"Text Neck" & Desk Posture

Are you dealing with tight, persistent muscle knots between your shoulder blades, or struggling with shooting pain and numbness down your arms? You aren't experiencing these issues because you lack posture straps or ergonomics—your daily workspace habits are physically altering the structure of your spine.

In this episode of Ask the Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus dives deep into the mechanical realities of "Text Neck" and modern desk posture. As a Palmer College of Chiropractic graduate and the team chiropractor for the Rockford IceHogs, Dr. Hulsebus explains how leaning forward to look at screens places immense stress on the cervical spine. Learn why trying to exercise or stretch a misaligned spine can actually lock bad posture patterns into your muscle memory, and find out how a combination of structural adjustments and neurological retraining can safely restore your health.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• The true biomechanics of text neck and how your shoulders dragging forward forces your head to protrude.
• The bowling ball principle: Why shifting your head forward places an unnatural weight load on your upper back.
• How chronic muscular inflammation leads to "sticky" tissue and painful, stubborn knots.
• Why wearing supportive posture straps acts like an arm cast, leaving your postural muscles significantly weaker.
• The 30-Minute Rule: How to use simple phone timers to successfully break up your sedentary work dynamic.
• What your chiropractor looks for on standing X-rays to assess subluxations and disc height health.

Have a question about spinal posture or workspace ergonomics? Leave a comment or message on our platforms, and you might be featured as our next question of the week!

👉 New Patients: Save time at your first visit by filling out your intake form online here: https://hulsebuschiropractic.com/patient-intake-form/

📍 Visit Hulsebus Rockford Chiropractic:

• Address: 1877 Daimler Road, Rockford, IL 61112
• Phone: 815-398-3434
• Website: rockforddc.com

