00:08
Julie P
Today we are going to talk about pains in the neck. Why do we have pain in our neck and our upper back and our shoulders? Right?
We’re doing a lot of sitting these days, make it home. Makeshift desks, makeshift offices. We got kids on the go on the dining room table in school. We’re doing a lot of sitting where we’re not really that comfortable.
We want to talk about how to get postural correction forward head.
Sitting Is The New Smoking
01:10
Mike
I think we’re just sitting here. We’re getting a little too comfortable sitting is what happened.
01:13
Julie P
Yeah. Well, I think we’re trying to sit and be comfortable and sit and be comfortable at the same time and do work, which you can’t, you just can’t do.
What we’re going to do today is we are going to talk about why there is pain in your neck and shoulders and how to get rid of it? So, first we want to address movement versus lack of movement because movement is something that we really should be doing.
Lack of movement is something that we are doing right now. Okay. So movement, it keeps us loose, right? That’s the whole point of movement is it’s. It lubricates the whole system. It sends mobility messages to the nervous system.
It’s constantly talking to your central nervous system to your peripheral, nervous system. Like, Hey, I want to move my arm. Okay, go ahead and move your arm. So it’s doing that.
02:05
Julie P
It helps with college and replacement, which is something we really need. Especially as we age, it keeps the last disability in our joints and in our tissues.
It keeps us able to move and then extend and contract again.
02:20
Mike
What about the lack of movement?
Pain In The Shoulders And How To Get Rid Of It
02:21
Julie P
So lack of movement, Lack of movement is basically where we’re doing nothing or we’re stuck in one position for a long period of time. What that does is it causes a buildup of really tough protein in your fascia and the fascia.
The fascia is something it’s like, it’s not even saran wrap, but it’s this whole like system of soft tissue that envelops and wraps every single muscle fiber, every muscle bundle, every muscle, every part everywhere, and honestly, muscles can’t without fascia. And that’s its support system.
What happens is it causes a huge buildup of really tough protein in the fascia. From there, you lose your ability to contract and relax. You lose what’s called your extensibility, which means that your Alasta stability or elasticity is where you can contract your extensibility is where you can actually go back to the same position.
If you lose your extensibility, then you’re basically stuck like this.
03:26
Julie P
So that’s what happens for a while.
03:28
Mike
Well, this example of this is when I sit down at a computer, which I don’t do really much at all.
I sit for 10 minutes. As soon as I get back up, I feel like I am a hundred, five years old. Everything is still in the bed position.
It takes me a while to find a straighten up that creakiness, that creakiness and self is that lack of a sense of, yeah.
Long, Short, Tight, Muscles
03:45
Julie P
And it only takes days. It only takes days to change your tissue. You guys, to make big changes in your tissue days. That’s why this whole like over and over again of sitting in the same position is killing us literally.
You can change from supple to form fitting to shrunken and restrictive in a matter of days. Today we’re going to talk about how we get out of that because we don’t want people to come out of this position or out of a situation, like just jacked up beyond belief and not be able to get back into their normal suppleness.
We’re going to start by talking about long and short muscles and tight muscles, because you can have long muscles and be tight and short muscles and be tight. Well,
04:34
Mike
Your body doesn’t know the difference between whether the muscle is long or whether it’s short, it just knows tight. What we’re gonna do, we’re gonna try to show you the difference between the two and then how to get out of that.
04:42
Julie P
All right. So, tight muscles, it’s really the imbalance between your muscle and your fascia, right? Because your fascia, again, holds the muscle fiber in there.
Without fascia, your muscle fibers, they don’t have a support system and they wouldn’t be able to contract and relax and really do that contract all function that we do so tight muscles can either have a shortened or stretched out resting length.
They can either be stuck in a short position, or they could be stuck in a long position. They have that. We have different resting lengths of both. They can become fibrous in elastic and ischemic, which means there’s a limited blood flow.
If we’re doing a lot of sitting and we’re kind of stuck in this stretched out position, let’s say let’s use our chest, our pecs, and our back, our rhomboids and mid trap for the example.
05:35
Julie P
If I’m sitting like this and I’m working like this all day long, my chest and my pecs, or yeah, my chest and my pecs are very shortened. My my rhomboids and my mid trap are elongated and more ischemic.
