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hey guys welcome back to the channel so today what we're going to talk about is why sleeping on your stomach is not the cause of your neck pain now it's an interesting topic of conversation because there's so much information out
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there that suggests that sleeping on your stomach is bad for your neck but what I'm hopefully going to show you today is it's not actually the case it can certainly feel that way absolutely there's a lot of people who wake up in
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the morning they've got a sore neck that they didn't have when they went to bed and the only thing that's changed is that being asleep and a lot of people sleep on their stomach so it makes perfect sense on a lot of levels that sleeping on your stomach is bad for your
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neck because you're next jammed up in a certain position for hours on end and they can create pain and dysfunction but what we see clinically and what I want to hopefully educate you guys on today is that there's a biggest step there's a
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more important piece to that puzzle something that we completely neglect something that we miss that if we can improve on that aspects of our lives that this aspects shouldn't be a problem
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because we know that sleeping on your stomach by definition isn't an abnormal shape all it is is just you being off to the side it's it's just an end range of neck rotation and we know
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physiologically that we should have somewhere close to 90 degrees of rotation to both sides and when we lie down we're on our sides obviously we're nice and neutral when we're on our stomach
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all we're doing basically is bending our neck towards the end ranges of our about capacity now in this position for me I'll try and keep my head in the same position all I'm basically doing here is
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exploring the outer ranges of my rotation and the key point here and this is the thing that you need to be aware of when you're trying to fix this is that there's more likely than not something stopping you exploring the
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outer ranges of your range of motion that you shouldn't have now we'll get to what that is in a second and it all hopefully all makes sense but what I wanted to point out here is that this idea that we wake up stiff and sore as I
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said it does make sense but it neglects the bigger picture because if you any any newborn baby any child the the younger versions of humans that act more
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instinctively they don't necessarily you know the conscious beings that we all are as adults we should have this tend to work more on instinct they tend to sleep in the stomach a lot and a lot of the time with us as well we will sleep
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on our stomach even if we don't want to we can rely on our size we can chalk ourselves up with pillows but then we wake up in the morning and our bodies found a way to find a position that it wants to be in so it can be quite stressful and quite frustrating if
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you've got some neck dysfunction and you keep ending up on your stomach and then we can get in the rabbit hole of different mattresses different pillows but those conversations like this one generally about the wrong thing
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so and that's probably a story for another video but but what I want to go through today is that we want to talk about why that neck is sore when you wake up in the morning and then what you can do to fix that to make sure that it
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stops happening and you stop having to worry about the position that you're sleeping in at night so so basically what that is is to put it simply what you do before you get to bed has far
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more impact than what you do while you're in bed but what a member that is that when we're awake we're generally awake for you know 14 15
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hours if most people gets you know 6 or 7 hours of sleep a night that still leaves you know 18 17 9 10 hours of waking time to accrue some dysfunction and what we see with a lot of people
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particularly when we are talking about neck dysfunction is the overwhelming majority of our time is spent looking down and as we should have talked about in previous videos we really care about
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the hinges that you place in your spine so if you're on a laptop or looking down on your phone there's generally a hinge that we put into our neck and keep it there for a period of time and that
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section and it can be right at the top if we're looking at you we've down or it can be lowered down if we're hinging down a lot more towards more of a 90-degree angle the longer in those shapes and the average American at
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least can sit you know 10 to 14 hours a day particularly in today's climate without raising an eyebrow it can be just a simple thing that we do and if that's sitting down looking down is a
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constant thing then what happens is we take that overloaded tissue to bed and sleep is our recovery time so if you were to go outside run up and down some stairs for half an hour if you were to
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wake up the next morning and your calves and quads were stiff and tight you would it would make sense because what you did the day before was obvious and unique and it stands out you probably don't run up the stairs every day but waking up
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the next day with stiff legs it's a perfectly reasonable bout of exercise soreness or muscular soreness where your butt is recovering from something that was beyond its comfortable level of tolerance so you become saw in a good
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way some good soreness the next day and it's the same concept that happens when we wake up with neck pain after sleeping it's not that sleeping is the problem it's that your body uses that sleep
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period to recover from what you did that day or the day before so if you constantly put your neck into bad positions over time those tissues are going to become stiffer and tighter more
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overloaded more sensitized over night because that's the time that your body takes to repair it does a systems check it sees what's struggling what's working well and it devotes its resources to
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what what it feels needs work so so when you wake up stiff in the morning or sore in the morning it's not so much that the position that you are in cause that it didn't take it from zero to a hundred overnight but the build up of your
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postures and shapes that day build up to a point where you feel the consequence of that consequences of that when you wake the next morning so what's important to understand from this is we need to make sure we're going after the
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basic boring everyday neck you're injuring the day so that your body can just express herself normally at night and the reason why we I think we've gravitated towards making stomach
