Deep neck flexor exercises – Back and neck | Hacker News Reader

Deep neck flexor exercises – Back and neck

sprintphysio.co.uk

190 pointswhereistimbo116 comments

Someone below wrote, " Doing these gives me a 100% guaranteed 3 day long headache. "

I have something like this and I've spent many years trying to figure it out. One MRI (which showed nada), three or four doctors, several years of physical therapy, and a personal trainer who studied the problem later, and I am concluding the following:

- I have loosey goosey joints more than other people. It's not extreme but enough.

- I have usage of computers that far exceeds 90% of the population (12+ hours a day).

- When the joints are loose, things get inflamed. When tendons and the joint structures get inflamed, the bodies responds protectively by tightening (turning on) stabilizer muscles

- Stabilizer muscles can be weak and thus get overworked, causing spasms and other issues

- Tight muscles can cause imbalances, further causing a chain reaction of more inflammation and spasms

I've been doing weightlifting (not bodybuilding which you should not do if you value your body long-term! Strength Training and a bit of Olympic Weightlifting) for a number of years. I've been analyzing and thinking about posture for years. I'm typing this on a standing desk at home that has a monitor with an articulating arm (similar setup at work). I use left and right mice alternating. I sit and stand, alternating. I do neck stretches every morning and some isometric neck stuff. I suspect part of my problem is shoulder mobility so I also do daily scapular work.

Yet. I suffer from neck pain every few days with flare-ups that last days and sometimes go away for a week or two.

Medicine: You Suck! We can send robots to Mars and make self-driving cars, but due to the incoherence of modern medicine, I spend hours watching Yoga and PT videos and end up memorizing the names of bones and joints and physiological movements. And I suffer. Fuck you, Medicine!

Glad I got that off my chest.

Got hit by a car and I’ve concluded doctors are largely a decade or more out of date on a lot of things, especially diet and non-obvious injuries.

I feel like medicine teaches you the facts - the hip bone is connected to the, leg bone - but in terms of 'troubleshooting skills', there is something deeply missing.

It seems like it favours memorizing things and certain patterns.

Humans aren’t great when dealing with complex systems like human bodies.

AI assistants for doctors (who learn to troubleshoot) can’t come soon enough.

> It seems like it favours memorizing things and certain patterns.

I think this is broadly true. Probably not for all of medicine but generally speaking it is.

I recently started having a relapse of debilitating cluster headaches for a couple of weeks for the first time in about a half a decade (maybe longer). I tried avoiding all the typical triggers: Caffeine, chocolate, dust, smoke (difficult in winter when the neighbors love their fires), etc. Nothing worked.

Then I remembered: Ah hah! Sinus infections. I'd forgotten that the underlying trigger for me almost 90% of the time is a sinus infection I didn't notice that got out of hand. About halfway through a course of antibiotics the headaches have largely subsided.

Problem is that my sinus infections never seem to manifest typically, probably due to anatomical abnormalities. This typically means that a week or longer of back-and-forth "we don't see anything wrong" with the doctor worsens the problem until the pressure and pain builds up to a point that touching anywhere near the sinuses is very unpleasant. The best preventative measure I have, and probably the reason I avoided them for so long, is to do regular sinus irrigation. I lapsed about 6 months ago and stopped doing it--whoops.

Most practitioners are fine if you fit the majority of cases and the literature. If you deviate outside that, it's much more difficult to diagnose for the reasons you highlighted regarding complex systems. Humans just suck at it.

I don't have much advice other than to learn and know your own body. You probably know it better than any doctor. But you also need to become your own advocate if you think something isn't quite right and you need some help!

Well, with humans it's a lot harder and ethically challenging to take them apart, insert a few print statements, and put them back together again :)

Physical therapists, however, are pretty darn good at diagnosing muscular problems and excellent at providing problem-specific solutions.

Changing my diet (cutting bread and booze) helped my terrible back and neck more than several years of PT and doctors did.

