How can we reduce neck pain and stiffness to help decrease your headache or migraine?

If you know that neck pain is adding, contributing, or causing your headaches and migraines, then today's video is for you. So today I'm going to show you an exercise to help reduce your neck pain and stiffness to hopefully help decrease your headaches and migraines.

Hi, I'm Dr Beth osteopath here at Melbourne Headache Solutions.

Neck pain and stiffness are two of the most common associated features with headaches and migraines. We know that there's one of the leading causes of headaches and migraines. Particularly, the top three joints in the neck, but you can't have healthy top three joints in the neck without having a healthy rest of the spine as well.

If it feels like concrete and it moves like concrete, then basically you can't have a healthy top part of the spine and you're going to get headaches and migraine. So, we need to make sure that your cervical spine and your neck is moving nice and healthily to help decrease those headaches and migraines.

So particularly for those people who sit at a desk all day, who liked to watch TV or play computer games a lot. So, basically where you're doing anything that's stagnant –you're not moving your head a lot. Then you have an increased risk of, um, cervical stiffness, or neck stiffness going on. So, you need to make sure that you're getting your head moving a lot.

We also want to make sure that we're not inducing biases into our neck –we're not doing anything to one side a lot. This includes stomach sleeping, where you put a lot of pressure down through your neck to one side, or if you had computer monitors, two computer monitors that they're not stacked so that you're looking to one side all the time. These sorts of things can help reduce the bias in your neck.

But if you have included biases into your neck, if your neck is very stiff and it's contributing to your headaches and migraines, I have an exercise for you today. I'm going to be using a yoga belt to help with my exercise.

You can use a yoga belt, you can use a towel, anything really to help get your neck moving, but you do want it to be relatively firm, okay. You can use a scarf, but it usually has a little bit too much to give so I'd recommend, as I said, my top recommendation is using something like a yoga belt. I don't recommend a leather belt, though. It tends to cut into your neck a bit too much.

So, we're going to take the yoga belt. We're going to put it around the neck. And then we are going to start at first, pick a high point in the neck –it doesn't need to be overly specific. Then we're going to pull it to the side at about a 45-degree angle pulling relatively firmly.

Then we're going to look over the belt and then come back to the center, look over the belt and then come back to the center. We’ll repeat this 10 times. Okay. As I said, we want to apply relatively firm pressure. Then we put the belt down, lower down in the neck and we repeat. Okay.

What we're doing is we are fixing the joints. We're fixing the joints in the neck, and we are articulating the joints in the neck over that joint to help increase the movement. Then we repeat it on the other side. So, you go up high in the neck and turn over and you do those 10 times. Then you do it down lower and you do those 10 times applying relatively firm pressure.

Okay. So, you can do this on both sides of your neck. If you feel that you are equally stiff, equally stuck on both sides. But if you do feel as though you are stiffer on one side of your neck than the other, or if you only get headaches, say on the left-hand side of your head, then you might want to try just doing it on one side of your neck.

So, say the left-hand side of your neck until you feel like you were more even. And then try doing it on both sides of your neck. So, see how you go with that exercise. I'd recommend doing this once a day if you feel lightly or moderately stuck. But if you feel very stiff and stuck, and you've got a high incidence of headaches and migraines, then I recommend doing this at least twice a day. Particularly if you're spending a lot of time sitting in front of the computer.

Don't forget you can also add in your neck rolls as well. Your neck circles to get more motion in through your neck. When you can’t get something like a belt or a towel or something like that to do this exercise, give it whirl, see how you go. Let me know how it is.

If you've got any questions or queries drop a comment below. Hopefully, this helps reduce your neck stiffness to help decrease your headaches and migraines.