The ischemic means that they’re just not getting that blood flow that’s needed. What’s happening is when one muscle is tight, the other muscle is tight and elongated. We will feel the sense of tightness back here. It’s actually the tightness up here that is the tight and short muscle.
That’s creating a very tight, any long-dated muscle back here. So it’s really the muscle of mountains. It’s super counterintuitive because we tend to like to rub the spot that hurts.
It’s usually up here or it’s hypertonic, and it’s moving too much and it’s getting too much contractile property, but it’s not letting go up in your upper trap.
06:35
Julie P
We’re going to go through all of that today. It is short, so we have a shortened muscle right here, like in our pec, that’s the front of our shoulder.
That’s what pulls everything forward. That’s because we’re sitting like this, like this, right. Hi, Kathleen. Welcome. I’m so glad that you’re watching. So it’s called adaptive shortening, right?
Adaptive Shortening
Because the muscle begins to adapt to whatever position we put it in. What’ll happen is the muscle tissue redesigns its own length. It does not buy, it reduces its number of sarcomeres.
Your circle mirrors is your base unit of contraction. It’s just, it’s where the muscle contraction actually starts. It reduces its number of sarcomeres and fascia, and then it accommodates it.
What will happen is we become a shrinking tank. Everything gets shrunk, wrapped, and we tighten up and then everything around us shrinks up. We’re like, okay, I guess we’re stuck here.
07:32
Julie P
So your body starts to adapt. And then it doesn’t know any difference.
07:36
Mike
Let’s take on that shape that you’re demanding on it. That might be good or bad.
Stretch Weakness
07:41
Julie P
You still have this crazy sensation of tightness, which is then, then what you’re doing is now you want to stretch even more because you feel so tight back here, but it’s really up here.
We start to almost round ourselves over and you’ll see people who are almost like their shoulders are touching each other right. In the center. Right. Really what that is it’s because everything is hurting so bad in here because it’s giving the sensation of like, oh my God, please put me back to normal.
We’re, we’re making it mean, like this really hurts. Let’s stretch it more. So what’ll happen is the muscle develops. What’s called a stretch weakness. Right? And so it actually isn’t strong anymore. It just feels really tight.
When you touch it, the muscle feels tight, but it’s actually what’s called a stretch weakness because it comes because really long and exhausted.
08:37
Mike
Yeah.
08:38
Julie P
Then, what happens is the fascia is like, okay, I guess this is what we keep doing. It keeps reinforcing it and reinforcing it. What will happen is that’s where your adhesions and your knots come on, remember, everybody’s got knots, everybody’s got the knots right here.
Right? These are big areas. I got knots. It’s not really a knot. It’s because your body hasn’t had any chance to get it back into a neutral and natural resting length. Your body really wants to go back to where it is.
And so it doesn’t know any difference. So it’s adapting to that new lifestyle. Here’s the crazy thing. What’s crazy is that when they adapt now, they’re telling the brain, this is our new normal, this is where you’re going to be now.
Now the brain doesn’t know any difference. So it stopped sending signals back there. Like it doesn’t send the contractile signals back there.
09:34
Julie P
So we have these watchdogs, right? These sensory neurons, that and receptors that are going up into the brain to tell you like, Hey, there’s activity going on in the muscle.
They’re called your spindle cells. Hey there, the joint is trying to the muscles, trying to rip. It’s called your tendon. And it’s a receptor. So it’s constantly, it’s a watchdog group.
It’s like making phone calls and being like, Hey brain, somebody is trying to rip this muscle. Hey, brain. I need to just turn this thing on. The brain is like, okay, I got it. The brain comes down and it sends back a signal back down, and then things happen.
You are sitting like this for so long or this for so long, you, it, the signal dies. You lose your whole transmission back there. It doesn’t understand what to do anymore, because what it’s getting is it’s getting like the SOS of tightness and tenderness.
The SOS of Tightness and Tenderness
10:25
Julie P
It’s because these guys are so tight and it’s so bound by the fascia being so tight in there. It doesn’t know how to do anything else. Hi, Paul, welcome. If we think about it this way, right?
The muscles can’t push, they can only pull, they can track, right? So it pulls everything towards its center. Like if I’m contracting, everything’s coming towards the center, it’s not coming just from one side to the other.