It’s sort of built into the profession: medical practice is inherently little-c conservative. Doctors are trained throughly to practice the precautionary principle because it’s easier to cause more harm. Often with good reason imagine you’re a surgeon and a new procedure comes out that’s 92% effective and the one you learned in school and have hundreds of hours of practice in is 89% effective. That boost is worth it in theory but are you going to risk a few patients while you learn it along the way? That benefit needs to be much larger in the aggregate. This is also assuming it’s something reach FDA certification, etc. scientific research is often a decade ahead of the market any way in any field.

Then there’s also the reality that doctors at least in the US are incredibly over worked and keeping up with a wide variety of scientific literature is just not practical. This is coupled to an increased specialization in medicine may mean cross-over research from different specialities may not filter into your desk.

> It’s sort of built into the profession: medical practice is inherently little-c conservative. Doctors are trained throughly to practice the precautionary principle because it’s easier to cause more harm. Often with good reason imagine you’re a surgeon and a new procedure comes out that’s 92% effective

I wish they remembered that for COVID vaccines, because apparently it's the exception.

A failed surgery is different to an ineffective vaccination.

Surgeries also aren't commonly deployed against epidemics.

It’s a matter of failure to modernize curriculum during education, and the difficulty of staying on top of new research.

The lag in education needs to be fixed ASAP.

> “I have usage of computers that far exceeds 90% of the population (12+ hours a day).”

Pre-pandemic, I trained Brazilian jiu-jitsu 5-6x per week - where people are trying to crank on my neck constantly. Your neck gets incredibly thick and strong as a result.

Even with that, I can say that NOTHING sets off my neck pain like 10+ hours at my computer.

Would you say a stronger neck reduces problems from the PC all day long?

I think strengthening/mobilizing anything on a regular basis helps prevent issues - I definitely have fewer neck and lower back issues after getting active 5-6x / week.

But the 10+ hour days still kill. Need to break those up with mobility.

Same with climbing/deadlifting. Six months into pandemic with all the gyms closed i started getting sore neck and accompanied migraines like twice a week... grrreat

Holding still for long periods is almost the worst thing for muscles. Basically your putting strain on the same set of muscles without actually granting them the sort of natural movement that keeps blood and stuff circulating properly.

> I've been doing weightlifting (not bodybuilding which you should not do if you value your body long-term! Strength Training and a bit of Olympic Weightligting)

Much of what bodybuilders do is strength training, especially at the non-professional levels.

At amateur levels, effective strength training and effective body building are going to be pretty similar.

Yes and No. At least there are two big differentiators.

Olympic Weightlifting is generally understood to refer to the movements of clean+jerk, snatch, and associated movements like deadlifting and squatting which are components of the complex lifts.

Strength Training very broadly just means a rep range that makes you stronger, not bigger. But commonly one thinks of powerlifting movements: bench press, squats, deadlifts.

Notice in none of the above did we talk about bicep curls, pulley exercises, leg curls, or any concentration exercises. We didn't even talk about leg press, because in the above two we only use barbells.

So the two big differentiators are:

1. rep range is high with bodybuilding because bodybuilding cares about volume

2. This is the big one. The exercise range for bodybuilding includes many (perhaps mostly) single or few joint exercises.

So when you say that at the amateur level it doesn't matter, that's only true in that any amateur will get stronger. That's true. But the similarity ends right there.

I speak from experience when I say, starting off as an amateur by copying what bodybuilders are doing (bicep curls and other mirror exercises, high rep ranges and doing many single joint movements instead of functional movements) is a recipe for bad habits and movement patterns that you need to spend years to re-learn later. Not to mention machines are garbage and cause injury since they make you do unnatural things (unless you really know what you are doing, which amateurs do not).

> Strength Training very broadly just means a rep range that makes you stronger, not bigger.

There is no such thing (edit: well, except maybe 1-2 reps, because it's hard to get much volume with those. But beginners shouldn't be doing those anyway). You get stronger in the rep range you practice. People often (in gym circles) mean "1-rep strength" when they say "strength", but such a narrow definition only makes sense if you are competing in powerlifting.

As a beginner you want the rep range that maximizes gains/risk and also gains/unpleasantness ratio, which will usually be 5-10.

