How To Fix Forward Head Posture - 3 Easy Exercises (From a Chiropractor)

My name is Dr. David Oliver, I am a

chiropractor

and today what we are going to talk to you about is

forward

head

posture

. Forward

head

posture

is basically any time you take your head and move it in front of your body, it is abnormal. posture that we see in people and it is probably the number one postural distortion that I see with my patients and there is a very good reason for this: it is what we all do in society today, sitting in front of computers, driving our cars, sending text messages on our phones, all that.

Activities involve focusing on something in front of you and every time your body focuses on something in front of it, the tendency is to move

forward

, so if we are looking at a computer screen, your body will want to move or get closer to that object. and then when we text, which is very common nowadays, we have this position again: your head is in front of your body, so that's the forward head posture. The reason this is so problematic is that mounting his head weighs most heads weigh on average 10 to 14 pounds now, if you could extrapolate that and bring it to a real world situation, think about a bowling ball , most bowling balls weigh between 10 and 14 pounds, so you take that bowling ball and place it on top of your body.

We have to keep that up there, so basically the muscles of the upper back and the neck, the ligaments, the joints of the spine have to maintain that position so that the head doesn't fall and hit the chest, so if we move that object to the front. of our body actually causes more stress. They've done studies on it and through gravitational forces, every inch of your body, your head moves forward, you gain 10 pounds. Move it 2 forward, 3 inches forward, you could have 30 to 34 pounds of pressure. that needs to be absorbed by those muscles and those ligaments, you know, if you palpate and feel someone in this area here and you do it to yourself right now, you're probably going to feel some kind of bad, bumpy stuff up there.

That's not the way it's supposed to be the reason you have that, it's because those muscles have been under heavy load for long periods of time for years, so you'll develop adhesions and feel trigger points in those. muscles that can be felt from the middle to the lower back, the other area that can be affected is the spine itself, so the spinal joints or bony parts of the spine can now become more degenerative over time. time. So you're putting more pressure on the spine over time, the spine naturally degenerates, but if you position your spine or put your head in a higher position, this will put more pressure on these joints, eventually that will start to cause wear and tear. and tears, such degenerative changes, uh, if you do that enough, there's also something between the vertebrae, the spinal disc, that can also become problematic, you know, you've heard about bulging discs, herniated discs, these They are very common and very problematic for people, so the anterior position of the head can really cause abnormal stress on those discs and eventually lead to wear and tear and this is something that we see very often in my office and it is something that I prefer not to. see, but there are

easy

ways to address it and fix it.

Alright, let's go over three

exercises

that we can use to try to correct this forward head posture and these postural distortions that we see in people. The first one we're going to do is called a chin curl, basically if you turn to the side we're going to take your head, it's normally in that forward head position, well, we're just going to reverse it, we're just going to bring it back. . Some people, this is actually a very difficult thing to do, but essentially all we're going to do. what we need to do is tuck the chin back, it's an abnormal PE movement for people and it feels strange and some people don't even have a great range of motion when they do it, so what we'll do is get people to start What to do is take two fingers placing it on your chin and they're going to gently push back, okay, you'll go as far as you're comfortable if this causes any abnormal pain in your neck or any abnormal pain anywhere else, this is not good. exercise for you and you shouldn't do it, but we are just trying to accentuate or try to get the chin to go back so that your body feels more comfortable being in that position initially, you may feel uncomfortable and a little uncomfortable or sore .

That's totally normal because your body is not used to having spent so much time with your head in this position. Returning to a normal position here is not going to do you very well, so there are generally two ways to do this exercise. we can do reps or we can do holds so you can just sit back and keep working if you're using your fingers pushing back nice slow reps. 10 to 15 is usually a good number as you get comfortable with it, you want to take your fingers. Now you want to learn to be able to do that movement yourself, so what you should essentially feel is a little bit of pressure on the front of your neck, it gets a little tight and then you may feel a little bit of stretching discomfort at the top. of the back. up this at the top of the neck here which is totally normal so 10 to 15 times in the reps or you can do holds so you can sit here and you can hold the position for up to 10 seconds and you can repeat that five times .