It’s like an accordion, everything swishes towards the center or a telescope. It slides in one another. So it goes towards the center. In order to move, a muscle will pull, right?
It pulls the tendon because the tendon attaches into the bone. The pull, the tendon is pulled and then a bone pivots around the joint. The body part moves like that’s basic movement.
In order to create this movement, we have to assign a bunch of different parts to different things, right?
11:28
Julie P
Where there’s different roles that muscles have. And, and we’re going to focus on two, there’s like the five common ones, like your agonist or antagonist, your synergist, your fixator, and your we’re going to go into the majority of ones, which are your prime mover, which is your agonist.
That’s like, if I’m deciding to pick up my arm, I’m good at use. My prime mover is going to be my bicep. That is my agonist. If you have an agonist that is your prime mover, you also have an antagonist, which is the tricep that actually has to let go.
12:06
Julie P
Length that it has to lengthen, because if we have to that contract and tighten up at the same time, you won’t get any movement. If it, if an agonist antagonist contract at the same time, that’s called stability, cruise.
12:19
Mike
A ton of stability, but then you have a lack of mobile, right?
12:22
Julie P
The body is amazing in a way where if you are shortening one side, it’s got to let the other side go. Because on the other side, everything would rip and you’d look like the incredible hole all the time.
In real life, skin form, instead of just turning green and ripping your stuff off, Hold smash. So, what does that mean for posture and pain? Because that’s really what we’re talking about, right?
We’re talking about pot, your posture and how you’re working and why is it giving you so much doggone pain? We have these muscles that are in the backs of our body, in their culture, postural muscles, right?
And that’s their job. There are, they’re slow Twitch muscles. Their job is to be a workhorse and to hold us up.
They’re constantly contracting, they’re your neck muscles, your back muscles, your glutes, your hamstrings, your calves, like everything in the back, because we’re being held up all the time.
13:17
Julie P
Their job is to constantly try to fix misaligned joints because the joints are the bones that connect together, right? That’s like our shoulder joint and the joints in between our vertebrae.
13:32
Mike
What does a joint is just the space between bones in our bodies. So it’s all joined is,
13:38
Julie P
It’s got a lot of cool soft tissue that’s around it, but that’s more than you guys need to know.
We jumped down that serious rabbit hole. What we want to do is we want to talk about the forward head posture specifically, because if we’re sitting on a computer or we’re looking over our phone or we’re texting, or we’re doing whatever, we each have this really big, giant head.
And if you watched what’s that movie,
14:04
Speaker 3
Tom cruise,
14:07
Julie P
He says the average head weighs seven pounds. I don’t remember the movie. It’s just show me the money. I know that one. That’s a show me the money. Anyway, the average head weighs seven pounds. Let’s say that.
If you were in perfect posture, your head is actually sitting on top of your vertebrae, your neck, your cervical vertebrae, which is actually sitting in kind of a concave fashion in order to help with impact because the body is made to where it card occurs.
It can help with impact and movement and control. If we’re sitting here and we’re sitting forward, every inch that we move forward is another seven pounds. Thank you, Jerry Maguire, you guys are good. I would, I’m horrible with movies.
The 42 Pound Head
14:51
Mike
So,
14:52
Julie P
So, the head is moving one inch forward. That’s another seven pounds. You move six inches forward, which is the majority of where we’re going inflection. That’s 42 pounds. That’s a lot of heavy head power. So what has to hold that up?
15:11
Julie P
All those back muscles in the neck muscles, right? What’ll happen is you, all of the muscles that become tight are your upper traps become really tight.
Your Lavera becomes really tight because they’re, they’re shortened because everything’s being pulled up and forward. What becomes weak are these deep, long neck flexors, because you’re sitting there like this.
So they don’t have anything to do. They just shorten up and get weak. They now remember that fascia stuffs it’s binding and it’s like it’s shrink wrapping you. You’re becoming a Shrinky being down here.
This is overly lengthened, and this is super tight. I mean, long and short and deep and weak, Mike, sorry, I’m talking too fast. Your wrong Boyds, which are the muscles in the mid back right here are super weak there.
Your low and middle trap fibers are completely shut out as well, which is really important because your upper trap goes all the way up to your top of your head.