> rep range is high with bodybuilding because bodybuilding cares about volume

People who train for strength also care about volume because volume is a great way to get stronger. And also great way to get bigger. Which makes sense, because getting bigger is a great way to get stronger.

> starting off as an amateur by copying what bodybuilders are doing

I think this is where the most of the confusion comes from. It is bad to start amateurs on stuff that professional body builders do, but it would also be bad to start them on stuff professional powerlifters do (low bar one-rep max squats or speed deadlifts).

On the other hand, as an amateur, whether your goal is strength or better physique - the best approach is going to be very similar.

> Not to mention machines are garbage and cause injury since they make you do unnatural things (unless you really know what you are doing, which amateurs do not).

Some types of machines are absolutely fine (cable machines), other types are also mostly fine - they get a bad reputation from few of the worst offenders such as leg press and leg extension machine.

Just to add to this comment, strength increased with cross-sectional muscle area. Neural adaptation is not entirely separate, but yes the stimuli for increasing each can be generally separated into the low or high rep schemes. For those doing any sort of strength training, as long as you progress in weight for the first 3-4 years gaining muscle mass is unavoidable and not a bad thing at all. Hypertrophy is a well studied area of sport science and as long as you maintain a healthy diet, building muscle is not a negative thing in the least. It even helps with longevity by counteracting the muscle loss associated with aging.

Hold on. I know what you're trying to say, reps at 5-10 will give you strength benefits. But there's a nuance you're missing that's quite relevant to the discussion. There are different metabolic options for the muscle, since different muscle cell types behave differently and metabolize differently. There is power, strength and endurance, broadly speaking, with a lot of overlap of course depending on your movement speed, resistance and volume. Which is why that at above around the 5-10 range you mentioned, you begin to touch into the endurance/hypertrophy area.

Your comment about 1-2 reps not being good for beginners is questionable, though. It depends what you're training for. 1-2 reps is good or bad, but it all depends on what percentage of your max output you're attempting. a 1-2 rep range at something like an 85-90% of 1 RM isn't particularly offensive or dangerous, but it might not be optimal programming-wise if that is All you do. But it'll give you more strength increase faster than doing 8 reps.

Your "there is no such thing" comment is wrong, though. I have in front of me Practical Programming for Strength Training by Mark Rippetoe, and there is a whole chapter that discusses the three muscle fiber types, twelve characteristics, and their relation to rep ranges. There is a continuum of strength v. hypertrophy, and the rep-range of 5 and below being optimally useful for strength training. Sure, any rep range really where you're not doing cardio will lead to both strength and hypertrophy, Especially for an amateur, but there is a rapid fall-off at either end of the scale (low rep = more strength increase / higher rep = endurance + muscle hypertrophy).

In short: it's nuanced and I think your 5-10 number is again, a sort of "bodybuilding mentality" seeping into popular discourse, instead of a "good rule of thumb."

> 1-2 rep range at something like an 85-90% of 1 RM [...] will give you more strength increase faster than doing 8 reps.

It will give you more strength if you measure how much you can lift in a 1-rep set. It will give you less strength if you measure how much you can lift in an 8-rep set.

The key false dichotomy here is strength vs. hypertrophy. They are not in opposition, bigger muscle is a stronger muscle. To be as strong as you can, you need to do two things:

1) Get the biggest muscles you can.

2) Get practice in the rep range you are interested in being tested.

As good as Mark's books are, a lot has been researched and discovered since. For rep ranges in particular, this is a good article (backed by research): https://www.strongerbyscience.com/hypertrophy-range-fact-fic...

No, it's not a false dichotomy at all, or the first two pages of Google results on the topic are all wrong, powerlifting competitors are wrong (they should be doing 5x12 instead of 5x3, 5x1, 5x5 and many other rep schemes), Starting Strength as well as Practical Progamming for Strength Training are wrong and Rippetoe is a hack, my trainer (an olympic weightlifting competitor) is wrong, Alan Thrall's entire YouTube channel is false, and someone can make millions of dollars by showing that hypertrophy and strength are really one in the same and that there aren't three types of muscle fibers. This would have a huge impact in the fitness world if you were right. I don't think that's the case.