It is an

easy

exercise that I give to all my patients with any upper back or neck dysfunction who are qualified for it. The reason I like it is because you can do it anywhere. I tell most people to do it in the car when they arrive. a traffic light, when you come to a red light, sit there, turn off 10 of them and then keep going, you can do it several times a day, you can even do it in your office, some people don't feel comfortable doing that, but you know. It's better than having a sore neck, isn't it?

So the second exercise we're going to do is going to focus on the upper back and neck. When people have that forward head posture, it's not just the head that typically comes forward, it's actually the shoulders that come forward as well, so as the head moves forward, we tend to curve. , especially when we type and work on computers, texting or driving, nowadays everything is in front of us, so our shoulders actually start to move forward, so in our back, our shoulder blades which meet in our back they tend to round forward a little bit in most people, so what we want to do is work on an exercise to bring them back to a normal position. a more neutral position and then at the same time we work on keeping our head in a nice, neutral, stable position, which is why it's called the w exercise.

The reason it's called w is because you're going to start with your arms bent at your sides like this. They're W-shaped, so you're just going to take the shoulder blades on your back and bring them together and lower yourself so that my shoulder blades are on my back. I'm putting them together and going down the analogy. For most people it's like they're putting their shoulder blades in their back pocket. It's very important with this exercise that you don't overdo it, you're not sitting there trying to squeeze your shoulder blades as hard as possible, that's actually working. to raise your shoulders, which is the opposite of what we want to do, so I'm going to turn and show you what it looks like from behind, so if we're here with the w position, you're going to gently bring your shoulders together and lower them again, you are not squeezing them here, it is just a gentle squeeze, you should feel this Mo, this contraction continues in the middle part of the back at the same time, it is very important that you pay attention to your head.

Position most people as they do this movement with their head forward, just as we don't want to do it right, so you want to get that head in a nice, neutral position, like we showed you in exercise one, and then when At the same time, squeeze gently. between those shoulder blades with this exercise you're going to hold, you're going to hold for 5 seconds and then you're going to repeat five times, so again we're working on bringing those shoulder blades together and lowering them slightly and we can hold well, hold and relax for 5 seconds and you're going to do it. do again, you're going to bend and squeeze your shoulder, a very small movement that you see in your mid back and shoulder blades and relax, so the third exercise we're going to do.

C is a good combination exercise that takes parts of the first and second exercise and expands it further. It's called exercise Y wlt, so four letters will basically describe the positions we're going to be in. Basically, you're going to start with your arms raised in a Big Y position, so nice and high arms, you're going to make sure you don't shrug your shoulders, you're going to relax your shoulders, you're going to make sure your head is back up, you're not moving forward, you're going to keep your head in a good neutral position, so in this wide position you will expand your hands and pull your arms back as far as you feel comfortable.

Stretch nice and tight across your chest here and into your arms and even into your hands, so we're going to sit in that position for two big abdominal breaths, so you're going to want to take a nice, deep breath in through your nose and exhale. through the mouth, so it's going to sit there two breaths okay from that position, we're going to go from the Y, we're going to drop to a W, so we already did the W, so just combining this with this third exercise right here, like this that again with the elbows out to the sides, now we're really expanding, opening the chest up, you want to feel that strong stretch, you want to feel it through the middle of your back, two breaths again from there, let's go. to go down to the L this is usually the most aggressive stretch we feel with this we're really going to pinch our elbows at our sides we want to make sure we get those guys down and you almost want to imagine that you have someone behind you grabbing your thumbs and putting them together you want feel a strong squeeze between these shoulder blades.

By doing this, you ensure that you don't get up. You keep your shoulders nice and relaxed. head in a good neutral position, so again two breaths for that one and then we're going to shoot into the T position, so we straighten our arms, extend our fingers, open our chest and hold our shoulders. relaxed, we're not going to let them shrug and we're going to keep that head nice and neutral for another two counts, so two breaths, inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth and we're going to do that twice, so that's the Y way. you will live taller however you want to remember it is good for me, but those are good

exercises

to break the posture.

Do this several times a day, it will help open your chest, it will help you keep your head in a good neutral position and it will help combat some of that. Stressful forward head posture you're doing every day. Alright, we hope you enjoyed this video and if you want us to send you a PDF with some of the most effective exercises to correct forward head posture, we will send it to your email, all you need to do is do Click a link somewhere here in the video or there will be a link in the description below if you're watching it on YouTube and we'll send you that PDF right away.

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