Much like back pain, neck pain is becoming increasingly more common — not only due to the digital age, but also due to the pandemic forcing much of the workforce into remote working environments. For some of us, our lifestyles and jobs require a lot of sitting and working on either computers or phones or both for hours at a time.
Even with the best desk set-up and good posture, this amount of sitting can cause things like neck pain.
For those of us who have more active lifestyles/jobs can still experience neck pain/trauma from repetitive movements or heavy lifting!
Things to Watch For:
- Usually most people feel neck tension and stiffness with prolonged sitting, computer work, etc.
- Sometimes movement helps decrease their symptoms and other times it makes them feel worse
- If nerves are being compressed some people may feel numbness and/or tingling down their arms.
Things To Try:
- Try getting up at least every hour from sitting or at least change positions. If your pain decreases you’re on the right track and we know you need to perform more movement-based exercises to help your neck.
- Also try these three following exercises groups:
- If you know heat or massage helps decrease your pain, then we can assume muscle tension also plays a role in your pain. Physical Therapists are trained in soft tissue mobilizations using different techniques and tools to help decrease muscle tension.
- If this is your case manual therapy will be part of your treatment sessions!
- If you think one or all of these suggestions are for you please do not hesitate to contact us!