Upper Back and Neck Exercises

It is Dr. D here and we're back with another common stretch that I recommend to a lot of my patients, especially those that spend a lot of time sitting at a desk, working at a computer. Maybe you spend a lot of time driving throughout the day and you got some upper back, neck tension, low, and maybe even across the shoulders. This is a nice easy one that you can either perform with a mattress here, or you can use on an exercise ball. Today I'm going to show you it on the edge of a mattress so that ease of access for the most people here. So one of the most important things as I'm demoing this, I want you to feel like your neck is fully supported at all times. I only really want the very back part of your head to be the thing that is falling off the edge of the mattress. So please don't feel like your neck is really bent during the stretch. So we'll get into it here.

You're going to sit on the edge of the bed here so that you can position your head so that we're going off the corner of the mattress. And this is going to be important here in a second. So when we're positioning ourselves, we're going to go ahead and find just the back part of the head again, falling off the edge of the mattress here. And with us now positioned at the corner of the mattress, we can then take our arms and drape them off either side of that mattress and really feel a nice big open stretch through your chest. And we'll be able to relax here for however long feels comfortable.

One of the things that folks might tend to notice as they're doing this stretch that I want you to make sure that if you notice this, you can go ahead and stop and we'll pick it up again the next time, is if you do feel like your fingers start to get a little bit tingly, or if you have any sensations change in your arms, please do discontinue this stretch. Chat with your doc about it, that might be a little bit too long or a little bit much for your particular body. So please do this safely, but this is going to be a great stretch for you to employ for your body if you feel like you got a lot of tension that builds up in that upper back, lower neck, at the end of the day, especially from being hunched over doing a lot of the things that we do on our technology.

So give that one a try, check in with your docs and let them know what you think.

Be Well

Dr. Daniel