Glenn Dawson shows four moves to fix neck pain from phone and laptop use. Release tight upper traps by pressing your neck against a bar for 90 seconds, do scapular retractions against a wall, stretch your chest, and finish with prone lower-trap slides on the floor.
Is your neck literally a pain in the neck? Listen, in this video I'm going to show you how to reset your neck in 4 easy, simple movements you could do at the gym. Follow along. Step 1, you got to mash out the tissue around the neck. So most people with neck problems, it's from forward posture, either looking at your phone or looking at the laptop. We're going to release this upper trap that's usually tight. The first thing you want to do, if you are at a gym, put the— say it's my left side that's tight. I'm going to put that hand behind my back, go underneath the bar. You may not do it as cool as I did the first time, and you're going to press your body into the bar and apply pressure for 90 seconds. Literally just this for 90 seconds. That's it. That's the whole exercise. Now, if you don't have the gym nearby, you can still trigger point that area. It's just going to take a lot of effort from you. So take 2 fingers and your thumb. Don't, don't with your dirty mind quit it. 2 fingers and your thumb and you're going to place the 2 fingers on your back of your trap. The thumb is going to go in the front. You're going to squeeze and hold right here for 90 seconds. It won't do as good of a job, but if you are in pain and you are not next to a barbell, This is going to be super, super, super, super beneficial for you. So either way, trigger point for 90 seconds. Exercise 2, we have to make sure that our body is in alignment. So the first thing we have to realize, if your posture is forward and your neck is causing pain, your shoulder blades probably aren't back. So the next thing we're going to do is called scapular retractions. I'm going to put my hands against the wall without bending my elbows. I'm going to pull my shoulder blades together and push them apart just like this. You want to do at least 5 reps. I would recommend if you're in neck pain, do 10 and do not look down. Looking down is going to make it hurt. Keep your head facing forward and just work those scapulas. The next thing we're going to do is stretch out our chest. Our chest gets really dominant and tight. Pulls everything forward, and that causes the tissues around your neck to get overstretched. So just a simple chest wall stretch, you're going to make an L with your arm, twist your body off the wall, and keep your forearm on the wall. This one you're going to want to do at least 90 seconds. Or here's a quick trick you could do to get a better stretch— active release. So you would activate your chest by pushing your arm into the wall for 5 seconds Exhale, and then stretch for 30 seconds. This way your body is releasing your nervous system so that you can actually stop guarding and lengthen the tissue. Last but not least, if our upper traps are super dominant and tight, we have to work our lower traps to get those to function correctly. So the easiest thing to do to work your lower traps is to lay on the ground like so. Keep your chin pinned in, put your fingertips on the ground, and slide your fingertips out and back in, squeezing those shoulder blades down, using your lower traps, the muscles beneath your shoulder blade, to pull down. If your elbows flare out like this and it's very difficult to keep them in, we got to stretch out your lats and your chest a little bit more because you have another problem that's going on. Hopefully your neck is already feeling relief. If it's not fully reset yet, reach out for professional help, or just reach out to us here at Reset U Fitness. If we can get to your problem on a specific level, we can do a lot better than just this video. But if you haven't already done so, share this video out. If you have neck pain, there's probably millions of other people that have neck pain too, and this could definitely help them. If it helps you, it's going to help them. And if you haven't already done so, subscribe. Subscribing to the YouTube channel is like tipping your waiter. And if you went to a nice dinner, you got a lot of value from your waiter, you'd probably tip them, right? I mean, right? So if you haven't already done so, subscribe. It's just like saying, "Hey, thanks for the good service," and your waiter appreciates it.
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