16:19
Julie P
It goes out to your shoulders and then it finishes right until your mid back. If the only muscles that you’re using or your upper fibers of that whole muscle, and you’re not using anything in the middle or the lower, you’re not able to control yourself and stabilize and pull yourself back down. Okay.
16:35
Mike
That type is going to lead to some of the reasons why you get some of those headaches, especially neck tension, headaches, that’s coming from exactly those muscles being overlong and tightening, just trying to pull back. Yeah.
16:44
Julie P
It lines up with this thing called reciprocal inhibition and reciprocal inhibition means when one side is contracting, the other side has to let go.
You can’t contract an antagonist and an agonist antagonist at the same time and have movement, right? If you’re using too much of this it is not working. If you’re using too much of this it can’t work.
It’s this game that we get to play with the body on how to turn it back on. We get out of this pain because we’re going to have to sit like that for the majority of time, because this is what we’re doing for work these days or online all the time.
What we have to do is to remind the brain to correct it. We go back to the sensory receptors. Remember those spindle cell guys. Oh, so isometric contraction. It says, explain isometric. The muscles contract in different ways, right?
17:42
Julie P
Concentric contraction means the muscle is shortening. If you have a concentrated contraction, good to, if this is shortens, this is the east centric side or the lengthening isometric is basically where there’s contraction without movement.
An isometric would be, let’s say if you have a crying baby and the baby is like, you’re in the middle of the mall throwing a fit, right? So you’re like, Hey baby, stop crying. Because that’s how I talk to them.
Hey baby, stop crying. The baby’s not crying. You pick up the baby, that’s all concentric. You bring the baby up to you and hug them. And you’re holding this child that isometric.
It’s just like, you’re holding it, nobody’s moving. You’re contracting because you’re holding a weight in your hands, but there’s no movement. Once the baby stopped crying, then you’re going to do the exact opposite movement, which is east centric.
18:41
Julie P
You’re going to load essentially and put it back down on the floor or on the ground. You’re going to go on your Merry way. Does that make sense?
18:51
Mike
Hopefully.
Isometric Contraction Is A Muscle Contraction Without Movement
18:52
Julie P
Yeah, hopefully that’s helpful. So isometric is just contraction without movement.
We’re dealing with contraction, egocentric, isometric, shortening, lengthening, we’re also dealing with those sensory receptors again, because remember if I’m sitting here and I’m shortened for a long period of time, the spindle cells, the muscle spindle cells are not getting any activation back here.
So, so they’re watching, they’re watchdogs. Aren’t, they’re not talking to the brand anymore because they’re like, eh, these guys, there’s not sensing any movement. So they’re like, we’re good. There’s no movement needing to happen. Okay.
19:31
Mike
You’re starting to change your position, which was, which is your resting position.
Instead of being in the decent posture, which is, there’s never a perfect posture, but we try, always try to get as close as we can because our body works more efficiently.
If we’re staying in that constantly concentric contraction this way, it’s going to learn to stay in that behavior. And it’s going to stay there. Now, the beautiful thing is we can change that and correct that posture. And then we stay in balance. Right?
19:55
Julie P
Well, so here’s the thing too though, is, so let’s say that you are really tight here and you do know that this is really where your tight spot is.
You have a tendency and we have a tendency to want to stretch it. Right? We go up into the doorframe cause everybody’s got the doorframe stretch where they’re like pulling on it really quickly.
Anytime you do that, you’re actually shortening your muscle instead of lengthening it. What you want to do is remember if you have contraction in here and it’s shortened and it’s chronically short for you to go up and to do a hardcore stretch, like this is actually sending a signal that you’re trying to tear your muscle.
The body will go and contract even more because you’re alerting the spindle cells on there. Like there’s some movement and they’re going to contract in even more.
20:42
Julie P
If you guys to, in order to change this behavior, that’s gone into a smaller ball. Let’s say, and contractile property, you actually have to think about not just stretching, but contracting from the back.
You’re activating the spindle cell muscle spindle cells in the back. The goal, the golgi tendon organs will give a signal back. And then the spindle cells will activate. And then the golgi tendon will activate.
We goes back and forth until there’s fatigue. All of a sudden that’s when you’re going to get the stretch. You have to fatigue the fibers out, but that’s, as you’re doing it, then you’re also sending your brain a message like, oh, you really want to pull that shoulder back.