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sleeping evil is because if your neck has become stiff and tight from being a bad position often throughout the day or days or weeks if you then try and jam up an already
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stiff bunch of neck joints if you if you lively on and put those stiff joints and all that not a bad position so I put them into an end range position and consistently jamming them up it's understandable that they're not going to
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appreciate that so it's kind of like if you consistently stand there and bang your toe against a wall the next time you start be tired it's going to feel sore not because the one time you did it but because of all the preceding times that
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you did that and it gets to a point where it just doesn't tolerate that so so what we want to work on then is the first step to making sure that you wake up every morning with a neck that feels good we don't need to devote as much
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time to the pillow and the mattress debate or the stomach sleeping debate sorry but the the thing we need to work on or the first thing we need to work on is are you actually in a good position so what I challenge you to do if you are
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watching this video is the next time you're sitting down just relax see where your boy takes you do what you normally do whether it's using your phone reading your book using a laptop doing arts and
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crafts whatever it might be playing an instrument taking moments when you're in those positions to get a sense of where you are in space and if you're up nice and tall and you default back to that
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position you should feel like there's a discrepancy between where you could be and where you actually are and the first step to improving your neck in the morning is to improve those positions during the day if you can't improve your
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awareness and your and the value that you place on those good positions then waking ups difference or in the morning is hard to cure because we're not addressing the root cause but what we can do to try and I guess link all this
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together and the good thing about this exercise we're going to use a ball on a second to fret there is hopefully this will connect the dots where if you can free up your neck before you go to bed you should
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genuinely wake up feeling better regardless of the position you slept in that during the night time so so what we've done what we wanted to do with the ball is lacrosse ball tennis ball we've done this before it's a really powerful
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exercise we want to want to start doing the base of your neck where the bump is at the the middle the big bump that everyone seems to know about I'm gonna place the ball on that bump and when we want to roll the ball to to one side and
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then what we want to do is you want to lean up against a wall or all idea and we want to place the ball again in that spot off to the side as if we do this a lot but it's such a powerful exercise
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and what we want to do here is we want to turn your head towards the side that the balls on just to get a better purchase on the ball and we want to gently move the ball up and down and around until you feel like you hit some
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spots that feel stiff and tight it may or may not feel tender but obviously respect how it feels but the the symptom that we're looking for here is stiffness tightness restriction and resistance
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we're looking for that overloaded stiff restrictive tissue because we want to free it up so once you've found it just stay there spend some time here you let the ball press in once you've done that for thirty Seconds to a minute or however long you feel it takes you to
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feel satisfied that it's less stiff and tight than it wasn't you started then we just want to roll the ball up a tiny little bit higher move around to the next spot and they want to repeat the same process just stay here with the ball do its thing and we want to make
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sure that you then feel freer before you keep moving up so we know that the majority of the rotation in your neck or your head on your neck comes from the very top areas of your spine so we want
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to make sure that right off the top of your neck at the base of your skull and same idea find something that feels stiff and tight stay here stay here too so it starts to settle and what we want to find is we want to make sure that
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before you do that you check out your range of motion first and then you do the exercise check out your range of motion again it should immediately feel looser and freer and then what you can find is and I highly recommend you try
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is is that when you're in this position once more all of a sudden you've taken away the challenge and the threat in your neck and you've made it a more supple version of what it could be and what it should be so that when you're in
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a more end range position you're not jamming those joints up against stiffness and rustiness they're just come into their natural resting point and that's the distinction that we need for a lot of people so so if you feel
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like your postures are fantastic if you feel like your next nice and mobile sleepy and your stomach shouldn't cause you a problem all things considered now because we don't live in the world where it has to be all or nothing you're most welcome to avoid sleeping in
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your on your stomach if your neck feels sore in the morning but you've got to make sure that you're doing these other things so that as your neck improves if you want to come back to this position you should have that option because there's nothing bad about being in an
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end range position but it can be a challenging experience for your body if that in range position is also stiff tight and on the verge of being irritated and saw so so it's a really interesting topic it's something that we
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sort of talk about with what I talk about with my patients are lots that we sort of live in a world where the perspective that we have makes perfect sense on one level but when we take a slight step back and consider more
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things we realize that we instead of playing in this area we should actually be playing over here and that'll take care of that area on its own so so some group of thought there so otherwise we're putting these videos that every
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day or close to every day as best we can so if you have any questions if you have any requests through information please leave them in the comments below or find us on social media and let us know via
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and this information is information that we talk about the patients every day so it's real-world information it's actionable and it works you know you shouldn't have to trust this you should see that it works when you do it yourself so so thanks again for watching
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and then until next time we'll see it bye
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