The Chronic Pain Solution for Complete Resolution

Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I have a little sleep secret I want to tell you about. Look, sleep is crucial for your fitness, but it's crucial for just plain old everyday life and function. And I find I sleep great unless I have a migraine. And I've had more than my fair share since perimenopause all the way through postmenopause. My secret weapon was Blue Sky CBD sleep gels. Each gel contains 25mg of CBD and 25mg CBN for deep restorative sleep. Something about it helps to reduce inflammation, which I believe for me was key in helping me get to sleep. But the biggest thing is so many of the over-the-counter solutions, whether for sleep or migraines, can ruin gut health, and liver health. Neither one of those did I want to be problematic for me. So this option is recommended by healthcare providers worldwide and backed by thousands of happy customers, many of whom come from our Flipping 50 community. There is zero THC, so it's non-habit-forming. It's made by a trusted family-owned company that we all can feel good about. Third-party tested for purity and potency. And if you're interested, you too can try a sample for just $6. But even better, you can get 30% off forever with discount code FLIPPING50. That's FLIPPING50. Just go to flipping50.com/blueskycbd. We'll put that link in the show notes and you'll find it everywhere on Flipping 50 at My Favorites. What are you waiting for? Good night. The chronic tight pain of upper back and neck and mid-back combined with desire to gain strength and muscle through lifting weights may just be creating a vicious cycle. Could you be not over-exercising but under-aware of your posture, over-amplifying poor postural habit by your lifting and making things worse. Recently, 3 individuals on the same day made me aware that lifting heavier caused acute tension and resulted in headaches, either immediately for one woman during the workout, or later after the workout for the other. We reviewed posture. Chronically, forward head hang was a common denominator, either as static posture or in movement, or in their work during the course of a day. When you take something already imbalanced and you add weight to it, only one thing can happen: a further imbalance. At some point, the body will cry uncle. My guest today will make this crystal clear for you and for me. If this is you, the duration of our episode is not nearly enough time to resolve your problem. It is enough to make you fully aware of why massages and shoulder rubs, Theraguns haven't done the trick for you. Why maybe CBD oil or, you know, Icy Hot, if you're still using that, still have not relieved it. There's another free resource we'll talk about at the end of this podcast so you can get more help if you want it. And I cannot wait to dive into this. But first, I'm Debra Atkinson and you're listening to Flipping 50, where I address top struggles and concerns. That's not our goal, just to point out the bad things, but to give you solutions for them and to make you aware that it's not normal just to accept them and move on and think this is a part of aging. It's just not. It may be, unfortunately, what we've seen in prior generations. But we can change things right here by not accepting it, not associating it necessarily with age, but associating something like today with contemporary postures and what we're all guilty of doing too much so that we can fix it. Look, most inventions weren't made until a necessity made them need it, made them have to happen. And so it's true with us. Unfortunately, we may be discovering this is a need. You and I, those of us who are experiencing the headaches, the upper back and the neck tension— and I'm telling you, Yoni nailed me. I mean, here in this podcast, he was like, well, if this and if this and if this— and I'm like, oh, oh, I'm like, check, check, and check. Yes. So if you you too fall into this category, you will find this, first of all, like, oh, that's it? It's something so simple. And yet it's probably a little bit more complex than we want to believe in order to fix. But if we really want to get to the root reason of why these things are happening, it's going to take a little bit more than a massage gun or a great shoulder rub. Not that I'll write you a note if you want to get one of those today, but that's not going to help. So in this podcast, we share what to eat, how to move, and how to change your mindset. And you're going to get a little of both how to move and how to change your mindset today. My guest is Dr. Yoni Witten. He's an expert for the art and science of permanent pain resolution. In addition to his hands-on work with patients over the last 15 years, Dr. Witten has spent years researching and studying with experts in manual medicine, functional neurology, and rehabilitation. Through his practice, he's developed a revolutionary approach to chronic pain. Now, the system that Dr. Witten developed has been codified and is available to chronic pain sufferers around the world. The Pain Fix Protocol blends the latest scientific research with essential concepts from the fields of natural movement, evolutionary health, nutrition, structural hygiene, self-care, and human Performance, and he is really a fantastic speaker. And I want to share with you, if you missed it, you can still get access to all the recordings, but Dr. Yoni was one of my guests, and it was so my pleasure to have the excuse then to meet him for the very first time on the What, When, and Why to Exercise for Women 40 and Over. And his interview was one of the favorites, and it certainly was a favorite of mine. So he will be a repeat I hope not, because we have to exhaust all the problems and acute pain that we have. But he will be back, and I want to let you know this is a special guest of mine. I hope you enjoy his presentation as much as I did. Dr. Yoni Whitton, thank you so much for being here.

