Bill from Beyond Fitness shows how tight jaw muscles can restrict your neck. He walks through a self-assessment, then light massage of the masseter, followed by controlled jaw movements with a small gap between your teeth. Reassess your neck range of motion after each set to see if it improves.
Could your jaw be causing your neck pain? Let's find out. Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness, and today we're going to talk about jaw muscles and jaw movements and how that can impact your neck. Now, if you think about all the anatomy, you've got a lot of neck muscles, both superficial and deep, that are all around the cervical spine. You've also got a lot of muscles in the face and the jaw that run in a lot of different directions. The jaw muscles and the neck muscles are right here, and they kind of crisscross in certain areas. And what we want to do is get those moving so that the neck muscles can move better. Better neck mobility can lead to all kinds of different things. It can lead to less headaches, sometimes better vision, and it can just help you feel a lot better in general because neck pain is not fun. So what we're going to do first is we are going to assess your neck range of motion. I want you to turn your head left and right. We're going to go up and down. And we're going to go side to side and see if any of those areas feel painful or tight and take note of how they feel. Next, we're going to implement a jaw exercise. So the first thing we want to do is some light jaw massage. So take your hands, put them on the sides of your face, and you're going to clench down on your teeth lightly and you'll feel the muscles pop out here. And that's where your, your masseter muscles are. And if you felt one side pop out more than the other, then you may feel more tenderness in one of those sides, and that's the side to really work on. And just give it a light massage in circles here. And you could do both sides together if you want, but in my history of working with people, I find that usually working on one side rather than the other tends to be more beneficial. So you'll have to test it on yourself and see what feels best. So after we've done that for about 30 seconds, we're going to test the neck range of motion again and see if it feels any better. If it has, great, we're on the right track. The next thing after we've done some of that is then we want to do some jaw movements. So what we're going to do for the jaw is we're going to move it side to side. Now, very important here, because we don't want to cause teeth problems, we don't want to grind the teeth together. So you want your teeth just about a quarter of an inch apart from each other, tops and bottoms, and you're going to slide your jaw left and right. So here. So we kind of make a funny face and we get the jaw moving. And then you're gonna test the movement again, see how it feels. If it feels a little looser, then we're gonna do jaw forward and backwards. So just to give it to you from the side, we're gonna stick the chin out and then we're gonna pull it back in and just go back and forth that way. So after we've done that a few times, if that starts to feel a little better, great. We're still working in the right direction. If it got a little bit worse, let's just stick to the massage. Now the 3rd level of this is gonna be adding a little bit of resistance to this. So as long as there's no pain in the jaw, With that movement, we can start doing those movements with a little resistance from our hands. So if we're going side to side, we can do it by resisting with our hands here. And you can do the same thing forward and backwards. And now we've added a little bit more load, which is going to activate more muscles and get more things moving in there. So once again, once we've done that, we're going to reassess, see how it feels, and if we've improved— Then this is something you can go to multiple times a day. Give this a try, try each one for about 30 seconds or so and see how it feels. If you want more information on this stuff, I wrote this book called Rewiring Pain. This book dives into all of the neurology of pain and how to do different kinds of exercises to help improve that. And there's even a questionnaire here in the back that tells you exactly where to begin, so you don't have to read the whole book, you can dive right into the chapter that's going to be most beneficial for you. Awesome. I'll leave the link to this in the bio below, and if you have any questions, also leave comments. I try to answer all of them myself, and until next time, live healthy.
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