Please read the previous posting on Forward Head Posture.
The second major cause of back pain is due to rolled shoulders and tight chest muscles.
A quick test:
Stand with your back to the wall in the bathroom, sideways to a mirror. Relax. Don’t try to force good posture. Just stand normally. Slowly turn your eyes/head and look at your reflection. You should see two things if your body is “correct”:
1. The back of your head should touch the wall.
2. The back of your shoulders should touch the wall.
Next, stand in front of the mirror with your hands beside your sides. Look at your hands – are your palms parallel to your sides ? You should not see any of the front of your hands.
Very few people are able to do this without forcing it.
The main culprits are the chest muscles. There are two main ones:
The pectoralis major [ pec major ] and the pectoralis minor [ pec minor ].
http://serialtrainer.files.wordpress.co ... _major.jpg
Take a look at the following picture. If you look to the left of the picture you can see that the pec major attaches to the top of the arm.
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~uzwiak/Anat ... age011.jpg
Four problems occur when the pec major gets too tight:
1. The arms are pulled forward. That means you lose a large range of motion. One of the main reasons why some leaner individuals are capable of throwing a grenade farther than some with large chests. Not always, but sometimes. A l muscle called the subscapularis under the armpit can also restrict your throwing range.
http://www.abcbodybuilding.com/anatomy/ ... age007.gif
2. As your chest contracts, it pulls the top part of your body forward. Again, like the Forward Head Posture problem, this moves your center of gravity forward. In order to prevent you from starting to topple forward, your lower back muscles tighten up, with all the attendant problems mentioned in the previous post.
3. Because the head is attached to the to the thoracic region [ upper back ] of your spine, your head is forced forward and makes you even more unbalanced.
4. As the top part of your body moves forward, the upper back [ thoracic region ] bends forward, and you get a hump in your back. Take a look down any high street and you will see old men and women all bent over with humps in their back. 99% of the time that is caused by tight pectoral muscles. Provided the bones have not fused, that can be reversed fairly easily. I see it every week at the clinic I go to.
So what causes the pecs to get too tight. ? In the Parachute Regiment, two main causes:
1. Push –ups
2. Tabbing with Bergens.
Push-ups are great for developing the chest, but for each normal push-up, it should be accompanied by a reverse push-up.
I was raised in a little village in Scotland where the Royal Marines have a training facility. As there was next to nothing else to do, I spent every day from the age of 9 walking up the hills with a pack. From the age of 16, I did push-ups every day.. From looking at old photos, I can see how my posture changed [ for the worse ] as time went on.
There are some good stretches which will help with tight pecs, and I’ll cover them in a later posting.
The video here shows forward head posture many times.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlabaTIP ... re=related
Over time, the muscles remain contracted and can cause permanent changes. There is also a muscle under the neck called the digastric which can tighten up from the head being forward when on battle marches etc [ this muscle is the one that can “seize” up when you yawn sometimes, especially if you are very tired ].
http://www.waynesburg.edu/depts/ccink/m ... terior.jpg
In a nutshell, anything that pulls your body forward away from it’s correct position will cause the back muscles to tighten up.
Those back muscles are called “erector spinae” in Latin and mean “To keep the spine erect”. Whenever the brain senses that the body has shifted forward, those muscles will tighten up automatically. This is programmed into us and we cannot change that process.
In both civilian and military life, one of the biggest causes of forward head and shoulders is the simple laptop. Have a look at one of your mates the next time he is using one. Due to the fact that the screen is so low, you are forced to put your head down and forward, along with rolling the shoulders forward.
The next one shows classic bad posture:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl= ... 9%26sa%3DN
If a muscle is kept contracted for long periods of time, it will tend to stay that way even when what has caused it has been removed.
The following link shows the layout of your chest muscles on a cadaver:
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl= ... 9%26sa%3DN
Dave
Share This Page:
What Really Causes Back Pain - Part 2 Tight Chest
If you go to this link:
http://meilus.com/PublicityTV.asp
and open up the file called "Fox 13 Tampa with Russell Rhodes" take a look at the first few minutes of the tape.
That gap between the wall and the back of his head is not good. For someone of his size, his head probably weighs about nine pounds. That forward weight is putting a lot os stress not only on his lower back, but also on his neck muscles. 90% of all neck pain is caused by this. Also if you have tingling in the fingers, that is a main culprit [ caused by an area called the thoracic outlet which I'll cover later ]. 95% of all neck surgeries are not necessary in cases where people have not suffered bone damage [ breakages etc ].
I'll discuss how to get your head and shoulders back permanently without using the robot [ by some simple stretches ] in a posting on treatment that I'll put up soon.
Dave
http://meilus.com/PublicityTV.asp
and open up the file called "Fox 13 Tampa with Russell Rhodes" take a look at the first few minutes of the tape.
That gap between the wall and the back of his head is not good. For someone of his size, his head probably weighs about nine pounds. That forward weight is putting a lot os stress not only on his lower back, but also on his neck muscles. 90% of all neck pain is caused by this. Also if you have tingling in the fingers, that is a main culprit [ caused by an area called the thoracic outlet which I'll cover later ]. 95% of all neck surgeries are not necessary in cases where people have not suffered bone damage [ breakages etc ].
I'll discuss how to get your head and shoulders back permanently without using the robot [ by some simple stretches ] in a posting on treatment that I'll put up soon.
Dave
Tks
I'll be doing three more postings on what causes Back Pain:
Abdominal/Diaphragm Tightness
Hip Flexor Tightness
Quadriceps Tightness
After that I'll discuss how to prevent/get rid of back pain. The techniques I'll be talking about can get rid of or drastically reduce any back pain that is not a result of fused bones. Even if people have had back surgery, they can benefit.
I spent years doing the wrong things: never warming-up, never stretching , never drinking enough water, drinking gallons of coke, never balancing my muscles [ quads/hamstrings etc ]. Until I ruptured a disk in my lower back, I'd been active every day since I was a child [ running, tabbing, swimming, weights, cycling ]. I'm 51 now. I spent most of my childhood hill walking with little packs containing fishing gear for the lochs around where I used to live.[ Kinlochleven ]. Then it was onto bergens as I got older. Always bent forward going up hills. I'll be posting my x-rays later to show the damage that was done to my spine. If I'd known then what I know now, I could have still done those things, but have ended up with much less damage.
Dave
I'll be doing three more postings on what causes Back Pain:
Abdominal/Diaphragm Tightness
Hip Flexor Tightness
Quadriceps Tightness
After that I'll discuss how to prevent/get rid of back pain. The techniques I'll be talking about can get rid of or drastically reduce any back pain that is not a result of fused bones. Even if people have had back surgery, they can benefit.
I spent years doing the wrong things: never warming-up, never stretching , never drinking enough water, drinking gallons of coke, never balancing my muscles [ quads/hamstrings etc ]. Until I ruptured a disk in my lower back, I'd been active every day since I was a child [ running, tabbing, swimming, weights, cycling ]. I'm 51 now. I spent most of my childhood hill walking with little packs containing fishing gear for the lochs around where I used to live.[ Kinlochleven ]. Then it was onto bergens as I got older. Always bent forward going up hills. I'll be posting my x-rays later to show the damage that was done to my spine. If I'd known then what I know now, I could have still done those things, but have ended up with much less damage.
Dave
