00:09
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Hello, welcome to protocol sports systems. Listen, today we are going to talk about five reasons why your neck may hurt and how to get rid of them.
We’re going more specifically and breaking down exactly the neck, because so many people have a focus of pain that comes right into this area. And they’re always like my neck hurts. My neck hurts. My neck hurts.
My neck hurts. My neck hurts, but is your neck really? The thing that’s hurting, right? When we talk about pain in the neck, what does it really mean?
Most people were like, it hurts. I can’t turn. I can look this way. Try to, trying to drive and look over your left shoulder and see if cars are coming on.
That Pain In Your Neck
01:08
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
They can’t even get to that turn your whole body. I know. Cause I’ve been there. Yeah, I have to. And when your neck hurts, it’s horrible. Horrible.
It does affect everything in you, but is it just the pain in your neck or what’s creating that pain? Like what is it the upper back that moves its way up into your head? Or is it from your head and moves away back down into your upper back.
This is kind of where we get to look today to figure out the who’s the what’s the, why’s the how’s and the winds of the neck. Yes. Yes. Let’s get started before we get rid of the pain though.
We need to know why first, what it is and where w what’s the cost. Okay. Let’s talk about the five steps that could possibly be the reason why you got to pain and back of your head.
01:56
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? All, alright. Reason number one, the big old bowling ball that sits on top of your shoulders. Yeah, it’s large. Okay.
We have, if you notice from our buddy Scully up here, we have seven vertebrae that sit in your cervical area seven and their job is to help us connect our head to our shoulders.
It’s there to stabilize and it’s there to help with this big old guy. The average head weighs between like seven and 12 pounds, usually right? About 11 or 11 pounds, 102 pounds is self-care fitness.
That is what it does. If you think about the weight of the head and not sitting directly on top of the spine, that’s when it’s in the right position, right?
Your vertebrae, your seven cervical vertebrae are sitting on top of one another and place. In accordance so that it helps to stabilize this guy.
02:59
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
You’ve got 20 muscles that come in and connect 20 muscles that connect into the base of the head and the neck to help intrinsically move it and mobilize that.
Vertebrae Are Stabilizers
But truthfully, the vertebrae themselves are stabilizers. They’re not there to be mobile with the exception of this big one, right up here, which is the C1 and C2, the Atlas, which moves along the axis, which is really how.
03:27
Speaker 3
80% of the.
03:28
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Rotation. That’s where the rotation actually comes from is C1. And so we’re talking about that actress.
Listen, if you got a huge head, I’m sorry, but you do. If you got a huge head and it weighs between seven and 12 counts, let’s say Mike weighs 11 pounds ahead, right there.
That bowling ball, it’s kind of balanced on those seven vertebrae accurately. Eric Dalton was the one that came up with this.
A 42 Pound Head
He did a blog about a 42 pound head. Let’s say you got Mike’s head and he sits like this. Let’s sit sideways. There you go. He’s sitting upright with good posture, right? For every inch that his head tilts forward is another extra 10 pounds.
Let’s say Mike is only three inches forward. That’s 30 pounds added on top of the amount of his head. So that is your texting. Your, that is your phone.
04:37
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
That is your laptop. That is your computer. That is whatever you do on a daily basis. Think about this for every inch, add 10 pounds. Three inches is 30 pounds plus that 11. So that’s 41 pounds.
04:52
Speaker 3
Is that another 10 pounds.
04:54
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Because you got a big head and then you add the hair into it. It’s all about that. You’ve got an extra 10 pounds on your muscles and your vertebrae.
Your head could literally wear anywhere from 30 to 42 pounds, depending on how forward your head is three inches, 42 pounds. I’m going to leave that there with you. So think about this.
If we’re trying to hold up this giant head and our vertebrae are not that big. If you notice, and they’re doing this job to hold up, this gigantic kid, that’s literally sitting like this all the time we have, there’s so many other things that are happening and think about where this goes. It goes down the line of the strong.
05:39
Speaker 3
Amount of strain going all the way down, the fact.
05:41
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Of the chain right now. Remember the goal and the goal, the job of the vertebrae is to help with impact.
Any type of impact that your brain or brain your skull has, which is in your brain, how your brain is in your school. All the impact goes into this tiny little thing here, even though they’re small, their job is to disperse it.
The Discs Taking The Impact
You’ve got these discs that are sitting in between the vertebrae and they are taking the impact and dispersing it. Now you’ve got to hit that sitting forward like this. How are we going to disperse that even though it was very uneven.
