A New Way to Alleviate Neck Pain

One of the most common ailments I see in my office or hear about from you via Instagram is neck pain. If you are a normal 2020 person who spends time sitting at a computer, driving, or looking down at your phone, you may find neck pain or headaches are a common occurrence. If you have experienced that achy upper back or it feels like your traps have turned into two rock hard bricks, I’ve got some good news for you. Fascia restriction plays an important role in the pain you are feeling, and it is completely within your power to loosen these areas and eliminate this pain.

It feels a bit ironic that this is my topic today, as yesterday I was bouldering and took an uncomfortably big fall off the top of the wall. I was feeling cocky and made a risky last move to grab the top of the wall and well, I missed. Yes, the floor is like a springy gymnastics-style mat, but I still dropped a good twelve feet and attempted to drop and roll. I rolled backwards over my neck and made a whole group of climbers go, “oh, sh*t!”. That didn’t seem like a good sign, although I’m luckily left with only a bit of a stiff neck this morning. I’m taking it as the universe ensuring I am genuinely empathetic as I write this! Rest assured I will be following my own advice after finishing this post.

While some of us take unnecessary falls and acutely injure our necks, the vast majority of you are experiencing more chronic pain. Here are two fascial pain patterns that can help you decode your neck pain or headaches and get you feeling better asap.

First, let’s do a quick review of fascia. Your fascia is the most abundant tissue you have in your body. It wraps around everything: your muscle fibers, muscle groups, tendons, bones, nerves, organs, and blood vessels. It is responsible for your shape, texture, and structure, even more so than your skeletal system! I liken it to a 3-D plastic wrap suit you wear on the inside.

If a section of that “plastic wrap” starts to stick together, shrink, and twist up, your whole body can be affected. One section of restricted fascia can pull on another area, and commonly the area being pulled is where you feel pain. So attempting to loosen an area that is already over-stretched and being pulled will not solve your issue. You need to hunt out the source of the true fascial restriction. Simplified way down: where you feel the pain is rarely the problem.

The first and most common pattern for neck pain is fascial restriction on the opposite side. This means the fascia of your chest (pectoral) area and the scalenes (front neck muscles). Most of us are spending quite a bit of time sitting and tend to sit slouched with shoulders rounded and head forward. If you imagine that sitting position, it’s easy to see how over time your chest and rib cage area can start to restrict.

The tightening and “shrinking” of the front part of your body will pull the opposite area into an over-stretched position. So now the upper back and trap muscles are consistently being pulled and can begin to hurt. If this pulling happens for a long enough period of time (say, the last 10 years sitting at your computer), your traps may cease to function as a muscle and instead will function like a strap. As in, they will not expand and contract like a normal muscle would, they will simply “hold on”. Especially if you find you sit with your head in front of your shoulders, which is typical if you are slouching, your brain is telling your traps that it must “hold your head” and support it. If the traps think they cannot let go otherwise your head isn’t safe, they will hold on for dear life and will feel like you have two cement bricks in back of your neck.

The good news is that you can restore space back into the front fascia and begin to release the strain on your traps. With a little consistency, you can realign and rebalance your upper body and thereby alleviate your pain. Also take note of how you continue to stand, sit, and look at your phone. Move your computer up higher! Hold your phone up to eye level so your head doesn’t drop forward! If you can break the habit of slouching while sitting and keeping your head balanced over your shoulders, you can keep this pattern from returning.

Secondly, if you find releasing your chest and the front area fascia does not give you relief, consider fascial tightness in the posterior chain. There is a massive strip of fascia called the Posterior Line that goes from your forehead all the way down to your heels. It looks like this:

Credit: Thomas Myers “Anatomy Trains”, Posterior Line

In my practice, I have found that this line tends to play a big role in chronic headaches especially. Let’s go back to imagining this chain as a sheet of plastic wrap. If there is a section that begins to stick to itself and “crinkle” up, it can create a lot of tension on the ends of the chain. Those attachment points (the forehead and the heel) will become strained from the lack of space in the chain and the “pulling.”

If you have been getting headaches that you feel right in the middle of your forehead, releasing fascia further down the Posterior Line can give that attachment point relief from being pulled. Experiment with the area of the rhomboids, low back, glutes, and hamstrings. In personal experience with clients, I’ve seen that releasing fascia as far down the line as the calves can alleviate headaches!
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Lastly, I want you to remember that pain is just a signal. It’s a message from your body saying that something is not quite right. My ultimate goal is to take away the mystery of that signal and give you the tools to address it yourself. I encourage you to try out both of these patterns separately and see which is the most helpful for you.

If you want to learn more about how to effectively release fascia with a foam roller, check out Pain Liberation Academy! This virtual academy gives you simple, follow along programs for plantar fasciitis, low back pain, shoulder pain, neck pain, sciatica, and more that guarantees you'll feel a significant difference in your pain in as little 30 days.