Tag: shoulders

Trigger Point Therapy

TrpIf you’ve got a headache, it could be coming from your shoulders. 

Muscles make up, on average, between 36-42% of your body weight. With that much mass, they have a significant impact on your health. When all is in working order, muscles allow you to perform normal activities with ease. When your muscles experience trigger points (also known as “muscle knots”), you can experience pain, stiffness, tension, a loss in your range of motion and sometimes severe limitations of your normal function.

Trigger points are an extremely common cause of pain. There are more than 600 potential trigger points possible in human muscles. Light pressure to active trigger points reproduces the pain and gives the therapist a clue as to where to look for the cause. Trigger points have a special property called referred pain. Referred pain means that a trigger point in one muscle can actually create pain in another area.

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Why is Your Neck Sore?

neckpainUnless you’ve been injured, your sore neck most likely comes from tightness in muscles created by postural issues related to the position of your head.  Your shoulders are rolled forward and your head is forward.

So why is your neck sore? Simply put, your neck muscles are in a constant battle to keep your head from rolling off the top of your spine. Some of the muscles in the battle are attached to the top of your shoulder blades, dragging your shoulders up.  Elevated shoulders cause your pectoral muscles to contract and try to help manage the weight shift. The muscles between your spine and shoulder blade (the rhomboids) usually just form knots to try to compensate.  In front, your droopy head causes you to have to raise your head to keep your eyes level, putting more stress on the disks in your spine.  In short, it’s a mess.

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The Mighty Trapezius Muscle

trapsguyblogYou might not know exactly where it is, but you most likely have experienced pain and strain in your Trapezius muscle.  The Trapezius has three areas: upper, middle and lower. The muscle stretches from the top of your neck, out to your shoulders and a little more than half way down the center of your back.

This huge muscle performs many different functions, including moving shoulder blades in toward the spine, rotating and moving shoulder blades up and down, bringing the head and neck backward, and rotating and side bending the neck.  It also assists in breathing, opening up the small amount of breathing room in the upper chest area.

For people who work at desks and computers, Continue reading “The Mighty Trapezius Muscle”