To be clear, neither I nor Greg Nuckols (author of the article I linked) claim that muscle fiber types aren't real.

In any case, if you or anyone else reading this are interested in learning more, here are some additional links:

- Size vs. Strength: How Important is Muscle Growth For Strength Gains? - https://www.strongerbyscience.com/size-vs-strength/

- Training Based On Muscle Fiber Type: Are You Missing Out? - https://www.strongerbyscience.com/muscle-fiber-type/

- Eddie Hall doing 10-rep sets when training for his 500 kg deadlift: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKPgu8JMY8k (which were explicitly called out as an important part of his training here: https://www.joe.co.uk/fitness-health/how-eddie-hall-trained-... )

If you're copying what the advanced (10+ years training) as a newcomer, that was your first mistake. Their training is specifically designed for someone who has the neural adaptation and muscle mass of a person with many years under their belt. You don't progress by doing the same thing for 10 years, that's antithetical to the ideas of adaptation concerning hypertrophy. Look up the lectures by Dr. Mike Israetel for good info.

Yeah, I know that copying what a 10 year bodybuilder is doing is no good and not the fault of bodybuilding as a sport. But I'm making an even bolder statement: that using concentration exercises like bicep curls, leg curls and (especially) 3-4 different angles of shoulder and chest work, espcially with machines and high reps, will very much increase your chances of injury.

I'm telling you that whenever I walk into a commercial gym or my building gym (i.e. not a powerlifting or oly gym) I see easily 90% of the people doing stuff I know is in bad form at worst, and at best will give them the most mild of training regimens. I blame the culture of bodybuilding (in the U.S. at least. I read that in Eastern Europe there is a very different attitude and training culture starting from school).

I argue that barbell training -- functional training more broadly, which includes calisthenics if you want -- is vastly safer and superior to bodybuilding and indeed yes, it does require a bit of personal training and instruction in the beginning.

IMO - just get the Starting Strength book by Mark Rippetoe and run with that for a year or two (or possibly forever depending on your goals). Quick gym sessions (45 min or less), strength focused exercises and IMO for those basic barbell movements it is the best.

If after you a bit of time you stall in strength and wish to go farther add in more bodybuilding type exercises or switch to another program like Wendlers 5/3/1...etc

But really if I had to recommend anything to most people to stay strong (esp as you age and live the lives we live today), the basic barbell exercises taught in Starting Strength are all you really need for a lifetime.

For years now I've been focusing on squat, standing press, and (when my elbows heal) pull-ups. My variation are pause squats (3 seconds down, 2 seconds hold, up fast), front squat, and now overhead squat. My variation for the standing ("strict press") is bench press, which I do 1X a week. I try to run 1X a week, sometimes 2X, but I'm inconsistent. I normally do 1X a week of deadlifts and ring rows but I have an elbow flare-up at the moment.

I do the three main ones (squat, press and pullup) 3X a week. No push day, no pull day, every workout is squat day. No machines -- evah! No curls. None of that. I do a small amount of accessory work for core, forearm muscles, and neck muscles, as well as PT work. I also spend a LOT of time warming up, probably 30 minutes. I'm in my lower 40's and recently tested with pretty solid testosterone of 670, and bloodwork is all good. I look way younger for my age. I also do intermittent fasting (really just skipping breakfast). I do drink, however.

There was a period when my gym closed during the pandemic and I had no alternative. I had to take a couple months off. Well, the muscles remained muscles (which does not happen so much with bodybuilders, who tend to get their muscles convert to fat pretty quickly), and after a few months I'm back to squatting pretty decently (I can do 1.6X my bodyweight for 5x5).

I absolutely recommend strength training for the older guy. Especially the PC nerd older guy.

I plan to continue weight training but cut out 1 day and instead learn proper calisthenics.

> Yet. I suffer from neck pain

Have you tried cervical traction?

> Medicine: You Suck! We can send robots to Mars [...]

Seriously! Though maybe to be fair, the design of the spine isn’t that great. I mean it’s amazing. And simultaneously can’t take the abuse we pile on it. Whoever invents the cure to deteriorating joints and deteriorating nerves is going to solve half the world’s pain and also become very rich.