Debra, it's always a pleasure to chat with you. Please call me Yoni.

Yoni, I feel like we should have let them into the green room because that's where all the fun happens. There's a lot of laughter back there.

We always have fun in the green room. Yeah, I think we need to start turning it on like right when we jump on the call. That would be a good plan.

Exactly, exactly. All right, we're going to talk about something near and dear to— honestly, it's a little about me today. So I have frequent headaches, and I've had them mostly since menopause. So I know it's a frequent thing for other women as they're dealing in cycling, and I'm no longer— that's not my excuse. But I've also at some point in my life been told while I was getting chiropractic that, does your neck hurt? And I said no. And they said, well, it's going to someday.

Oh, that's a nice thing to say to somebody.

I know. I'm like, I believe placebo effect, please. I mean, like, please. But let's talk a little bit about posture, forward head hang, headaches. I mean, are they all related? Where does it come from? And most of all, How can I stop it?

Wow, well, that's, that's kind of a mean thing to do to somebody. Sometimes I would do that in clinical practice, but I would never leave somebody with the cliffhanger. I would kind of wait for a second for it to digest and then explain what I meant by that and then give them some things that they can do to prevent it. So, wow, there's a lot of stuff here. So headaches is a big one. A lot of people have headaches. The main thing that I would encourage people to do when they have a headache is to stop, and before they pop a pill and start covering up symptoms, ask two very simple questions. First, am I hydrated? How many times have I peed today? How many glasses of water have I drank? What color is my urine? And how was my sleep last night or the past few nights? Because headaches are— there's no one-size-fits-all for headaches, but one of the most common problems with a headache is a hydration issue. There's lots of studies showing that if you just keep a person well hydrated, incidence of headaches goes way down. So before we get into the cervical stuff and the postural stuff, which is a super big deal, but just make sure you're hydrated because it goes way beyond headaches.

Second, can we unpack that? Yeah, so talk about hydration because I think I've got a lot of women on who are really saying they're, they're virtuous and they're drinking lots of water, could they potentially still be dehydrated if they're drinking lots of water but not using electrolytes with that water?

Yeah, absolutely. There's so many things that go into the hydration conversation. It's, it's actually, um, a big part of a program that I'm, I'm currently working on, and it took so much more time for me to complete the section on hydration than I thought it was going to, uh, because you can really get quite deep into it. So electrolytes can be a very big deal. We're in summer right now when we're recording this, and I know that you've lived in some very hot places. I currently live in a hot and humid place, and heat illness and being properly hydrated are a legitimate concern on a daily basis where I live. So what goes into that? As you said, electrolytes, minerals in the water. I mean, the water that we're supposed to be drinking is spring water that comes out of the ground that's naturally infused with minerals as it kind bubbles up to the surface. Unfortunately, what most of us are drinking nowadays is a stripped-down version that's essentially dead water. I mean, it's practically distilled with all of the UV sterilization and reverse osmosis and all of this. So, if you are drinking that type of water and you don't have access to spring water, then yeah, adding electrolytes back into the mix is very important. If you can access spring water, it's well worth the time and effort to get it. In a lot of places, you can pay for home delivery and then you don't need to worry about the electrolytes because it's naturally infused into the water as it's supposed to be. But you do have to be careful of environmental contaminants. I lived in Southern California for many, many years and the water there is heavily contaminated. And even though it goes through a filtration process, they go and they add back in chlorine and fluoride to sterilize it. So, you're getting doses of known toxins with your drinking water. And so, you know, it's hard to blame people for using reverse osmosis and wanting to get that stuff out. But then you get a form of water that is highly acidic that the body doesn't even really absorb. So that's kind of a roundabout way of answering the question that you asked, which is, is it possible for a person to be very diligent with how many cups of water they drink in a day and still be dehydrated? The answer is absolutely yes.

Great answer. Yeah, great answer. I think definitely something to look at. Um, okay, so what about, what about the posture? And I'm— there are so many questions I can ask you here, so just get comfortable in your chair. All right, so, um, you know, upper back neck tension. Yeah, I mean, I think men and women both can, can have this, but I also want to just go way back to any women listening. When we were in junior high, we all sprouted up many of us faster than guys. And then we got really self-conscious because not only were we sprouting up, but then we were getting breasts and we were not ready to assume that responsibility yet. So a lot of us got hunchbacked in junior high because we were a little embarrassed about our bodies. And yet I think we're still carrying some of that through. And now contemporary desk and keyboards and all of that are making it worse. But chronic, you know, back of the neck pain and tension. What do we do about it, first of all? And what do we want to maybe avoid doing?

