The ‘I dunno’ exercise for neck pain and upper back tension

Here’s  a quick and effective little exercise that relieves upper back tension for those tight shoulders  and neck from being at the computer, driving the car or from good old everyday stress.

So many of us have tight and painful upper backs and necks and It generally takes years of accumulated bad posture and  physical and mental stresses to get this but the good news is that quite often it can be fixed quickly and easily. One of my clients said to me many years ago that she wears her shoulders as earrings. I didn’t immediately know what she was talking about so she explained to me that all day every day she would find herself so tense her shoulders would not be relaxed and they would creep higher and higher until it felt like they were attached to her ears. I am sure many of you drive your cars like this or work at the computers like this. Your shoulders are not down and relaxed, you continually have to tell yourself to relax them instead of holding them tightly. It gets worse the more stress that you have around you. It you do this for long enough these muscles get painful from hours of contracting them. Imagine if I was to ask you to bend your elbow and flex hard your bicep muscle to contract it hard-as if you were to show me how big your arm muscles were. And imagine if asked you to hold that for one hour in the same position. Well, you probably wouldn’t last for very long and even if you did, your arm would be very sore from contracting it. This is exactly what is happening when you are holding your upper back and shoulders ‘like earrings’. It’s little wonder they are sore at the end of the day!

One of the most difficult things to do is be aware that you are doing this. So many people are so used to it, when I tell them to relax their shoulders they tell me they are relaxed. I try to wiggle their upper back and shoulders and they are locked hard. The client generally is quite surprised because they think that they were completely relaxed. Unfortunately, after years of tensing their upper backs and necks they have literally forgotten how it feels to feel relaxed. This is where this exercise comes in.

The ‘I dunno’ exercise:

We need to re program your muscles to start to realise where and what relaxed is again. The ‘I dunno’ exercise will do this for you. I want you to do this several times day especially if you find yourself going back into bad habits by tensing those shoulders. Shrug both shoulders up towards your ears as if you were doing that classic ‘I dunno’ position. Hold for 3 seconds and the gently let them drop back to a relaxed position. Let them relax for 5 seconds. Now push them in the opposite direction towards the floor, the opposite to a shoulder shrug, for 3 seconds. Then relax them in neutral again. Repeat this sequence 5 times of raising, relaxing, pushing down and then relaxing. This will give you a much better understanding of where relaxed is and when you are tensing your muscles. It will also have the advantage of fatiguing these muscles which will make them less reactive to going back to being worn as earrings. The more you do this the more aware you will become and the less pain and tension you will have.

Remember, always have good posture when you are sitting and standing otherwise you will have limited results. As I have said many times before, that it’s imperative to remove the causes to your pain. Bad posture with your head in a forward protracted position is the main cause of neck pain!