What Happens With Forward Head Posture?
Hey, guys, I’m Dr. Arron Wall with Gateway Chiropractic, here in Fort Worth, Texas. So how do you fix forward head syndrome?
Well, forward head syndrome is a disease diagnosis, and you’re seeing it on more and more people these days. Maybe it’s on you, maybe it’s your spouse, maybe it’s your children. But what you’re seeing with people nowadays is this head going in front of the body. And when the head does that, it pulls these shoulders in over time.
And the longer that you’re at a desk or you’re on a tablet or you read or just your head is in that downward position, the more that the natural curve in the neck straightens. This is why it’s so bad when you have forward head posture, because when that happens, it’s straightening the curve that should be in your neck.
And when you straighten this neck curve, it starts to stretch the spinal cord. It can start to stretch the nerves that come out. And these are nerves that go to a lot of things, not just your muscles, but these are nerves that go all the way down your arms and hands to your fingertips. These are nerves that go to your throat or your thyroid gland or your arteries or blood vessels up to the brain, your glands and lymphatics.
And why that’s big is because, when people have this forward head syndrome due to a lot of bad habits for a long period of time and it’s stuck like this, they start to see a lot of problems happen that they might not think are related to their posture, such as numbness and tingling down the arms and hands, carpal tunnel stuff, bad range of motion in the neck, a lot of chronic neck pain.
They can get tension headaches and migraine headaches from that. They can have issues with GERD or issues with reflux from the throat, those nerves getting compressed. So the list really goes on and on about problems that happen.
Starting With X-rays and a Detailed Exam
So what I wanna show you is: How do we start correcting that?
Well, we have Markia here, who’s helping demonstrate this. If you have forward head posture, this is the example. There’s a lot of different posture adjustments we do with patients, but we’re really gonna focus on the head being in front of the shoulders, that position.
How do we work on that? Well, we’re gonna do a couple things.
Now, with Markia, with all of our patients, whenever we adjust, we’ve already taken X-rays. We’ve already done a detailed exam. We know exactly where she needs to be adjusted. So when I’m adjusting her, I know where to adjust her. It’s not a guess. That’s very important.
But also, X-rays tell us exactly what rehab we need to do with the patient. And that’s what I’m gonna show you here in a minute, is her doing rehab after the fact.
Working on the Shoulders and Upper Back
So there’s a couple things we go into doing this. The first one is we wanna get these shoulders back, start moving them back, because when this starts rolling in on people, all the musculature here gets super tight, and we gotta start working that back. Otherwise, the person’s gonna just stay hunched over. We don’t want that.
So we work on the shoulders. So we’re gonna do a shoulder drop here, real easy.
Now, this actually feels really good. It just looks like we’re kind of slamming them down a little bit, but it feels really good. We’re pushing these shoulders back.
And then, also, right in through this area gets so locked and hard. A lot of people you see with this have this hump, this inflammation forming. So we wanna change that too and start opening up the ribs, opening up the thoracic spine.
So we’re gonna do an adjustment here with her that way, right in between the shoulder blades. Deep breath in and out. Good. There we go, very nice.
And that just opens it up. So many people have breathing issues and asthma because their posture’s so bad. We open that up. It’s like they can take a deep breath again. It’s really neat.
Adjusting the Neck and Working on the Neck Curve
So now, we’re gonna work on the neck curve. We’re gonna work on adjusting the neck.
Just relax a little bit. There you go. One more. There we go. Very nice. And I’m just gonna relax that a little bit. There we go. Perfect.
And so, after adjusting that neck, we’re gonna work on the curve of the neck. So we’re gonna sit up here and face the fan here. We’re gonna do a couple things with our arthro gun. The first one is we’re gonna work on the neck curve.
And you can kind of see how we’re kind of arcing her neck into a curve.
And this arthro gun, it feels really good when it’s working on the curve, but it helps the flexibility, the range of motion, just kind of helps get this curve to form a lot faster.
And then, we’re gonna switch attachments. We’ll work on her shoulders some more. We’re gonna pull these shoulders back. Do it here too.
Awesome job. You can go put on your rehab there in the other room. We’ll be in there in just one second.
But why we do that is to help with forward head. We have to adjust the curve of the neck. We gotta adjust the neck, obviously, but if we don’t do anything to the shoulders, it just stays in this locked position. So we don’t want that.
So that’s why you’re seeing me work on the shoulders a lot, freeing up the upper back. That’s how we have to start working somebody back, close to normal.
Using Rehab to Help Hold the Correction
And so, what I’m gonna show you now is we’re gonna go into our rehab room. After somebody with forward head posture gets adjusted, we’re gonna start really working on the muscles because these muscles here, everything gets tight. This gets very weak and swollen.
So we have to really build up the extensor muscles of the body to start training yourself to hold this correction, which is very effective. But let me show you here what I’m talking about.
So Markia has put on her weights now, and you’re gonna kind of see how she has this set up. So we are working on these neck muscles and working on pulling the shoulders back.
So we have a chest weight that kind of forces her to pull against it to retrain the back muscles. And then, her halo head weight harness, that weight is gonna pull her forward. She’s not gonna like that. She’s gonna start to go against that feeling, and that’s gonna help with that isometric hold of the neck muscles.
So she’s gonna do this for a few minutes, and then she’s all set. So it kind of sets the adjustment after we do it, but it’s very effective at starting to really bring somebody back from that forward head syndrome.
Making Changes With Forward Head Posture
So hopefully that makes a little bit of sense, gives you a little insight on how we do things here in the office. It’s probably very different than what you thought about, but the good news is you can make changes with forward head posture. We do it all the time, been doing it for over 20 years. And we’d love to help you get to a way better state of health and a lot better posture.
So check out our other posture videos that we have. It kind of really helps you in different ways and shows some different therapies for doing that. But we’d love to help you. Check us out. There’s a “click my schedule here” link next to this video. And yeah, we’ll see you in the next one.