Sure. Yeah, let me, let me just start by saying that structure dictates function. And so if a person is suffering with chronic upper back pain and that tension in the traps and the shoulders that never goes away,. And the people who I'm talking to right now that are, that are kind of nodding their heads are people who have had the best masseuse in the world work on them for an hour straight. They feel like a million bucks. They get up off that table and within a few hours or by the next day, the tension is right back where it had been prior to the massage, prior to that phenomenal massage and the massage therapist who did everything they could to help that person out. And the reason for that— you know what I'm talking about. So the reason for that is because when you go into a non-weight-bearing position where you're lying on your stomach or you're lying on your back and gravity's no longer pulling down on you, specifically pulling down on your head, those tissues can relax and that massage therapist can get in there and knead all of those knots out and get them to fully relax. Like I said, the massage therapist is probably doing a bang-up job. But here's the key: the body is not stupid when it put that tension there in the first place. It put the tension there out of necessity to support the head in a forward position. The head becomes heavier the further it moves forward, and in order for the head to move forward, there has to be a reduction in curvature in the lower part of the neck. So the neck has a curve in it just like the lower back curve. It's a lordosis, just like the lumbar curve. But with a person in the example that you gave who's trying to cover up, who feels ashamed or embarrassed or shy or sad, they assume that, you know, sad person posture where they're closing down, they're going into essentially a fetal position. And when we're born in fetal position, We have none of those lordotic curves. Those lordotic curves are known as secondary curves. They form later in life. We're born with the primary curve, which is the fetal position, which is the ashamed position or the covering up position. And if you want to get rid of that tension in the neck permanently, the only way to do it, the only way to do it is to restore normal position of the head stacked directly on top of the shoulder when you look at the body from the side and to have a normal amount of curvature in the neck and the lower back.

Okay. So if I can, I can sit up and I can do that momentarily. And then, geez, Yoni, I'm even doing it right now. So I'm arcing my head forward to get to the microphone. I'm causing my own problem. How do I, how do I correct that permanently?

Sure. Yeah. Well, you bring up a really interesting point there, Debra, which is that posture is regulated subconsciously. We shouldn't have to think about our posture. Any permanent solution to posture that is based on conscious effort is doomed to fail right from the start. Now, to be clear, it might require some conscious effort in the beginning, just like learning how to drive a stick shift car, right? You have to think about clutch, stick, turn signal, steering, getting your favorite song on the radio, all these things, right? They come automatically later on. You don't have to think about them. But in the beginning you might. But if you have to constantly think about those things throughout your lifetime, you're going to run into some trouble. So forward head position is a major problem in modern society for a lot of the reasons that you just mentioned. We spend an inordinate amount of time sitting. We spend less time being physically active and engaging our muscles and using them and maintaining their strength levels, which causes all types of problems that I know you're already familiar with. Uh, but the incidence of forward head posture is massive. I mean, we've got 5 studies since 2016 done in countries around the world in various, uh, different age groups and, uh, different populations of, uh, what types of, uh, professions and jobs and students and adults and all these things. And you're talking the average incidence of forward head posture around the world nowadays is just under 70%. No. So, there's no way. There's no way to get rid of that tension at the base of the neck as long as you have a forward head posture because your head is physically heavier. And, here's a simple example that'll demonstrate that. If you were to pick up a 10-pound dumbbell, which is roughly the same one of what a human head weighs, and you were to hold that dumbbell really close to your body and then check how active your bicep is, that muscle in the front part of your arm, while the, the dumbbell is held right up against your shoulder, and then slowly extend your elbow, move that dumbbell further away from your shoulder, and check how much activation there is in your bicep. Well, in the second example, with the dumbbell extended away from you, that 10 pounds is going to be causing a lot more activation in the bicep, right? Right. Same thing with the head. As soon as you poke the head out in front of the body, all of those muscles in the upper back and the neck And newsflash, all the way down to the lower back and the hips and down into the legs and even the bottoms of your feet have to be active to quite literally prevent you from falling on your face. Wow. So there's no way to override that because it's literally your body's safety mechanism kicking on to protect you. The only way to get rid of it, normalize head position. So you mentioned, okay, I need to sit up straighter. You also mentioned it sounds like you have some issues with the ergonomic setup for your recording studio.