When you have unevenness into the vertebrae, you have unevenness into the pulling on the vertebrae and the stress that’s being applied to the vertebrae.
So the stress is on the bone. It’s into the joint, it’s into the muscle.
06:34
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Everything is now pulling on the bone, which is then creating pain in the neck, right? That’s one, the bowling ball that sits on your head.
Now let’s go deeper and talk about that support structure that you have underneath the bowling ball, which are those muscles. Now, the muscles you’ve got 20 of them remember, and they are attached to the head and the neck.
What they do is they support and they are responsible for movement in the head, in all directions that is flexion, extension lateral flection rotation. The one that they don’t talk about, which is retraction, which is a big missing in the majority of us step to instill the spotlight.
Now we’re talking about all of these different ranges of motion. If you have a forward head, the muscle’s job is two to two things. If it shortens and lengthens, that’s all muscle does, is it shortens and lengthens it contracts or elongates it contracts any longer.
07:41
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Now you’ve got a head that turns would say, give me flexion and extension. That’s a lengthening extension. That’s a shortening, correct?
Flection and extension lengthening and shortening. Now you have a head that’s sitting forward like this all the time, these poor little muscles, they can’t go back to their normal way of being, which is contraction.
They can’t shorten. They can’t, they’re just in a state of elongation and just constant. It’s like your head fell off a cliff and you’re hot. Your body is just like, your muscles are like that. They’re just holding and holding it, holding, try to keep your head on.
Right? What they do is they’re trying to stabilize and move you and they can only do so much.
Now your head is sitting forward or your head is sitting kind of off, or your head is sitting kind of cockeyed here, or let’s say you get hit by a car and you get some whiplash and your head is suddenly shaking around like this, everything gets messed up.
Neck Spams And How To Help Them
08:45
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
All of a sudden, we go into spasm.
We go into over contraction, which then you get hypertonic Tenicity hypertenicity as means there’s tone in the muscle, all over our bodies, unless we are paralyzed and or dead or in space.
And then we have no muscle tone. The tone is that contractile property, that slight contraction that’s happening all the time.
When the brain is getting an understanding of what’s happening.
09:14
Speaker 3
Right now, it’s.
09:16
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
You get hypertonicity, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re getting stronger. It means that the tone is dialed up to the nth degree.
You’re just sitting there like this, like, oh, but yet you’re not stronger for it. Now your muscles in the back of your neck, the ones that attach to your head, the ones that go down to the middle of your back are in hypertonic stage.
A Heavy Head Hurts The Neck
They are just like, good Lord. This is a heavy head. How much does this head weigh? That’s what the muscles are saying. So long conversations. If you ever listen to muscles, they’re complaining a lot in that neck.
What happens is you get these muscles down here that build up on hypertrophy because they’re constantly being pulled on.
They start to book. It doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily stronger because remember everything is getting full forward because the muscles are just like, all.
10:12
Speaker 3
Right.
Flexion, extension rotation, lateral fret, lateral flexion, and retraction
10:15
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah, depending on what’s happening, but there’s pain in your neck. Why isn’t this being taken care of?
If the muscles aren’t able to do their job of remember flexion, extension rotation, lateral fret, lateral flexion, and retraction. If they can’t do that, what are the what’s going to happen?
What, who are they going to be calling on to help them out?
10:40
Speaker 3
There’s only one other thing to do is call on this actual structures themselves. The bones are going to certainly come out place and a ligament structures are going to need to become either long gated and overstretched or over shortened.
10:50
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? Remember you have all these muscles in the back, if your head is forward, so are your shoulders.
All those stabilizer muscles are straight or stretched out too. We’ve got no contractile property going on back here at all. Nothing’s happening where it’s like, let’s hold these guys up. Now the muscles are like, I can’t help.
The body being an amazing teamwork of structures, the joints are like, all right, I guess we’re in. And they high-five each other. The joints are like, eh, and so now where they normally are sitting upright in almost the inner Lord dye curve, now they’re going into a kyphotic curve.
Now they got this big curve here that doesn’t happen just at the neck. You guys, it also happens to turn and not all that way, drop your head forward. It happens right here into the thoracic spine.
Help Neck Muscles Do What They Are Supposed To Do
Now all these vertebrae that are going up into the neck are to round even more because they’re trying to do the job of what the muscles are supposed to do, but are failing at because they don’t have any contractile property, because the only thing stopped they’re being held in one position, right?