> Someone below wrote

Just curious - why not reply? Saying ‘below’ can be awkward when comments move around.

> Have you tried cervical traction?

Do you have any recommended products or procedures?

> Just curious - why not reply? Saying ‘below’ can be awkward when comments move around.

Because I wanted to expand the context of the thread, I guess? Spending time with a long response to a short comment in a nested thread structure felt like it would get buried.

Good question, I guess I’d recommend seeing a physical therapist first, and trying traction under guidance for a few weeks before buying anything.

I'm doing cervical spine traction right now... it makes my head hurt but I've found ways to do it that are less uncomfortable.

My story is similar to others here, I'm a lifelong athlete with some injuries that are exacerbated by computer usage. I now stand all day, every day with a monitor at head height, which has been the most impactful lifestyle change. Otherwise I do stretching, some exercises like in this article, deep breathing, and massage.

Looking forward to getting back to lifting and sprinting full-time, meanwhile though my cervical spine needs to become more stable. I'm never going back to sitting at a computer, because I literally can't! I suppose that's good ultimately but I do find it hard to concentrate on certain things while standing.

> it makes my head hurt

Oh that sounds potentially bad... I don’t know about you, but did find that I tended to turn up the pressure too high so that it feels like it’s giving my neck a good stretch. I’ve found that I can leave it quite low and get the same benefits without any pain. One or two docs have warned me in the past that it’s possible to make things worse if I do too much. So, anyway, be careful!

I’m in the same camp too, a life of sports and outdoor activity. I’ve crashed mountain biking a few times and suspect my neck trouble stems from or was accelerated by that. But when I told my doc that story, he listened and responded with “so what do you do for work?” I told him software, and he was like, “yeah, so I’d lean toward a couple of decades shitting in a chair with bad posture being your main problem.” That’s when I got the treadmill desk.

I have exactly the same thing. Plus last year (2020 was truly shitty) I developed a frozen shoulder, which now prevents me from doing many exercises that used to help me. My other shoulder is starting to hurt too now, and I’m mentally preparing myself to having both shoulders frozen this year. I have been to many doctors, and had lots of tests (x-ray, MRI,ultrasound) but they cannot find anything. Doctors are mostly useless for things like this. They are only helpful when you have accidents with obvious broken or damaged bonuses and tissues etc.

What's frozen shoulder?

Have you tried stretching (gently) the levator scapula stretch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSoXPJRnR6E)? I've recently started doing this 1-2 a day. I hold my elbow more to the sky and out than she is doing (sometimes using a doorway to help keep my elbow up), and I hold it for 1m on each side.

The levator scapula attaches to the cervical spine at one end, and the top of the scapula on the other. Shoulder and neck problems can occur in a chain and in a sort of domino effect.

I had frozen shoulder last year and it really sucked. I was pretty despondent as it didn't seem to be getting better going to physio endlessly, but eventually it started getting better and is pretty good now. Seems like a condition that isn't very well understood. It can be pretty debilitating.

> I suspect part of my problem is shoulder mobility so I also do daily scapular work.

I've had some great results with:

- Kettlebell work. TGU/Halos/Arm bar are all great exercises for shoulder health/strengt/mobility.

- Dead hangs [1].

- Some light stick mobility exercises such as [2].

[1] https://www.t-nation.com/training/tip-two-surprising-exercis...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn1IBowxflw

I was doing deadhangs but I also suffer from elbow pain from a mix of pullups (which I've since not done for a while) and squats. I think deadhangs are great for "decompressing" the spine, though.

I was doing TGU for a while, I should get back into it. Part of it is pandemic-lack-of-space, and part of it is, overhead movements cen trigger the headaches.

How did the squats hurt your elbow? :(

Doing a zillion pullups hurt my elbows. I think a mix of shoulder mobility limits and that caused the pain I get when I squat. This has gone down though despite my squat weight going up. When I squat I try to make more effort to squeeze my shoulders back and down and watch the angle of my arms. Also, holding a kettlebell upside down for 1 minute on each side above my head with elbow straight has greatly reduced my elbow pain.