I don't anymore because I've been busy while you're answering.

So, yeah, there's simple things that we can do that we should do because, you know, research shows that we're sitting, you know, 10, 12 hours a day now. Most people, lots of people, we do our jobs online. We sit in front of computers. We commute to and from the office for those of us who still commute. And sitting is just part of daily life. So, of course, Of course, optimize your setup. Goes without saying. If you're using a laptop computer, for goodness' sake, spend $20 and get an external keyboard. Put the monitor up so that you're looking straight ahead or even slightly upward and have a keyboard in front of you. Get the microphone a little bit closer so that you don't have to reach out for it, but it reaches out for you. You know, mic stands and whatnot. Things like that. I'm sitting on right now while we're having this conversation on a kneeling chair, which I'm a huge fan of, and I've got a video that talks all about why this is the best option available for sitting, not necessarily the best option for a workstation, because at the end of the day, Debra, we're a species that's designed to be in constant motion and we don't do well when we're staying too long in one position, whether it's sitting or standing. We do best when we're moving all day long or changing positions all day long is maybe a better way of saying that.

So good. And I'm gonna put this in the show notes too, but I have been talking about this. Somebody sent me a desk bike. I never, never wanted it. But what I noticed is it's just so much easier. I'm sitting upright while I'm at it. I mean, you just naturally are. My core is more engaged. I'm, and, and I'm more alert actually. I'm more focused than you just get sloppy mentally when you physically get sloppy. Yeah.

So cool. 100%. And, and I'm on a kneeling chair that has a rocker bottom. And so when I rock forward on the chair, my brain gets the sensation that I'm about to fall forward. And so what does my body do? Well, it brings my head back to upright my body. And so research has shown that by being in a kneeling chair that has a rocker bottom like this, you actually maintain the secondary curves in the neck and the lower back. You keep the hips at a more open angle, so they're not as flexed where you're shortening those hip flexors. And like you just mentioned, you get a lot more muscular activation, which keeps you more alert, which makes you more productive.

So good. I love that. Okay, so posteriorly, we have to change things so we make it easier to do the right thing. We've been talking a lot about going for walks, and, you know, I did a demonstration showing that you don't want to be bent forward from your hips. You don't want to be leaning forward with your head, you know, in order to go faster. You want to— the leaner the angle happens at your ankles. And but a lot of people struggle with this. Like, they'll be walking and suddenly it's like, do you see yourself? I've been walking with friends before and it's just like, hey, you know, I'm gonna age with somebody. I'd like it to be you. Could you just stand up a little bit more? How do we— how do we prevent that drooping.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's the same thing that we've been talking about. Where the head goes, the body follows. That's really the rule. So if you watch any gymnastics competition, any high dive competition, you watch the person, man or woman, set up to do a beautiful dive off of a diving board. What moves first? The head. If the person is doing a flip, the head go— if they're doing a backflip, the head whips back first, then the body follows. If they're doing a front flip, the head tucks first, the body flips around afterwards. If you want to alter your body's position, head position has to go first. If you want to alter symptoms like tension in the upper back or headaches, like we were talking about earlier, gotta change head position and you gotta change it at that permanent level that's regulated subconsciously. So when we start seeing people with these forward head positions that they've fallen, they're, they're, they're what I call posture prolapse. So the posture has just collapsed. They've lost the battle to gravity. And what you see with this is we have proven increase in all the symptoms that people are looking to avoid. You're talking about— we have studies showing increased incidence of neck pain, back pain, headaches. People with less curvature in their neck are 2 times more likely— just a slightly reduced curve in the neck— are 2 times more likely to have chronic neck pain. People with a loss of curve in the neck, or what's called a reverse curve, where the head is poking way out in front of them, 18 times more likely to have chronic neck pain. Greater frequency, intensity, duration of headaches, increased incidence of facial pain and TMJ. Majority of people who have tension headaches also have forward head position. You also have carpal tunnel syndrome, decreased ability to breathe properly. We're gonna talk about walking well. It's nice if you can breathe while you're doing it. These people also have 22 times more risk for developing rotator cuff tears. So it's like The starting point for resolving all of these issues is the same— normalized structure. If you had two wheels, Debra, and they were sitting right next to each other and we were going to have a contest as to which one would roll further, and one of them was perfectly round and the other one was square, which one would win?

The round one.

