What is Text Neck?
What is text neck? Text neck is poor posture from looking down at your phone all day or looking down at other electronics or books. Did you know that we spend on average about 4 hours a day looking down at our phone or computer?
Each time you do this, you are increasing the weight of the head. For every inch forward you are increasing the weight of your head by 10 pds. This puts more pressure on your cervical spine (see the above picture) and creates other things like:
-disk compression
-early on-set arthritis
-problems swallowing as you age
-decrease in lung capacity
-can even lead to heart and blood vascular disease.
It is important that we pay attention to our forward head posture and practice exercises and stretches to decrease the forwardness of the head. There is also an app that will indicate whenever you’re holding your phone in a position that decreases forward head posture.
If you notice that you are in this position often, I recommend working on stretches and exercises to help combat this. Put the phone down more throughout the day. Look into purchasing a NeckRite pillow to help place the head in a better position when you and your children are on electronics.
Want to learn more about posture and ways you can practice sitting, standing, and moving with better posture? Grab our Free guide.
If you are dealing with Upper Back and Neck Tension
We are a society that spends so much time sitting and not moving that we have started to change our posture.
- Our head juts forward
- Our shoulders round forward, moving into an internal rotation
- Our upper back begins to round
All of these things and more creates a lot of tension in the upper back and neck. To help counteract some of that, we need to start practicing some myofascial release and stretching techniques.
Here I provide you with 3 exercises you can do to help to start to relieve some of that tension and ease sore tight muscles.
Other blog posts you may enjoy:
Relieve upper back pain at the Shoulder Blade
What is the best sitting posture?