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

0:00

Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here, and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford IceHogs. Let's dive into it. Well, last week you joined us and we talked a lot about headaches, and I said one way of getting headaches is text neck or desk posture. I wanna talk a little bit about what text neck is and desk posture as an issue, 'cause we've been helping desk workers find lasting posture correction in Rockford, Illinois, for a long time. Let's talk a little bit about what happens. You see, when I sit down, my shoulders roll forward and my head comes out, and my neck loses its posture. That's what we call text neck, 'cause today we have a world where people are looking down all the time on their phones, on their computers, driving their car, watching TV. Or let's say you don't even sit at a desk, let's say you stay at a workstation. Well, that workstation has the desk in front of you or the counter in front of you or the machine in front of you which you're looking down and looking. Now, when you're doing these things, what you're doing is you're rolling your sho- shoulders forward, and as your shoulders roll forward in the seated position or standing behind a desk in a sitting position, even a standing desk with a computer, you still got your shoulders forward to hit the keyboard and the mouse. As we roll those shoulders forward, we start to develop a weird posture, an abnormal posture that we're designed to be. You see, your shoulders are meant to be rolled back and your sh- your should- like you're squeezing your shoulder blades together, your chest out. But we have society today where everyone's shoulders are rolled forward. And as your shoulders roll forward, your head protrudes out. Now, your ears should be right above your shoulders, and you should have a nice round shape, C-curve shape to your neck looking at it from the side. Today, we find everybody has a very straight up-and-down neck from having them roll forward and your head sticking out. And what happens is this creates a lot of tension, a lot of stress. You see, the human head weighs the same as a bowling ball, and the longer you have that bowling ball protruded forward, the more stress it does on that whole area. And it starts to build up over time. You get more and more of that slouching, more and more of that humping. A lot of people tell me, "I don't wanna become a little old lady at church." I see with that big hump. They call that scoliosis. They call that osteoporosis. And really what it is, is, it's the text neck is, that's where it starts, 'cause your head comes forward and your shoulders come forward and you're leaning out. Now, when I do that, I don't really have a lot of pain. Like, I can sit like this, it doesn't really hurt for like the first short amount of time. The problem with this is we actually start to change our overall posture. So even when I'm standing up walking around, I'll still maintain that posture because I've learned it because I spend more time in that position than I do in the upright standing position, and then I walk around like that, and now I'm vulnerable. Now I'm easy to s- easy to injure. Because when I have good posture and I go to grab something or reach something or if I get hit or jerked, for the most part, the human body can deal with that. But if I'm already in a vulnerable position due to a learned behavior and then I do that, now I'm leaving myself open to injury. Not only that, it's just a lot of strain on those muscles in the back of your neck. They're always working overtime, always being irritated. And what happens is, as the more it's irritated, the more it's being pulled on, the more inflamed it gets. The more inflamed it gets, the stickier it gets, and the stickier the muscle gets, the more knot it makes. And that's when you start feeling those muscle knots in between your shoulders, and they start compressing the nerves coming out from the angle of your jaw down to your collarbone. There's a muscle there, and as the nerves come out of your neck down your arm, that muscle is now being taut in the wrong position. It's inflamed, it's irritated, it's sticky, and it starts hitting the nerves going down your arms into your shoulder to all the way down to your fingertips. And people come in, they tell me they got shoulder pain, hand numbness, or maybe carpal tunnel, and we see they have this text neck, this posture, and we go in there, we have to work with them to correct it So this is an ongoing thing that we see more and more of in today's world, is text neck. Now, it was bad before because people had desk jobs before there was tech. Typewriters, telephones. You know, we used to tease that when you used to come in, we could tell what side you'd hold your phone on by the way your neck looked on the front and back view. We don't really see that anymore. People have headsets or ear pods today. What we do see is a ton, a ton of that rolling forward even more, because at least that gave you a break. You had to, like, kick your head back to hold onto the phone. Now we don't do that anymore. So the text neck is just something we see over and over and over again. Actually, nowadays, when I see somebody without it, I'm actually impressed more. That's become the abnormal, where the text neck is becoming the normal, unfortunately. So what do we have to do about this? Well, the first thing is we have to try to change it, right? We have to try to change our posture. We have to look at our workstation wherever we are, or our fun station. Like at home in the garage, I have a workbench, and that's gonna be like my… It's not a workstation. It's kind of like where I do projects. But we have to start looking at these areas, and we have to try figuring out how can we reposition things to maximize the least amount of rolling the shoulders forward and head out the best we can. Is your monitor up high? A monitor down low is gonna make it worse. A monitor up high is gonna make it better. Now you're looking up more. That's gonna make it a lot better. Having the keyboard right in front of you so you can pull your shoulders back rather than out in front of you, where you have to reach more and get more rolling. Maybe reevaluate your mouse situation. Where is your mouse located? Are you twisting this and that? And maybe it's not even a mouse. Maybe it's just other tools or implements. Is a standing desk better than a sitting desk? Absolutely, because you're, you're more likely to push away and do some more stretches than you could if you were sitting. So is just changing all these alone gonna fix it? No. A chiropractic adjustment has to step in. So when you go to the chiropractor, they should X-ray you front to back and side to side, at least of your cervical spine, if not of your thoracic spine as well. Then we should see these posture issues and see how, how bad your posture is and how bad your misalignments are. The chiropractor will then go in there and make some chiropractic adjustments to loosen up the vertebraes, so that way you're more musculature open to these changes. Simply just trying to do the posture changes with the misalignments, you