When I started my yoga asana practice I ended up uncovering some shoulder dyskinesis I hadn’t been aware of from years and years of programming. That turned into a pretty bad shoulder injury that has on the plus side taught me a lot about my body.

One thing I learned is that a lot of shoulder stuff comes from tightness of the pec minor, which now in retrospect is pretty obvious. Some things that I do that have really helped with shoulder stuff:

1) Shoulder dislocates with an aikido jo. Any rigid stick works, like a broom handle.

2) Camel pose (ustrasana), but coming into it a bit differently than is usually taught in yoga classes. Keep your knees hips width distance apart, with your toes tucked under (rather than pointed), and sit on your heels. Grab your heels with your fingers on the inside of your feet (if you were to open your hand your thumbs will be pointing directly backwards). Make sure you have good shoulder rotation here. Now lift your pelvis up while holding on to your feet, get your pelvis stacked over your knees, and think about lifting your chest to the sky. Send your breath into your upper chest for 5-7 breaths and then come out the way you came in. This really opened my pec minor.

3) Gomukhasana with arms clasped behind your back. Use a strap if you can’t get the bind (it might take a while for this rotation to open).

4) Pull-ups. Lots of pull ups. Started with dead hangs, then would do 50% of max 6x times per day 3-4 days a week. Would retest max every 3 weeks. Got myself to about 15 per set before I decided I didn’t need to do that many pull ups.

5) cat cow with wrists flipped, fingers pointed backwards. Really focusing on the shoulder rotation and getting straight arm scapular engagement.

6) Infraspinatus strengthening a few times per week with light weight. Exercises were described in this article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3655748/

7) Lots of side planks (vasisthasana). Be careful with this one, it can do a lot of harm if you go too hard with it before you’re ready.

8) Not for shoulder per-se, but what really strengthened my neck muscles over the years has been practicing headstand the way it’s taught in ashtanga vinyasa yoga. (Sirsasana -> urdhva dandasana -> sirsasana -> childs pose).

During quarantine I started supplementing my regular yoga asana practice with Dylan Werner’s True Strength series and I highly recommend it if people are wanting an incremental body weight training series. Lots of mobility work in there too.

I’d like to add one thing that is often overlooked and that is simply walking. It can help sort out a lot of problems by moving all joints in rhythmic manner.

Something really difficult to do nowadays with the COVID lockdowns...

I hope you can still walk outside alone with distancing!

Some countries have curfews where you have to be indoors before 6pm or 8pm, in some cases it's 1pm (Portugal last weekend).

"Shoulder dislocates with an aikido jo. Any rigid stick works, like a broom handle."

Can you elaborate ? I believe you are saying you intentionally dislocate your shoulder but I am skeptical that that is actually a thing ... I think maybe you mean you are adjusting, or popping, your shoulder ?

Genuinely curious ...

You don't actually dislocate your shoulder. It is just a drill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02HdChcpyBs

Yeah, as kasperni mentioned, it’s just a drill. Please don’t dislocate your shoulder on purpose! The method I use is the second variation in this video: https://youtu.be/vP8YmmRMz6I

You can vary the intensity of it by your hand positioning on the stick — start pretty wide at first and eventually reduce the width between your hands over time. Be careful with it and take your time, opening your shoulders takes a while (years).

I love this list.

Word about pull-ups. I was doing pullups 3X a week, and I tried not overtrain by a very very gradual increase over months in an Excel-sheet-level programming, since the pandemic and I got a pull-up bar at home. I was super careful. And yet it happened - it's called Golfer's Elbow and it's technically called medial epicondylitis, and it hella sucks. It lasts many months, it doesn't magically go away if you do nothing, because I think it's due to a muscle imbalance (impossible to confirm that via online research, just anecdotal), and it's very painful. In the mornings I get a stinging elbow pain just by lifting a piece of paper or scratching my head.

So careful with the pullups.

Your cat cow with wrists flipped sounds very intriguing, I'm going to explore that.

It's interesting that Yoga fixed you up. Glad that helped and thank you for sharing.

