With a significant increase in our time spent at home, our screen time, for some people, can almost be unbroken. So what does this mean for our necks? Well, as you see in the image below, our neck position whilst using our phones or computers differs significantly from our normal standing posture. Our skulls are actually quite heavy and our neck flexor and extensor muscles aren’t that large (smaller muscles fatigue faster). When smaller muscles fatigue, they often recruit larger muscles, which can take more load, typically in these flexed neck postures, this will be your upper back muscles like traps and rhomboids. However, with this rounded neck and upper back posture, we usually aren’t able to properly set our scapula and other joints in their intended position, resulting in poor musculoskeletal biomechanics, increasing the load on these joints even more, hence mid back or thoracic stiffness.

Now keeping this in mind, if you look at your screen time reports for your phones and computers it can be up to 12 hours! Which means 12 hours of offloading forces through this fatiguing cycle, increasing your risk of neck and thoracic stiffness and injuries? This issue is only compounded by the fact that we aren’t taking as many much needed breaks during the day or having the same mileage to take them -lunch break to a cafe, bathroom breaks on the other side of the floor etc, it all adds up!

So where do we come in? Our physiotherapists have years of clinical experience and knowledge around neck, thoracic and spinal issues and are here to help. They will perform a thorough assessment to find the specific structures within your neck and spine that your body has been overloading forces to, reduce some of the tension that’s been building over these recent months, educate you on your individual factors that have been causing your injury, and provide you with an personalised exercise program that fits in with your daily life to reduce the reoccurrence of this injury.

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By Claire Crawford - Bsc Sport and Exercise Science, current Master of Physiotherapy student

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‼️ The biomechanics of posture-related neck pain‼️

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