actually make the misalignments increase their muscle memory and become more of a chronic issue. So when you go in, you make the chiropractic adjustments and start freeing the spine up and helping the spine move more, then you reintroduce some posture exercises. That's incredible. Now, the last time I was with the Pro Hockey Chiropractic Society, somebody said, "Why don't we work on neck posture exercises, both muscular and neurologically?" So here in Rockford, we actually have ways that we teach you how to stretch while doing neurological work at the same time to try to really re-engrave this better neck posture. The biggest thing is people like want to get one adjustment and stretch for a day or two and see if they can make this go away, and that's not how it works. You're gonna have to do several adjustments over time, and the stretching and the neck work never stops because the sitting never stops. So as long as you're sitting, you have to keep doing these, and our society keeps us sitting all the time, so this becomes a constant chore. Now, what's the best neck exercise and stretch for you? Well, that's why you have a chiropractor. The chiropractor will take a look at your spine, see how you adjust, and give you the best advice. People ask me all the time in public,"Hey, what's the best stretch for my neck posture?" I show them what's wrong and why that's, why it's causing problems, but without doing a chiropractic exam or having X-rays, I don't know which the best exercise or stretch for them to work on. So I just figure at least I'm telling them what's wrong so they can maybe start making better choices from there I'm a doctor that's very realistic. I know this texting and this computers and stuff aren't going away, so we have to continue to try to adapt and change different ways of doing things in order to counterbalance the negative. If you're gonna eat bad foods, you're gonna have to m- eat better diet the rest of the week to make up the difference. If you're gonna g- uh, eat bad foods, you might have to exercise more to flush your system. If you're gonna eat bad foods, you might have to take more supplements to flush your system out. If you're gonna spend hours in front of a computer, you're gonna have to do more neurological and musculoskeletal stretching and chiropractic adjustments to balance the bad off. Again, there's not a universal answer for everybody, but just remember, every time your shoulders are forward and your head's sticking out, you're making yourself worse, not better. And if you have multiple subluxations where bones are misaligned in your spine, this is even a bigger problem. And if you take an X-ray of your spine and we see thin discs, now we have to work even more uphill. So there's very, very many different factors. I would ask my chiropractor, "How's my posture? How misaligned am I with the subluxations, and what does the overall health of my discs look like?" From there, I can get a better answer how long it's gonna take to get me better. Now, a lot of times people will come to me and they'll say, "Well, hey, I just on… I was up late last night on TV and I saw these straps. They, they force your shoulders back, having you have good posture. What do you think about this?" And I'm not a big fan of those because, you know, I often talk about if you break your arm, you put your arm in a cast. The cast can give you great posture while it's in the cast. But when you take the cast off, your arm's much weaker because it's been in a cast. So if I was to pull myself back using these straps, forcing myself to have good posture, when I take the straps off, am I stronger or weaker? Well, typically you're weaker, giving yourself worse posture, not better posture, which is only making the situation worse. So I'm a big fan of maybe not doing that. Now, I have seen certain people wear things that, like when you have bad posture, it gives you a beep and it tells you to correct yourself. You know, that's, that's kind of a neat thing. I, I don't think I could do that. I feel like, I feel like I'm a test subject because every time I sat around, beep-beep. You know, I, I don't think I'd wanna put up with that. But that, that's a real product. I kind of like that one. Another question I get is, "Well, if sitting in front of my computer or sitting in front of my phone all day is how often should I stand up? How often should I move?" And, you know, I always say for every 30 minutes of sitting, you owe me 15 to 20 seconds of stretching to try to balance out the negative. And, and now again, your chiropractor can teach you those stretches, but the problem we usually run into is people don't want to start doing those stretches until they hurt. I often describe it a lot of times as people don't want to brush their teeth until their teeth hurt. You brush your teeth so your teeth don't have to hurt. So the hardest stretch to remember is the first one, right? And you do the first half an hour. So I often recommend people take their smartphones and set a timer for every 30 minutes to remind you to stand up and stretch, because 30 minutes at work can go by really fast when you're involved in a project or engaged in something. So make yourself a timer and get up and stretch. So my, my big thing to you is if you're somebody that sits a lot, you've had headaches, y- people look at you, you notice your neck posture is not what it's supposed to be. Maybe you're having problems sleeping, maybe you're having those, like, knuckles on the inside trying to dig your way out between your shoulder blades, or you feel like your shoulders is tight or those muscles between your shoulders are tight, you're probably starting to develop really bad neck posture, and it would be great to go see a chiropractor. Get some X-rays taken, see what your posture looks like, have the chiropractor review things with you, tell you about your misalignments, your subluxations, and last but not least, talk a little bit about your disc heights. How long has it been there? What, what are we working against? The chiropractor should be able to give you a few chiropractic adjustments, and then start teaching you homework to do on your own, stretches and exercises. Now, the chiropractic care doesn't stop when they teach you the exercise and stretches, but the first step is we have to loosen you up with the adjustments, teach you some stretches, kind of keep an eye on you, maybe decrease the frequency of how often we see you, but have you do the stretches while you're getting adjusted still. And last but not least, then introduce some posture exercises to reinforce your posture, and then probably the frequency of visits will decrease again. That's how we do it here in Rockford. Hey, if you have any questions for me, go and leave a comment after the-- wherever you're watching or listening to this, and we'll, we'll-- maybe next week you'll be the question of the week. So we talked about headaches, and we talked about text necking. What's another thing that people wake up with stiff necks with is, is their sleeping position. So why don't we come back next week and talk a little bit more about sleeping and sleeping positions and kind of how that works. Hey, thanks for tuning in.