People of all ages complain about neck and shoulder pain. In case of elderly people, the pain is usually caused by degenerative changes that come with age. However, in younger people who have become an ever growing group of patients visiting doctors and physiotherapists, the pain is largely the result of a poor body posture: an incorrect position of the head, neck and the thoracic spine, in which they are spending more and more time, whether at work or in their free time.
In order to treat the neck and shoulders pain effectively, we must first learn its cause.
Some of the top causes include:
- Poor body posture while working in the sedentary position.
- Spending too much time in front of a computer or a smartphone.
- Chronic stress.
- Trauma (a motor vehicle accident, a fall).
- Degenerative changes.
- A cool breeze to the neck and shoulder muscles.
- Too high/too low sleeping pillow or a mattress that is too firm/not firm enough.
If you look carefully at the position of your head and cervical spine throughout the day, you can easily notice that it is bent in a position that you can colloquially describe as a “stoop” or a “hunch”. This is due to the specific nature of our daily functioning. With the development of all types of digital technologies over the last few decades, we are spending most of our daily lives in a sedentary position.
In addition, we spend our working time and our free time focused heavily on our computer screens or smartphones – as a result, we tend to assume an even more “closed” body posture:
- Our back is hunched (the thoracic kyphosis gets more pronounced).
- The shoulders are rounded forward while the chest and the sternum are depressed.
- In response to such a position of the thoracic spine, the neck moves forward in a characteristic way (the position that the neck adopts is called cervical protraction, where the chin is jutted forward relative to the chest).
With this forward head posture, the natural and physiological curve of the neck, which is called cervical lordosis, becomes more shallow, which aids the development of all types of cervical issues and ailments, and consequently, leads to headaches.
A prominent Czech physician named Vladimir Janda was the first to describe the above-referred causal link, which he called the “Upper Crossed Syndrome”. Upper Crossed Syndrome (UCS) is characterised by a specific body posture, where the upper body muscles (the pectorialis major muscles) and the posterior neck muscles (cervical extensor muscles, suboccipital and quadriceps muscles in the descending part, levator scapulae muscle) become too tense, which leads to the development of trigger points, or places that are highly tender due to underoxidation and local block of cell metabolism.
In case of those muscles:
- you can feel characteristic nodes, hardening,
- they are very painful to touch and the pain may spread to other body parts, for example, to the head or to the arms,
- some muscles in the Upper Crossed Syndrome become excessively week, mainly the muscles in the posterior thoracic region, that is: the extensor muscles of the thoracic spine, such as the quadriceps muscle (the middle and ascending part of the muscle), parallelogram muscles, as well as the anterior neck muscles, or flexors.
In order to alleviate the pain, it is necessary to reverse the muscle disbalance by loosening the muscles that are overly tense and strengthening the muscles that became weaker.
How to treat pain in the neck and shoulders? How to relieve it?
In order to alleviate the pain and prevent exacerbation, it is first necessary to change the habits that resulted in the disfunction. When neck and shoulder pain occurs while you work in a sitting position, you need to make several major changes:
- Make your work station as ergonomic as possible.
- Regulate your seat so that your feet rest on the floor and your knees and hips are at a 90-degree angle.
- Make sure the screen is in front of you.
- The top edge of the computer monitor should be at your eye level and around 40-70 cm away.
- While sitting, your buttocks should be as close to the back of the chair as possible.
- Your arms should rest on the armrests or on the desk at a 90-degree angle.
What else can we do to alleviate the neck ailments?
- Get quality sleep.
- Avoid stress or add relaxing activities to your daily routine (meditation, massage or sauna).
- Walk or take up any other physical activity that you enjoy.
- Avoid draughts.
However, self-therapy exercises and techniques are the most important element when treating neck and shoulder pain. When done regularly, they will ease the pain. If you don’t experience pain, they are an excellent pain prevention tool.
Download free neck exercises developed by a physiotherapist.
If you follow the above guidelines, do the exercises and the pain does not subside or becomes stronger, and the range of motion in the cervical spine lowers, you should visit a doctor or a physiotherapist to exclude more serious conditions.