12:06
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
A joint is when two bones come together, you might be asking yourself, what joints do we have in our vertebrae?
You got these joints of each vertebrae that are sitting on top of each vertebrae. Each of these are a joint guys. Each vertebrae is its own joint. It sits on top of each other like this. When that happens, it’s able to flex, extend and rotate.
If it’s sitting like this, all the joint and the joint structure is being pulled forward. Now think about this. What then happens back to we go back to this vertebrae. What happens to those guys? Because now there’s an actual extra stress that’s being applied to them.
You have all these stresses that are applied into the vertebrae that are going to be pulling on the neck, but it’s not necessarily from there. It’s from here.
You got all of this extra growth of extra stress, extra pulling, extra stuff that’s happening in the, this area that’s affecting all of the stuff in the neck.
13:16
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
That’s number three, those joints, the joints then create, they still get in the joint, start to move. Cause they’re like, okay, we’ll just slide forward because we can only hold on for so long.
That decreases your range of motion. Now, instead of being able to do this, you’re like, oh wow. Because all of the vertebrae have now shifted forward. Now instead of sitting on top of one another, they’re sitting forward like a staircase into one another.
Everything now bangs into one another, and then you don’t have the range of motion.
That leads to Hey, pain in the neck. It really a pain in the neck? That’s where you’re experiencing the thing? Sure, sure. The one thing we want to do is also talk about the things that hold those joints together.
This would be number four, that would be those ligaments. Ligaments, they are the stabilizers of the joint, right there.
14:21
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
They’re this cross, that cable like system in the body. We have the movers and stabilizers and the movers are like your tendons.
They attached to the muscle and they go one direction and they allow for movement ligaments, attach bone to bone, to bone, to bones above. You have ligaments everywhere in your body.
What they’re doing is they’re crossing up like this, being able to be pulled in all different directions and they attach the vertebraes so that you don’t have this whoop, this big slippage that’s going on because we wouldn’t last long on the earth.
If we slipped all over the place and all our parts started moving around.
15:10
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
So, so when they are doing their job, they are creating a great stable surface, right? They’re everywhere so that you can have this dynamic movement and not feel like you’re ripping and tearing everywhere.
Neck Muscles: A Rubber Band In The Heat
However, if you’ve been sitting like this for a super long time, what happens then is if you think of a rubber band that’s been sitting out in the heat for a long time, it loses its strength and its contractile property. And it goes thick.
And it just stays long. It’s like if you pulled on your shirt for a long period of time, and then the color just opens up, so what will happen is those ligaments now become loose.
What used to be pretty easy to retrack that guy back is now going to be challenging for you to get that back and keep it there. Therefore we have this cycle of pain that keeps coming through because you’ve come down.
16:00
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It hurts. You come up and it stops.
16:03
Speaker 3
You might go to massage therapy or something. Then you get to calm down. Some of that hypertrophy muscle, the muscles that are really tight are hypertonic muscles. If it all comes right back again.
16:12
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah, yeah. And, and ligaments, they have a blood flow. They have a slight blood low, but you can sit, you can sprain your ligaments all the time.
People will experience all this pain that’s going on repeatedly in their neck. And there they move. But it’s because they’re too mobile. Their body doesn’t know how to hold them back into a stabilized position because they’ve lost the ability to stabilize.
So that’s number four. There are there, the basics of pain in the neck are your bone, your muscle, your joint ligament nerve. I know because when people see nerves where they think nerves, they think, oh my God, I have to have surgery, right?
Oh, it’s a disc. I tore it. I got to have surgery. Oh, I herniated this it’s compressed. I compress the nerve. I have surgery. What do nerves do? Nerves actually innervate your muscles to move.
What Do Nerves Do?
17:15
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
That’s what they do. These little yellow things that are coming out of Scully all over. These are her, his nerve roots.
17:22
Speaker 3
Send and receive.
17:23
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
That’s what they do. They’re constantly received. They’re your watchdog group right there. They’re receiving information and I want to move.
All right, well do it. All of a sudden you’re like, okay, I did it. If they are compressed because your joints now move forward. So think about this. The head is heavy. We’re sitting forward that full on the muscles.
The muscles are tired, take a joints. The joints are like, I’m tired too. And then the joints move forward. What’s happening now is they’re going to compress into that nerve root because they can’t hold themselves up.
They’re compressing it in the nerve root because now the stress is equally dispersed. Right? The impact, and so it’s like pressing one side more than the other.
