5 Postural Tips to Help Prevent Holiday Headaches

As you navigate your way through the holiday season, you will more than likely find yourself sitting in heavy traffic, enduring uncomfortable airplane travel, or carrying heavy bags and boxes that are large and awkward.

As a Functional manual physical therapist, I’d like to see you enjoy the holidays pain-free. To begin, I urge you to maintain the proper positioning of your back and neck as much as possible. The position of your head is also important to remember, especially as you sit at the computer clicking away on Amazon.

To help you achieve the correct positioning of your head, follow these simple cues:

• Tuck your chin as if you’re holding a large orange between your chin and breast bone.
• Try to elongate the crown of your head, as if you’re trying to make yourself taller
• Relax your chest bone downwards as you exhale, avoid sticking your chest up and out
• Attempt to keep your rib cage aligned vertically over your pelvis/hips.
• Relax your belly button and drop your tailbone towards the floor

These steps play an integral part in preventing an onslaught of injuries or ailments that, over time, can be very challenging to reverse.

The head is meant to sit vertically on top of your neck vertebrae, similarly to the way a golf ball sits on top of a golf tee. Unfortunately, our head often translates forwards, and sits in front of that golf tee, putting undue stress and strain on the back of your neck. The tissue in the back of your head tightens, creating tension and prevents efficient function and movement in the upper neck when you’re, for instance, “trying to look over your left shoulder to change lanes on the highway.”

Over a period of time, this “forward head” posturing can become a big problem that yields numerous symptoms radiating out from the neck, and can radiate down the arm. Symptoms like pins and needles, tingling, throbbing like pain, or even numbness or weakness can affect your arm, but it all initiates at the neck. Symptoms surface the most during stressful periods. It’s no coincidence that when you’re having a bad day, or a high anxiety meeting, you wake up with a stiff neck, or, go to bed with a splitting headache.

Fortunately, headaches and pain caused by poor posture and spinal dysfunction is commonly treated and resolved by a certified functional manual therapist.

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FMT is the key to faster healing. It is why many clients tell us they received the same benefit after one FMT session as five traditional physical therapy sessions they had tried before. FMT is not traditional physical therapy. Learn more...

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