Exactly right, because the square one, the structure cannot do what we're asking it to do. That's the same thing with a head in forward head position. Structurally, we are asking it to do things it can't do. You can't even breathe properly with your head in a forward head position because you've altered length-tension relationships in the musculature that run from the neck to the thorax. Just, it can't work in the same way that a square wheel can't roll. So the starting point is fixing head position.

I love that. I mean, and it's so eye-opening, and it's also like eye-opening that we're just putting Band-Aids on a lot of things and we're not actually helping the root cause of the problem.

That's why I really hammer it home is because people gloss over it. Well, yeah, fix head position. I know that I need to think about keeping my head up straighter. No, no, that's not enough. If you've lost curvature in your neck, you can think about keeping your head up straighter until the cows come home. It does not matter. You actually need to put the curve back into your neck. It would be like saying, I'm going to think about having clean teeth. Well, that's great, but you better also brush and floss your teeth.

So good. So what are your thoughts on foam rolling?

I think of foam rolling the same way that I think of any other therapy, which is it's one tool in my tool belt. And is the hammer better than the screwdriver, or is the screwdriver better than the hammer? Well, it depends on what job you're trying to do. There's a time and a place where a hammer is exactly what I want, and then if I'm trying to put a screw in, doesn't— I could have the best hammer in the world and it doesn't matter. So, uh, foam rolling for— let's go back to your original statement. A woman who developed early, got very tall, and developed breasts at the exact same time. And so she's shy and she's got additional weight from the breast tissue on her chest. Why does the back push out in the first place is the question that we need to start with. So structure dictates function, right? The body doesn't make mistakes. When it puts tension in the shoulders, it's doing it on purpose to support the weight of the head and forward head position, like we've already talked about. So the question now is, why does the body develop a hunchback? For the exact same reason. So head becomes heavier as it shifts forward. Body tenses up muscles to support that extra weight, like we already talked about. But when this process goes on long enough, Debra, what happens is the body will actually increase rigidity in the spine and push that spine outward to counterbalance the weight of the head that's pushed forward.

Does that make sense? Totally. Like the body likes to be in balance. Something goes forward, something's going to go back.

Beautiful. So now we go back to the statement that I keep saying, which is you want to fix that, fix head position, because then you eliminate the reason for the hunchback in the first place. So the problem with foam rolling, again, a long way of answering this, but now it's going to make sense when I say it doesn't address the root cause. Yes, I can push that hunchback back in and decrease the rigidity that my body put there on purpose to deal with the forward head position. But is that the right thing to do? Because the moment you get up and gravity's pulling you down again, well, guess what? Now you've weakened the structural rigidity that your body put there on purpose to deal with that weight, which means now the muscles in the base of your neck and your shoulders and traps need to get even tighter to compensate for the lack of skeletal rigidity.

Ooh, okay. That was a mic drop. Yes. Okay. So have you given me— how is it that I can correct my head position?

Ah, that's the million-dollar question. So first, how to tell if you've got one.

You made me work for that.

I did, but it's going to make so much more sense now when we talk about it, like when I answered with that foam rolling, because it's so mean to give a blanket statement. Because there's a time and a place where that foam rolling is really appropriate. Say I've already gone through and done the correction for head position and put that curve back into that person's neck and built up the strength of the surrounding muscles, then maybe the foam roller is the perfect tool. But to start with it, for most people, is putting the cart way in front of the horse. Got it. So let's see, how does a person tell that they have a forward head position? Well, number one, you could have a walking partner who says, hey, I don't want to stand next to you because you look pretty bad. Which is what you did. But if a person doesn't have that great friend, like we were talking about in the green room before we got on here, a few ways to easily tell: look at photos that people have taken of you from the side and see if the whole of your ear pokes way out in front of the shoulder, and be brutally honest with yourself. 70% of the population has this, so you're more likely to see that your head is forward than you're more likely to not You know what I mean? Yeah.

Okay. But hold on here. So when you are inevitably, there's almost no way around this. And I know this because like for, for 5 or 6 years, we would have trainers in a facility, you know, as a part of the movement screen. But we also would do a static postural screen and we would have them turn their, turn your customer to the side and let's just do this plumb line. Well, automatically people know your eyes, you're staring at them and they are not going to stand in their normal poor stance. They're going to clean it up.