There goes, the nerve here comes the pain, running down your neck, running down your arm.
18:14
Speaker 3
What sets up another cycle of the body sensing out there’s gonna be a huge problem. We got to go and stabilize that area. It’s going to stabilize it.
18:22
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? Then what it also causes is adhesions. If Haitians are basically wear two layers of tissue, adhere together, so now you’ve got tissue.
That’s normally moving like this all over the body, right? This is how we contract. When we’re moving. We’re like an infra of a super highway that’s going on in there. Things are moving and crossing across.
If all of a sudden, now you’re not getting a lot of blood flow and you’re not getting a lot of contract all property because the muscles aren’t doing their job because the head is too heavy and they can’t get back.
It creates an adhesion. So everything kind of gets stuck together. When this gets stuffed together, what’s happening is it becomes irritated, irritated, and then boom, all the nerves sit up at the top.
Like this can get really annoying. ie trigger points. That’s what, you’re not our guys.
What Are Muscle Trigger Points?
19:17
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
All of a sudden you’re feeling this, you’re feeling all of the nerve sensation at the superficial part of the fibers, but it’s because the stuff isn’t working down here and that’s where you’re feeling.
The end result of what’s actually going on a few layers below a lot of other things that are happening. So also a lack of ligament stabilization. What that does is it slides the vertebrae over the compressed nerve root.
Now you’ve got pain, not pain, not pain, not pain. You’re pulling from the head, your pressure on the vertebrae. The disc is pressurized with one side more than the other have unequal distribution and disbursement equals pain.
That’s where you get the bulging disc herniated disc. That’s where they come from. They come from things not being correct up here because anything that’s got the disc that’s even it where’s evenly.
If it’s got an uneven compression it’s going to wear on evenly and then it’s going to push out and foliage, I E your bulging disc, you’re hurting Eddie desk.
20:27
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yep. Think about all of these neck muscles. Remember 20, you don’t have 20 just sitting back here, get 20 all the way around the neck. Eight.
That just are your suboccipitals that help with the tiny little movements this way. A lot of these also they help function, not just neck movement, but breathing. They help raise and lower these ribs.
You have this huge brachial plexus of nerves that come under here under these muscles, under the clavicle, under the Peck. And so they’re literally sitting right here.
You get these muscles that are now tight as all get out because they’re sitting like, don’t know what to do, and they’re compressing on the nerve.
Now you have neck pain because you have nerve pain because you have muscle pain because you have joint pain because you have a head sitting forward.
That makes sense. It’s crazy. How one little action creates a ripple in the pond, like a huge ripple.
Proprioception, Posture, And Neck Pain
21:42
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? You don’t know what you don’t know you guys. So proprioception is an amazing thing. There’s this thing called a righting reflex, that if you drop your head down, your head will write itself because your eyes always have to hit the horizon.
If you’re looking like this will actually allow you to stay forward and not feel like you’re dizzy. Because if you’re like this all the time, you’re going to end up falling over.
The body will adjust itself to a forward head by writing the eyeballs with the horizon and tilting the head back. A lot of us are in a forward head posture and have no idea that we’re actually in it because according to our eyes and our brain, we’re in the right spot.
What we want to do is we want to make sure that we are constantly adjusting ourselves and making sure we’re up and retracted back.
22:31
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
So, one real quick, one quick exercise to do that I like to do is like you used to be called the cigarette exercise, but we don’t smoke here.
So whatever the way we don’t either. What you’re gonna do is you’re going to cross your fingers across your arm to hold yourself. The other hand, your two fingers goes onto your lip.
What you’re going to do is keep your fingers at your lip and pull your head away. You should be able to pull straight.
23:01
Speaker 3
Back, move your finger,
23:02
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Your fingers, stay with you. You move your fingers back into your head. It’s not this, and it’s not this or this, your nose and your lips are in the same position.
Do Posture Braces Work For Neck Pain?
You pull straight back, and now will allow you to retract your head. So now would be one. No. Okay. So posture braces.
That’s a really great question. Posture braces, In my opinion, they’re going to sit you upright, but they’re not going to teach you how to actually do it.
23:40
Speaker 3
They’re good for a reminder for those who really need to remind her to correct and change your posture.
Some people need that. I suggest we just need to correct and change your posture. Those brilliant, that reminder, it’s going to be there for you to remind you.
