Balance your neck and avoid 1-sided neck pain

Speaker 1: (00:00)
Hi, I’m Danielle Vernon, your back PT ergonomist. I’m here to talk to you today about overcoming one sided, neck pain. So one sided neck pain or unilateral neck pain is most commonly seen with the dominant side. So given that most of us are right handed in most of my patients complain about right-handed right-sided neck pain. So most of the pain comes from any kind of reaching movements using the phone or any increased stress with using dual monitors. So we’ll touch on that today as well. So hopefully I can give you a few tips that will help you to change some things up and make things more comfortable for you. To start off, one of the big things we see is reaching causes a lot of repetitive strain. So if you’ve put your, your hand here on your neck, when you reach for your mouse or you reach for your phone, you can really feel a tension coming in on that right side.

Speaker 1: (00:55)
So one of the things that’s important to know is your neutral zone. I see too many people that are working at the computer like this, and then having to reach out to the right for their mouse. It’s really important to bring everything to the front side, not only to reduce neck strain that comes with that reaching, but also to reduce any strain on the forearms when you’re leaning against your desk, bringing everything back to you, making sure you have your chair set up that will make sure that your head is balanced over your neck, which creates less stress around the shoulder blades and the upper neck area. So part of the trick is making sure that you have your neutral zone, reachable things for you that you need to reach more often, such as your phone, your stapler, tape, things like that. So one of the easiest tricks is force yourself to put things over on the left side, making sure that during the day, you’re not just constantly reaching to the right.

Speaker 1: (01:54)
But you’re also reaching out to the left and balancing that effort that comes out on both sides. The second thing is, all of us are using cell phones. now a days. We pick up our cell phone, we start to do this, and then we start to work easy, switch ears, make sure it’s on your left hand. That way you can have your right hand free to use the mouse. And again, I’m assuming that people are right hand dominant, switch it up with your left hand dominant, but making sure that you have your right hand free and that way you’re not holding your phone between your shoulder and your neck. One of the easiest things is obviously to get some earbuds, your phone’s earplugs, something where you can have it in your ears, and that way you have both hands free when it comes to your monitors, having a single or dual monitor systems, also something that can really cause a lot of neck pain, making sure that your monitors are reasonably distanced from you, just depending on how big the monitors are.

Speaker 1: (02:55)
Making sure that if you have a single monitor that you’re sitting up nice and tall, and your line of sight is in that top one-third of your monitor and making sure that if you have two monitors that you have your workspace level between the two monitors, that middle of the monitors are equal distance with your body line. And you’re working in the middle of two monitors so that you can switch between monitors on the right and the left without worrying about having a lot of excessive rotation or up and down of movement of your neck, those things, bringing your shoulder blades back to your side, decreasing the rotation, making sure that you’re working in the neutral zone, where your head is balanced over your shoulders. All those will be good ideas to try and make your workspace more comfortable. If you’re more comfortable, you’re more productive. So there’s just a few tips to help you figure out how to make yourself more comfortable while you’re sitting. And obviously if your chair’s not a good fit, having an upright cushion between your back between your shoulder blades will help. So if you have any other questions or need more information, please check out our website at www.backbonecushion.com and have a great day.