Stop Stretching Your Neck. Try This Instead (It Might Improve Your Vision Too)

If you have neck pain or constant stiffness in your neck and you're always stretching it and it's not helping, instead of stretching it, let's try strengthening it. Hi, I'm Bill from Beyond Fitness Online, and today we're going to work on the neck using some isometric exercise. Now here's the thing, our neck has so much to do with other systems in our body, it's important to check to see what's working. So first things first, let's see how far you can turn your head, how far you can tilt your head. And can you look up and can you look down? Is there any restriction there? Does it feel like you have a limited range of motion? Does it feel painful at all? The other thing that's really interesting about the neck is as the neck gets stronger, the visual system can actually get better. So here's a Snellen chart. It's a good idea to— you can get one off the internet if you want, but check your vision. See how— what line you can see on there. Do these exercises, reassess, and see if it's improved your vision as well. There's a whole bunch of reasons for that. I'm not going to get into that in this video. But it's a good way to see if this is something that you need. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to do isometric exercise for our neck in all directions. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to try to turn our head that way. We're going to put our hand on our cheek and resist that turning. So we're here and we're pushing, pushing, pushing. You're going to hold that for 3, 2, 1. So about 5 seconds. Slowly come out of that. Take a deep breath. We're going to do that again 3 times. Okay. 5 seconds each. Here we go. Push. 3, 4, 5, and relax. One more time. Put your hand on the side of your face and turn into it for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and relax. Now that we've done that, try reassessing. How does your neck move? If there was one particular motion that was limiting you before, check that one first. Also check the Snellen chart. See if your vision's improved. Now we did that to the right. Now we're going to do it to the left. So same thing, hand here, push, 3, 2, 1, and relax. And do that 3 times. Then again, reassess. Then from there, we're going to try to do neck flexion. So this isn't pushing forward. It's actually trying to bring the chin down to the chest. So you're going to put your hands on your forehead and push down for 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and relax slowly. So remember that when you're done with this, don't just automatically stop. Really take yourself out of that slowly because the neck can be very, very sensitive to input. We're going to do it again. Push for 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and relax. And then if you want to try it again, you can, but if you want to reassess, Now's a good time to reassess, see if you can move in any of these directions a little bit better. Also, again, check your Snellen chart, see if that's improved. Okay, last one. We're going to put our hands behind our head right here, interlace the fingers, and we're going to try to lift the head up. So you're trying to not lean back, but you're actually trying to look up towards the ceiling. So you're going to put your hands here and push your head down into it. Again, for 5 seconds, and then relax. And then again, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, relax. So 2 to 3 reps on all of these is usually plenty. Now reassess, see if you can look up, down, left and right, tilting left and right. See if any of those all feel better. Also, again, check your Snellen chart. I would say that 9 out of 10 times, people do see some improvement in their vision by doing these. It can be super powerful for that reason. There are many other ways to work on neck strength, and I've got some more videos like that right up here, so feel free to check those out. And if you have any other questions, leave them in the comments below. I post new videos every week and would love to hear more about your successes and other things that you may want to hear from me about. And until next time, live healthy.