That's right. That's exactly right. And that's why I'm gonna give you 4 other ways to see if they've actually got it. So, okay, but, but going back to what you just said, I've of course experienced that phenomenon in my office as well. And what I got, you know, I had to get a little sneaky as a clinician. You know, the really good clinicians are sneaky, where we'll tell somebody that we're doing something else, or we'll actually be scanning for something else while at the same time checking for their actual posture. So one of the things that I would do is I would check posture with eyes closed, not in front of a mirror. Don't have a plumb line. Now you can put the plumb lines in digitally. You know, I started personal training in the '90s and we had plumb lines, you know, actual plumb lines on the wall. And of course, when a person sees that, they're going to straighten up, like you said, doing it, doing it with eyes closed, having the person march in place with their eyes closed, assuming they don't have any balance issues., and then keeping eyes closed, have them stop, take a picture. Um, do it after you scan for other things. But these other 4 are the confirmation because the visual alone or the photograph alone is not enough. And, and you just mentioned that you were doing a static postural analysis and a moving postural analysis, I'm guessing. Yeah. So what you're doing there is, is you're combining data from different systems to get a more complete clinical picture. And I know you know that, but I'm just explaining it to the audience. So what I did in in my clinic is a process that I called diagnostic triangulation. So triangulation on a map is where we take multiple points, data points, and then we use all of them to hone in on exactly where we are. Well, I would just do the same thing with diagnostics. So I would take structural findings, both static and during movement, same as you. And then I would get a bunch of functional findings, and then I would match that up with the person's symptoms. So in addition to structural findings, We're going to check range of motion, functional findings. A square wheel cannot roll in the same way that a neck that is pushed out into forward head position loses range of motion. Normal range of motion in the neck, 85 to 90 degrees in rotation over each shoulder, easy and pain-free and symmetrical to both sides. Cool. Yeah. Okay. So you should be able to rotate your head over your shoulder and your chin should line up up with that bony bump on the end of your clavicle. And you should be able to easily do that to both sides, which shocks so many people in my clinic because you no longer have to look behind you to back out of your driveway. We've got cameras now. True. So people just don't do it. So restricted range of motion. The other places that we'll see restricted range of motion are side bending, which is a motion that the vast majority of people in Western society never do. So tilting your head to the side as if you're trying to touch your ear to your shoulder, you should be able to go 40 or 45 degrees. Knees in both directions, again, easily and pain-free. The other one that people really struggle with is looking up at the ceiling. And the reason for that is if you've got a forward head posture, you've pulled that lordotic curve out of the neck, which is a backward bending curve. Backward bending curve is biased towards bending backward. As soon as you pull the curve out of it, it becomes harder to bend backward. Makes good sense to anyone. I wish we had a visual here because it makes better sense when I can show the visual. A few other things, structural findings. In addition to the altered alignment, there's something called cervical kyphosis trapezius sign, which is a mouthful, but what I call it is trap sign. And here's the dead giveaway, Debra, and you will know this. A person who has forward head posture has thicker and more developed upper traps. It's the same person who goes to the massage therapist over and over again to get their upper back tension worked out, and it never goes away. Their necks are also thicker. When you take a picture of them from the front, you'll see a person who is otherwise petite who has a very wide neck. That is abnormal. It's disproportionate to the rest of their physical development, and the body has laid down additional muscle, as it does any time you challenge it with increased load. The increased load in this case is the additional weight of the head head all hours of the day that gravity is pulling down on you.

You know, it's my podcast and I feel like you might be calling me names.

I, I say that one and I emphasized it specifically, Debra, because it's a big one with women. It's very easy to see on a woman, um, because women don't typically, uh, lay down as much muscle on their necks as men do, and they also focus on the same types of exercises, which is part of that. But just, um, from a deposition of, uh, muscle fiber type, men tend to develop thicker necks, uh, much more so than women do. So when you see a thick neck on a woman and she starts complaining of, you know, uh, upper back pain, headaches, neck pain, you start saying like, hmm, cervical kyphosis, upper trapezius sign. There was a group of researchers that found that they actually did the study on this, which was awesome because I had identified this in practice years ago. And then I read the study and I was like, somebody else saw it too. And they actually proved it. So I was so happy when I read that. Hardly anybody has read the study. So I was, I was just the happiest I've ever been when I, when I found that study. But they basically did the study and they confirmed it with imaging that when a person has those heavily developed traps that are specifically tender to the touch, Again, touching traps, just coming up to a person and putting your fingers in their traps should not hurt. That should not hurt. And if a person jumps when you touch those, strong indication. If you combine it with these other things, altered alignment, reduced range of motion, thick neck, increased muscle tone, and then those pain patterns that we were talking about where you have increased incidence of neck pain, back pain, headaches, all of those things, rotator cuff problems, all of that stuff, TMJ, all you start painting that. And now you've got a very strong diagnostic picture of what's going on with this person without even sending them out to imaging. Then you send them out for imaging if it's warranted. And you get the, you know, the gold steel, the gold standard seal of approval there where you're just like, okay, this is— I have literally every piece of data on this person. You know, it's like putting together a case if you were a detective.