What’s going to happen is going to get used to that brace coming on and you’ll forget,
23:56
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Well, it doesn’t really teach you how to do it. I would, I would do in my own. Plus they rip into your armpits and they hurt your armpits because they’re graining into him.
Yeah. Listen, I would think about taping in between your shoulder blades. What you’re going to do is you’re going to ground your shirt.
You’re, you’re going to put a rock tape or a K tape or some kind of a stretchy tape on round yourself, and then put it on either side, have somebody attach it to the backsides of your wrong weights or your shoulder blades, scapula, and then you’re going to pull back.
As you do that, it’ll remind you every time you round forward to sit back on,
24:36
Speaker 3
She feel it falling on you in the back is around force. You’re going to want to correct.
24:40
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It’s just, it should be a subliminal reminder, that’s it? So, and that’s a lot to me. It’s a lot cheaper than doing it the other way, personally. If you can actually do it on your own, I think that’s going to be so much more beneficial down the line.
The other thing too is when we have a forward head posture like this or neck pain, we have a tendency to be up here with our shoulders. Where the attention goes, the energy flows.
Our shoulders are usually way up here. Our upper traps are super hypertrophied, right? Because they’re so built up because they’re doing way too much work and everything has got too much tone on it.
And it’s hypertonic. Remember to this, the trapezius, if it goes into a trap is white. It comes from the base of the head down, out to the shoulders down.
25:34
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
There’s three levels, upper middle and lower fibers of the trap. If these guys are up really high, the easiest way to pull them is to pull the shoulders down and activate the stabilizer muscles back here that depressed the shoulders.
If you do that, it’ll alleviate the pain going from here up to your head, instant it’s instant, it’s called reciprocal inhibition. It doesn’t allow two opposing muscle groups to contract at the same time.
If you retract here, hold the shoulders, shoulder legs down towards your butt, not arching, but just pulling them down. This releases all these muscles up here and it’ll be like, it’ll be an instant fix of feeling better.
The muscle tissue will relax automatically. That’s a really great one easy, because you can do it while driving drop down. You can do it while holding on drop down. You can do, you can do all sorts of stress, drop your shoulders down.
26:32
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It will release all the pain into the shoulder, into the neck. The other thing too is remember, it starts from a lot, starts from the thoracic spine. If we can do a press up like a coper press, right?
You’re doing, you’re laying on the ground and you’re thinking about your head and your neck just coming up and compressing. You want to take all of these and rotate them back, retract that kyphotic spine, right?
As you do that, and you’re laying on the ground and pressing up what that’s doing is it’s releasing all of the muscles that are way too tight in the front, which that’s usually a cost too.
It’s also reminding the back that it knows how to work. All of the postural muscles, all of the muscles that are there to stabilize, you get a chance to activate and drop you back up.
27:21
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
They put you to rest again, which is fantastic, which is what we want. The other thing too, is it’s not just about extension, it’s about rotation. It’s also coming in and really being able to rotate just our upper body and the neck and the shoulders.
Even if I look forward and rotate my body, I’m rotating the neck. I’m getting. Yeah. It’s really about how do we get rotation all the way from the middle to the upper part of our back and neck.
If you can do that, this calms down because a lot of times the muscle is reacting to the fact that it can’t move with the joint. The joints reacting to the fact that the muscle isn’t working. It’s this horrible cycle of pain that people get in.
The other, the last thing is, adjust your laptop, adjust your computer, adjust your iPhone. Stop texting so much were like this, like really big cognizant of your posture.
Adjust Your Posture To Help Neck Pain
28:24
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Sit upright. Your eyes should be up. Everything should be looking up more instead of dropping down, give this big bowling ball an opportunity to do it as a job is. Sit on top of your head or on top of your head on top of your vertebrae.
Yeah. Instead of dropping down, give your body a chance to work for itself. If you can actually adjust things to where you’re looking up about a third of the way up, this is actually proper posture.
That you’re actually upright doing all of your work. When you’re texting textile here, I know it looks goofy, but it doesn’t look at and go through those in this. And it won’t hurt you.
It looks like you’re actually trying to focus on somebody else in the atmosphere besides just yourself. Think about how you adjust your body and your world to work for your posture.
29:18
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
When you’re sitting in your car, drop your head back into the back seat. Think about the bow. You’re thinking about this guys.
If you had eyes in the back of your head, your posture would be phenomenal because your eyeballs, your body’s following where your eyeballs are. They do it all the time.
Think about what would happen if you had eyeballs in the back of your head and how that would affect more.