Your eyes and head are the epi-center for balance and propioception between you and your enviornement. When your “posture” changes because of structural or neurological tightness the head position changes and your perceived “center” is now altered. This limits ROM elsewhere because your body senses that It doesn’t need it. This usually occurs at the closes joint, i.e. the shoulders.
With this new forward head posture we often see symptoms that link the head/neck to the shoulders. Tight traps, elvevated first ribs, tonic scalenes and tight pecs. The rib cage is elevated due to the tightness of the above musculature. In order to position back things into a more optimal position we need to have exercise that integrate the opposite of everything above. This means
- Depression of the ribcage
- Retraction of the head and neck
- Diaphragmatic breathing via internal/external oblique activation
- shoulder depression
The exercise below allows one to interstate the above into a very effective exercise use that can be used daily to relieve chronically tight upper body musculature as well as begin to fix the dreaded forward head posture.