Wow. I'm like, where have you been all my life? I rarely, rarely cry on my own podcast.

The coolest thing about it, though, when you reverse engineer this, because we're going to talk about your other question. So your question was, how do we fix it and how do we permanently fix it, which is possible? The best way to do it, as I've said, is to normalize head position because you can fix this. And what's really cool is you can take a person who's got a reduction in the normal curve in the neck or even a reversal of the curve in the neck, and you can put the curve back in. And the coolest thing is you don't even have to think about it because posture is regulated on a subconscious level, just like beating your heart and breathing. So when you fix it subconsciously, all of these other things go away. Your range of motion gets better, the neck becomes visibly less thick, muscles become less tonic, there you have less tension, and you have less tenderness Pain, headaches, upper back pain, neck pain, TMJ, all of these things. They all go away when you fix the one thing. That's how you know that this is the first domino that you need to work on because it doesn't work that way with anything else except normalizing head position.

Perfect. I've got a question for you and I've got two more actually. One, I hear this a lot from women, less so for myself, and I want to say this verse, I guess, before. I am— I would say I fit too much of what you've said, too much of it. And yet I'm high functioning, you know what I mean? I mean, I'm— my body's figured out how to do it. I, I do have good range of motion. I didn't fail any of those. And, and I still do have a curve, I think, you know, maybe, maybe We'd have to X-ray you to, to, to see for certain.

And with somebody who's been active, and here's the kicker for you, and I know this is the case just because we've been friends for a while, is you have a high level of fitness and you're very strong in your upper back and you have been able to compensate and overcome with the strength that you've built up over decades.

Got it. Which is not necessarily a great thing. Okay.

So, this— That you couldn't get better and live much more comfortably by improving the amount of curve in your neck because let's face it, the neck curve is the same as the lower back curve, Debra. It's there out of necessity to keep the mass in the case of the lower back, the mass of the torso positioned over the pelvis to minimize muscular effort because muscular effort is supposed to be directed towards finding food to increase survivability, and procreating. And the secondary curve in the neck is designed to support the weight of the head to decrease muscular effort so that we can find food and procreate. And it just so happens that the joints line up perfectly when the secondary curves are in a normal amount of— when there's a normal amount of curve present. And as soon as you start decreasing the amount of curve or reducing or reversing rather the amount of curve in the neck, you start altering the alignment of those joints and you get that square wheel that we've been talking about.

Okay. So I don't personally have this issue, but I do hear about this next one from several women in our community. And it's, you know, it's not a huge percentage, but I do repeatedly enough hear this, like right in between their shoulder blades, you know, where I would locate is this romboid related, they literally— it's not just the muscles are getting woken up and, and I'm having them activate something that's been dormant, but they actually will complain about like pretty severe tension or tightness or pain in that mid-back area. Is this related?

Yeah, yeah, I call that pitching a tent. So, um, it goes back to what we've already talked about where the, the further the head goes forward in the absence of what we just talked about with you, which is you have the ability to counter those heavy forward forces, assuming you do have a forward head posture, which it's very possible. Anybody who spent a lot of years cycling is at a major disadvantage because you're hanging the head out in front of the body and gravity's acting more on the head. It's pulling you down more. And we know that when we angle the head downward, it becomes heavier.. So you're just, you're working at a disadvantage. And when you do it repeatedly, well, one of two things is going to happen. Either you're going to win against gravity or gravity is going to win against you. Now gravity is pretty relentless. So gravity usually wins. But for these people who don't have that amount of muscular strength, the bones shift backwards, the bones shift backwards, and the ligaments on the back part of the spine, posterior longitudinal ligament, becomes very dense and really locks down, and you lose mobility of your spine. And because that middle portion of the back is where the ribs attach, unfortunately, you also lose mobility of the ribs, and it becomes harder to breathe when that happens. The worst thing that a person like that can do is foam roll the middle of their back and start breaking up that ligamentous tension and the, uh, the skeletal rigidity that the body has put there. You have to reduce forward head position first. You have get rid of the reason that the body put that there in the first place, not try and say like, oh, my body's making a mistake by putting this here. Let me see if I can correct the body's mistake. Body doesn't usually make mistakes. It's pretty rare for it to make a mistake, in fact.