I didn’t know that you actually needed to do that. Cause it’s forgotten. It’s not thinking about that. So, and that’s, what’s going to affect all of your muscle tone.
21:37
Julie P
It’s like, if you’re sitting like this for a whole long time, that’s what your brain knows. And, and you’ve got, you’ve created a whole new pattern of movement. As you sit down, you see kids and teenagers, right?
21:51
Mike
I’ll tell you about my son. 14 years old, he are just about 13, 14 years old. He is almost 6’2”. Now he’s getting tall.
When I look at Roman, I see him with a bunch of his love buddies in his room, in the, in a room. He is sitting in a chair. He is probably the tallest. If not by far the smallest kid in that room, all about the same age, but he looks like he’s the shortest because he’s sitting completely like this. His back.
If you look at his back, it’s like a Ridgeback. It’s like the stegosaurus, all the bow bird, rare, sticking way out. I come up and I push them cause my, and get them to up tall.
Now, all of a sudden, he’s the tallest kid in the room sitting there. It’s only because he wants to be in this posture for whatever reason in his mind right now.
22:29
Mike
I’m trying to teach him how to get that correct posture back up. It’s just about stabilizing, but it’s that if he’s learning that behavior, that his buyer’s going to want to stay in that position, we’re trying to teach them how to get back up and be upright. It wants to stay in that position, which is much more functional, right?
It All Starts With A Strong Core
22:43
Julie P
It all starts with the core, right? It all starts with your vertebrae. Your vertebrae is meant to be upright.
It’s not meant to be all messed up and round it over, but it counterbalances self on purpose. It has a concave side and a convex side it’s called a lordotic curve and a kyphotic curve and then a lordotic curve.
That’s how we’re actually meant to because what it does is it creates some shock absorption, right? That reduces the chance of injury by having us upright like that. If we spend a lot of time sitting like this, we’re absolutely going against all that the body is set up to help us with as far as injury prevention.
A proper posture, it supports your joint and tissues. It optimizes your efficiency and balance. Vanessa activates the antagonist to stretch the primary mover. Neurologically helping the stretch.
23:39
Julie P
Yeah. Is that why? Oh, sorry. You may give me a big, is that lag behind static stretching?
Maybe not being the most effective static stretching is good. You gotta think about when you’re doing your static stretching though. You don’t ever want to do static stretching.
If you’re getting ready to do something, because what it’s doing is it’s sending a message back to the brain like, oh, we’re good for the evening. We’re going to calm down. And you’re fatiguing your spindle cells.
You’re fatiguing your muscle fibers because they’re going back and forth. They’re doing this so you’ve got your golgi tendon and your spawn. They’re spindle cells.
They’re, they’re not fighting, but they’re having a calm conversation back and forth of contraction, contraction, and they’re sending it up to the brain. Finally the brain’s like, that’s it, go to your room? All of a sudden everything calms down, right?
24:30
Julie P
Does that make sense? It activates it. That’s why it’s reciprocal inhibition. If you’re squeezing back here and I’m retracting my shoulder blade, this has to let go at least .
That’s how we actually start to increase our stretch. Because if I’m focusing back here on moving this can’t move at the same time.
It can fight you, but this is going to be active because that’s what the brain is understanding right now. It’s the signal that’s being sent to the brain.
25:00
Mike
We can go down a whole nother topic of doing active and our dynamic stretching, static, stretching the whole thing.
That’s so that’s a whole another video in itself or another time in itself. I think what we’re going to focus on right now is getting to know what’s happening here.
What’s the reason why we’re having these pains and just postural pains? How can we now correct that and make that better. Right?
25:22
Julie P
So, let’s think about this. Let’s go into a pain pattern, right? What we’re going to walk through the whole pain pattern.
So you’re sitting here, right? You’re sitting here like this, and you’re looking at your phone or you’re looking at your computer and your movements are your cervical movement.
Your, for your head goes forward. Your thoracic spine, let me see if I can get here. I’m here. But my thoracic spine is now overstretching. Now these joints back here, your vertebrae, your shoulder, everything is destabilized.
Like their job is to stabilize you and to keep everything up. And right. We don’t break like the whole body is set up so that we don’t break, hopefully.
