Tim Sitt, author of “Move Or Die: How the Sedentary Life is Killing Us and How Movement, Not Exercise, Can Save Us,” demonstrates how to do a simple stretch to alleviate neck pain caused from consistently looking at your smartphone. Following is a transcript of the video.
Your neck is designed to hold up your head, which is 10 to 12 pounds. And so when you’re staring and you start to lurch your head forward every inch that you move forward the weight of your head doubles. So it could be forward six inches and all of a sudden your head weighs 60 pounds. What happens is you’re going to get neck strain, but then there’s also potential injury to the back, it’s a chain of muscles and obviously your spinal column connects the two. If your head is forward one of the things that you want to do is practicing moving it forward like a turtle and then moving it back. You want to do this nice and slowly so about five seconds forward and five seconds back, and you can breath slowly at the same rhythm. So forward and back is an important way to reestablish not just an emphasis on the muscles that hold your head forward, but also the muscles at the front of your neck that can pull it back.
