That strain you may be feeling along the back of your neck, possibly extending to your shoulders, could very well be the result of too much time spent looking down at your smartphone.

“Text neck” is the informal name that physicians have given this chronic condition born of the digital age. Ronald Tolchin, D.O., medical director of Baptist Center for Spine Care, part of Baptist Health Neuroscience Center, demonstrates stretching exercises that anyone can do to alleviate the symptoms of neck pain.

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[Transcript]

[Baptist Health South Florida]

[Exercises that help alleviate text neck]
Dr. Ronald Tolchin:
I'm asked to give advice for people with text neck or individuals with neck pain. The first thing I do is try to change some of the bad habits and work on their posture. So an ideal position would be to bring this up to eye level, and then I often give them exercises to supplement that. So some of the exercises I would give them would be to take their hand and bring their head to the side and get a little stretch in the muscles in the side of the neck. So we'll do the one side and then we'll do the other side. And they'll feel a nice tightness right there, and they can also bring their arm down at the same time. And it gets a little more stretched to the upper shoulder girdle. And if they want to hold on to a piece of furniture while they do that, they can use their arm to hold onto their furniture and get a little more stretch to the shoulder.
[Doctor demonstrating how to heal text neck]
Dr. Ronald Tolchin:
And then we want to have them look up and then we want to have them do the same thing in rotation to the right and to the left. And the other thing we would have them do is to roll their shoulders backwards like this, and then reverse it forwards. So we want to work on not just the neck, but the shoulders and even the upper back. Again, their whole bodies are in a forward bend position. So we want to start to get them more extended like that. So we'd use the upper back like that. And the other thing we could have them do is just to side bend their upper back like this and like this. So we have them do that several times a day.
Dr. Ronald Tolchin:
Those contractions enough would be helpful to reduce the pain, start improving the strength and also get the stretch that we need. So those are some things. Now, if they had persistent pain beyond that, then I would usually recruit the assistance of a physical therapist.
[Baptist Health South Florida]

[End Trancsript]

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