We do a really good job of trying to make it right all the time, because we human beings are funny individuals. Let’s say the joints are now destabilized, right?
26:18
Julie P
These, they become now the weak link in your chain. We’re going to go over kinetic chain at another and another show.
So then what happens there is pain. Now that you’re skidding your pain sensations, so your pain receptors are like, what is happening?
This is way too much movement. Something is going to happen where you’re going to tear.
26:40
Mike
Damage is going to.
26:41
Julie P
Send it to the brain. The brain gets this like, pain sensation. All of a sudden, now your postural supporters, which are all these muscles in the back, right.
They become inhibited, which means that they don’t do anything. They’re suppressed. Like they’re like, okay, we’re just going to hold here. It’s just like, they’re on freeze. They’re like, I’m not going to contract back.
I’m just gonna, I’m just hanging out. They’re just doing that. And they stop working. What happens then is like, your muscles are like, I don’t know what to do. What’s happening then is now we’re recruiting all of the mobility, muscles for posture.
Now all of the muscles that actually move us are now like, Hey, we need you, that your postural guys are not working. I need you to play in. They’re like, okay, that’s not what I do, but okay.
Now all of the muscles that are supposed to be moving us forward and back side to side are now becoming your postural muscles.
Muscular Imbalance Leads To Movement Imbalance
27:45
Julie P
This is where the s**t hits the fan in the body world, right? Because we’re hurting, we can’t move. Now all of a sudden we’ve got our trapezius, which is this, the upper trap side is the upper traps.
It goes all the way down into a diamond shape. It’s now your levator, which is the top of your scapula up into your head in the side of your neck and your lats, these big they’re chronically contracted.
Everything’s like, it’s not really doing its job. It’s just sitting there like, okay, just frozen. And it’s just holding. There is now this compensation pattern, right? Now everything else is like compensating because you’re sitting like this. It doesn’t know how to do its job anymore because it’s a cluster going on up there.
Now your mobility muscles are now functioning as your stabilizers. Now you have no one obit, no mobility, because you’re trying to stabilize with all the muscles that are supposed to be doing all the mobility are now doing the other guy’s job.
28:50
Julie P
And so now what happened? Isometric contraction. We just went over that. Right? Now where you used to have a lot of range of motion and mobility, you’ve lost it.
You don’t know how to move it anymore. And so you rapidly fatigue. You, you become, you get your ischemic and fibers come in. There goes your adhesions and your knots.
Everything is like, oh, I’ve got these knots. It’s not what it is. Your body is playing compensation rules. What that also does, it prevents all of these muscle bellies from being available for movement.
So, so our movement now our range of motion is where we used to be able to do this. Now we’re like, I just, I can’t move my shoulders back. It’s literally impossible.
We see this literally all the time where people I’m like move your shoulders. They’re like, what do you mean I am on my shoulders?
29:46
Julie P
I’m like, no, you’re not moving at all. Now you have this diminished range of motion. What happens then is now your boat, your muscles are like, that’s it, I’m at my breaking point, done.
Your muscles cannot handle it anymore. And they’re like, I’m breaking down. Now you get this huge body breakdown and all of the compensatory patterning compensation is when something else is playing for something else, it’s like, if you’re on a sports team and you’ve got your, your first string and your first string are all knocked out, you’ve gone through your second thing years, gone through your cert third string. And you’re out.
You’re like over at the Waterboy. You’re like, okay, come in. I know you don’t know what you’re doing. I need you to work for them.
30:30
Mike
Ultimately, what this is playing on is playing on your joint. It’s going to, this is what’s going to be a big cause of leading to degenerative joints in our body and shoulders back, knees, hips, all of them are, could be coming on because of these compensatory patterns. Right?
30:44
Julie P
Your brain is like, I don’t know what the hell was happening. I’m just playing because you guys are sending me weird signals all the time, because that your brain is like, all right, I’m checking out. Bye-bye.
And so it just leaves the party. It really does because it doesn’t understand the party that’s going on. And so what comes of this? So here’s the big thing. How do we get fix this and get out of pain?
31:11
Mike
All comes back to us to functional movement, restoring the function or the position of our body back to where it should be, whatever that might be.
That’s different for everybody. It’s roughly about the same for everybody, but it could be different for every person and within a few degrees.