Wow, that is wild and so very good. I'm glad we brought that up because I know that, that alone is going to provide someone with some insight to something that they've been unable to figure out. I want to ask you, so we've kind of hit on foam rolling. When is it, when isn't it appropriate? What about hanging? I've been asked this recently, and I don't know if it's being popularized by influencers or what, but they wonder just about simply hanging from bars. It depends.

Good answer. Yeah, I mean, you got to watch out for the person who's like, absolutely yes or absolutely no, because there's a time and a place. So there's some really interesting research showing that hanging from the hands from a bar has some really good health benefits for the shoulder. But if you're talking about hanging for the spine, for the vast majority of people, it is not going to be helpful and would very likely be harmful. The studies that talk about increasing the length of the spine or increasing disc height as a result of hanging That research has been done and it's been put to bed. Any increase in height, overall height or disc height, that you achieve from hanging from a bar, whether from your arms or from your feet, is gone completely within 15 minutes of removing yourself from that bar and walking around in an upright position.

Okay, great.

Thank you. Yeah. And the one thing that I want to mention on that, just to piggyback on it, is the reason why it's not helpful for the vast majority of people is because people sit too much and they don't have the level of fitness and muscular strength. And when you hang from a bar, you're lengthening tissues. When you're lengthening tissues, it's the equivalent of stretching, which is downregulating muscular activation, the opposite effect of what resistance training does. You are relaxing muscles. People who are sedentary, who don't exercise, should not be relaxing their muscles and decreasing stability of their body and their spine. They should be activating muscles and increasing stability. And that's why hanging is not a good idea for most people. The exception to that, if you want to get really into the weeds, is the highly trained athlete whose probably in their fifth decade or beyond, and they've been doing years or decades of resistance training, and they have a lot of compression in their spine, and they have a ton of muscular strength, and their resting tone is extremely high. So you look at this person and their muscles just look tight and tense all the time. Basically the opposite of a yoga practitioner.

Wow, okay, that was just a mouthful and mic drop moments right there. That was wonderful, and I so would love to keep talking to you, so we're just going to have to have you back. But I want to give our listeners a next step because, I mean, right now, I mean, you have us— you have me like eating out of your hand. So where, where can I go and get a little bit more time with you specifically talking about from A to Z, meaning problem to really permanent solution, what do I need?

So I'm glad you asked because I have a webinar coming up that goes deep on chronic pain, posture, and permanent correction of these problems. And really what you need to do from the bare bones to get this stuff to go away And never come back. And I'm going to send a link over to you so that your audience can get access to that webinar and they can, they can join me and learn all about that.

Perfect. Okay. Just listeners, by the way, if you're— well, if you have a mind like a steel trap and you're walking or you're lifting while you're listening to this, that link, and just to make it easy, we'll create one at Flipping50.com/StopPain so that you'll know to get it by the time this is out. That's where it will be. And, and this next upcoming one you've got going on in, in October, and I want to make sure nobody misses that. I will say this about anybody who lives in a northern climate, and Yoni, please weigh in on this, but I think as it gets colder, if you've got this chronic tension and chronic tightness, that often things get worse when that happens. Is this true?

True, not true? Yeah, I would say that there's, there's definitely a weather component to that. I think that there's there's also other components with people's mood changes as we get decreased daylight. And as it gets colder, people tend to be less physically active. They stay indoors more. And so I think that all of those things play a part in that. And, and, and we have to make a little bit more of an effort when there's less daylight and it's colder. You know, we used to have to go chop firewood and that kind of kept us busy, but not too many people do that anymore.

More. Yeah, unfortunately we probably need a little bit more of that activity level. Yeah. Okay, Joni, thank you so much for being here.

Ah, thank you for having me.

It's always awesome to talk to you. Okay, listeners, so now up to you. Number one, I want you to make sure that you do go to these show notes, because if it's not you, it is a best friend, it is your sister, somebody else in your home, your household, or within 5 people that you know suffers from this forward head hang and/or pain and tension in their upper back and their neck. It's the person who is always saying, will you give me a shoulder rub? And I can't tell you how I know that, or I'd have to kill you. Okay, so you're gonna want to go to flipping50.com/chronicpainsolution, and I want you to get the show notes and the links to follow Yoni because some of this was new news. Things you thought were tools may actually either be doing more harm or just getting in the way of you actually getting to the right answer. So let's get some better solutions right away. And what are you waiting for? Let's start Flipping 50 today.