I help people who are tired of their aches and pains get stronger, feel younger, and achieve a level of fitness they didn’t know was still possible
Do you hold tension in your neck?
I work with a lot of people who carry tension in their neck muscles.
They often have a lot of stress in their lives already, but add some headaches, irritability, and loss of energy from the tension patterns and they're just coping to get through the day.
It's already well known that stress or pain create a fight-or-flight response in the body, triggering a rapid and shallow chest breathing pattern.
If you're stressed or in pain long enough, that becomes your normal breathing pattern.
Your brain learns (and finally owns) the patterns that you repeat.
But what is not well known is that to chest breathe, you have to lift the rib cage to inhale - and one group of muscles that assists with that job are in your neck.
Imagine how much work your neck muscles have to do for every breath.
It's no wonder they're tight!
But here's what you can do...
Learn to use your diaphragm again, and learn to breathe into your abdomen.
Diaphragmatic breathing is often taught as part of a meditation or yoga, and for good reason. It calms that chronic fight-or-flight response, which helps reduce stress.
But a bonus effect is that diaphragmatic breathing doesn't require lifting your rib cage to breathe, and that lets your neck muscles relax and take a break.
Spend some time focusing on your breathing. Take small, relaxed breaths and get them as low into your abdomen as possible. Your chest should feel very still, and if you look in a mirror (or better yet, have someone else do this for you) your shoulders should stay still when you breathe rather than rise and fall with every breath.
P.S. Some people also feel neck tension during exercise because their tension pattern becomes part of their core stability pattern or part of another pattern — for example, when lifting their arms overhead. If that's the case for you, start paying attention to how much neck tension you feel during a workout and try to consciously relax those muscles.