31:26
Julie P
Right? It’s really about you guys focusing on what your body feels like when it’s moving.
Because just trying to S to think this muscle to go this way, you’re doing all sorts of other stuff, subconsciously, because you’ve already set up that pattern because you’re sitting like this all the time.
Now I’m like, I’m going to pull my shoulders back.
31:49
Mike
And you’re.
31:49
Julie P
Really not pulling your shoulders back at all. You’re extending your spine.
31:55
Mike
Totally.
Reciprocal Inhibition
31:56
Julie P
So reciprocal inhibition comes back into play. Think about the muscle that is closest to the joint that you want to work and contract those, put your fingers on the body that you’re working and feel the shoulder being pulled back.
Don’t think about arching. Think about pulling your shoulders back and just hold it. Now you’re going to give yourself an isometric contraction, which means you’re going to cold your contraction for five or 10 seconds.
You’re going to let your brain show back up to the party that your brain’s been sitting in 7- 11, getting snacks for the quarantine for the last light, who knows. Let it show up to the party.
As soon as it shows back up, then all of a sudden it’s like, oh, that’s what you wanted. Okay. Still then it starts talking back into it. All of a sudden, the pain that you were feeling up here will start to go away.
32:53
Julie P
The knots go away, the fibrotic tissue goes away. The ischemia goes away. The pecks actually open up and get a little softer and stop feeling like, yeah, your headache will go down.
Your head will actually come back. You’ll not look like the hunchback of Notre Dame, but you’ll actually look like a normal human again. There’s so many things that you can do for yourself, but it takes connecting into your body.
Right? So think about that. If you guys have any questions on how to do this, feel free to ask us,
33:26
Mike
There something we can show them right now that they can help just to start to restore some of this?
33:31
Julie P
I think the biggest thing is really, as I want you guys to think about your shoulder blades as being the prime mover. I want you to show at your shoulder blades as a bone in your back, right?
Those little wings, those little wings have 17 muscles attached to them. 17. And one big one is right here. It’s called your pec minor. It actually pulls your shoulder down in.
We want, so we want to actually retract that shoulder by the muscles that are attached to that shoulder blade. Think about using the shoulder blade and dropping the shoulder blade down, pulling the shoulder blade back.
34:12
Mike
A big thing is a lot of people tend to do that and actually elevate you actually see the shoulder. Yeah. I’m pulling it back and down. The short actually elevates up and goes forward. Yeah. Instead of backing down. Yeah.
34:23
Julie P
So try just those two things. I want you to hold it, play a game with yourself and hold it for 10 to 15 seconds. Right?
34:31
Mike
I learned from you put your armpit in your back pocket about that motion armpit in the back pocket, whether we have back pockets or not.
If you got yoga pants on whatever you’re doing, put your armpit in a back pocket, it sends a guiding motion. Yeah.
34:45
Julie P
Yeah. It’s a good visual for you. If you think about doing that and hold it, you’ll start to actually feel these muscles come.
34:51
Mike
Back real hard.
Contracting The Shoulder To Support The Neck
34:53
Julie P
No, just a little bit. Don’t let the rest of your body change. All you’re doing is trying to get this to happen. It’s not this happening. You’re not, you’re not going into like a contortion.
You’re just contracting your shoulder. I hope this was really helpful for you. I really want you guys to be out of pain and we really want you to be out of pain. We really want you to understand how amazing the human body is and how amazing your body is. It really is so cool.
The more you understand it, the more empowered you get and the little things, the little movements make the big movements so much easier. That is the key to getting out of pain. It, the little movements.
Think about connecting with your body and that way you’ll be able to do bigger things and hold that contraction. All of that pain will start to go away.
35:49
Julie P
If this is helpful, please let us know, give us comments. We’re also going to be sharing with that Facebook page, the tissue talk Facebook page.
We’re going to be sharing a couple of different exercises for how to open up your hips and how to open up your pecs, both partner and single. Hopefully you guys found this great, and we will see you next Wednesday.
We’re going to go over low back and hip dysfunction. Yay. Since we’re sitting all the time. If you guys have any questions and if you’ve got anything that you want us to go over, we’re totally down to do it. I hope you guys had a great day, enjoy your Wednesday, and we will see you next week. Bye.