Relieving neck and shoulder pain - Accessory nerve glide

If you carry all your stress in your shoulders or have neck pain, then I may have the perfect solution for you. Hi, I'm Bill, owner of beyondfitnessonline.com, where we take an outside-the-box approach to help you alleviate pain and lose weight so that you can live the active, healthy lifestyle that you deserve. So today what I want to talk to you about is How to alleviate neck pain and stiffness, including in the upper shoulders. Now, so many times people will come to me and say, I carry all my stress up here and it's really achy, or this hurts. How do I make that better? Well, one of the things we want to look at is the nerve that innervates those muscles. And that nerve is cranial nerve 11, or your spinal accessory nerve. Now, that's a really important thing to understand because that goes into the brainstem And can actually have an influence on a lot of different things, including flexion movements. So anytime you're bending over or rounding, that plays a role in that. But what we really want to pay attention to here is, could that nerve possibly be stuck somewhere between the brainstem, through the SCM, into the trapezius? Now the nerve actually has a little— you can think of it like a tube, and the nerve is in it, and as the muscles move, The nerve needs to be able to glide within that tube. Well, if that gets stuck somewhere because of scar tissue or an impingement, you're going to get a response in the muscle telling you, oh, it's no good, it's tight, it's sore, it's achy, it's painful, you don't want to move it. So what we want to do is address that and see if maybe that's the case by trying to force that nerve to floss through those areas a little bit and become a little bit smoother with its movement. Now when we do this, we want to be very careful because we are working on a nerve. We are going to be doing what seems like a stretch, but the intensity of this stretch should never be more than a 3 or a 4 out of 10. And the reason is, is that if you put too much stress on a nerve, you can actually cause more problems. Okay? So go light. You want to just be able to feel a nice light stretch when we start with this. Okay. Okay, so we're going to do what's called nerve tensioning first. And for the spinal accessory nerve, we got to have a few movements in our toolbox first. So the first thing I want you to do is just stand up nice and tall. Make sure we tuck the tailbone so that the pelvis is parallel with the floor and not arched this way. Okay, so we're here, nice and tall right through the head here. And what we're going to do is you're going to just take this shoulder. So if we were working on this side, We would want to take the shoulder and be able to move that forward and backwards. Now, if you're not sure if you're doing it well, you can go look at yourself in the mirror. Okay? So this is movement number 1. Movement number 2 is tilting the head laterally. So if you can do this, that's good. Now, some people will compensate by doing this. If you have a limited range of motion in any of these, that's okay. Just go where you can comfortably. Okay? So we got this with shoulder retraction. We've got lateral flexion. You should also have anterior flexion of the neck right here. So being able to tuck your chin down. And then this one is a little bit weird, but it's a gliding of the spine. So you're going to kind of stick your head out and bring it back in. So anterior and posterior gliding is what we call that. So if you can do all of those things, You're probably able to do what we're going to do next. So what we're going to do is we're going to get nice and tall, tuck that pelvis. Take this one step at a time. If at any point you get to that 3 or 4 out of 10, that's where you stop. Okay? So we're going to go here. We're going to get tall. We're going to tilt. We're working on this side, so we're tilting the head away. That's the first part. You might feel a little bit of a stretch. Now, if you're not at a 3 yet, then what we're going to do— Is you're going to push your head forward in that glide. Okay, check yourself. If you're not at a 3 yet, then what we're going to do is we're going to pull that shoulder back into retraction. If you can do even more, then we're going to bring the chin down towards the middle of the chest, and then you're going to relax. Now, at any point where you got to that 3 out of 10, that's fine. What you can do is repeat that And hold for just a couple of seconds each time. And do that several times throughout the day, maybe 4 or 5 reps each time. The more often you do that, the more you're teaching the nerve how to move fluidly through there. Now, if that didn't help you, we may need to do the opposite side. So you may be experiencing a problem here, but you can actually do it on this side because tensioning this side— will actually slack this side or relax this side. So again, get really tall, tuck the pelvis, we're tall through the head, and we'll go the other way. Tilt forward, shoulder back, tuck the chin, and then come out of it nice and slow. That's one way to relax this side. The other is to do the exact opposite of what we did. Tilt forward, shoulder back, tuck the chin, So if we go back to the side and tensioning this side didn't work, what we're going to do is we're going to get nice and tall, and then we're going to just kind of slouch down a little bit in the spine. We are going to tilt our head to the side that we're trying to rest. Okay? Then we're going to retract that chin, kind of pull the head in, look up a little bit, bring that shoulder forward. Okay. This should just feel relaxed. You might feel more tension over here, but this should just feel relaxed. That would be how you would slack the nerve in those muscles. So give these 3 a try. Leave me a comment below and let me know what you think, if— what worked for you. And if you have any questions, let me know. And of course, if you're unsure if this is right for you or not, please don't hesitate to check with your doctor. or your healthcare provider because they may be able to tell you another way to do these things. There's a lot of ways to approach this. I hope this is helpful, and I look forward to hearing from you down below in the comments. And until next time, live healthy.