Absolutely, this is good advice to go easy on the pull ups. You really need to make sure you’re doing a good amount of stretching into the forearms, wrists, and all the way up into the fingers. The cat-cow variation with wrists flipped can help a lot with this — once this version feels good you can even advance into down dog with wrists flipped to keep opening further into the forearms. Gomukhasana arms help as well.

But for sure, the most important advice is to pay attention to your body and go easy on it when appropriate, injuries are no fun!

Another in addition to these excellent suggestions would be scapular pullups and scapular pushups.

> Medicine: You Suck! [its complex and doesn't work]

Having worked in drug development (and no longer do) I can tell you that everyone in the field knows it sucks and also that you should be (very favorably) astonished that it works at all.

Biological systems are so insanely complex that they are barely understood; most medical treatments are attempts to perturb a single variable (of a system with billions of variables) in the hope that it has a big enough positive effect.

Insanely complex mRNA vaccines are "trivial" by comparison.

When you make a spacecraft as you describe you may have a million moving parts. Their operating domain is well known, they typically only do one or two things, and they can operate in a system that can be isolated (this is the crew capsule; it operates in a vacuum and gets power from the power module...). By comparison a human body is many many billions of parts (brain itself is 80 giganeurons) including many that are not even human, all interacting in parallel (those 80 GN brain cells each has a dendritic fan out of around 10^5, plus new means of connection are still being found); all flooding with various signalling (electrical, hormonal, etc) which is the result of object code being extensively modified over 400 million years.

And that's just for a single organism (which is how we erroneously consider a human being). Humans are themselves parts of complex interacting extracorpal systems of food, actions, and other environmental factors which cannot be controlled because unlike a piece of metal or a silicon die in a ceramic package we interact with the majority of them.

There are a lot of very smart people in computer science but my qualitative impression is that while there a smaller proportion of smart people in the life sciences, the average IQ of those latter group is significantly higher.

Even though I still follow the literature, I have a "holy shit how did someone figure that out?" moment several times a week.

I’m sorry. It’s terrible that people have to suffer from this kind of thing and get so little help from the supposed state of the art.

Damn, I’m exactly on the same boat! I found that wearing a dental splint at night help a lot.

I'm sure that if we would 'relax' bioethics standards we could make faster progress.

I also have neck issues, esp. when slouching over the laptop. Usually there is a point on the back of my neck that starts protruding. Then my neck and shoulder muscles get inflamed and I get pain, headaches, teary eyes and drowsiness. Usually things get better with an ibuprofen to calm the inflammation. But sometimes my wife needs to push really hard and massage until the protrusion goes back in. I can even feel it sort of click back into place and you can feel it skip while rubbing. It started years ago but it's sort of moved down closer to shoulder, it's not protruding in the same spot as before. One other thing I would do is take a rolling pin against the door frame to massage the neck or pull on the back of my head upward with a towel. Now I also do these neck exercises* and they really do help if I do them regularly, I also use a laptop stand whenever I can so I don't have to look down and slouch.

*https://imgv2-2-f.scribdassets.com/img/document/236321754/or... (I couldn't find it in english, sorry)

PS A neurologist and an orthopaedist told me that my symptoms don't make sense and they couldn't find anything wrong with my spine.

Careful! I would get an MRI which can see if you have a disk bulge or a bone spur. A protruding point does not sound good, but it sounds like something that medicine might possible be useful for for once.

Probably a disk bulge in my opinion, but it hasn't happened in a while now. I think the doctor dismissed it and told me that the disk can only bulge on the opposite side (inward), but I may be misremembering.

You have pushed your body to do something it wasn't designed to do, and over time, you broke it. It's very hard to get back.

You could have chosen another profession, but perhaps you'd have trouble with your knees then.

I had perfect vision for years, but a few years ago, things started to get blurry. Now I have to stop working after some hours because I just can't see the screen anymore, which would have been unthinkable a few years back. It feels pretty absurd having to stop just because you can't physically see anymore what you're doing.

I also do strength training and distance running – also to fight bad effects from prolonged computer use – which I guess keeps me pretty fit and healthy, but again, some part of the body might not be so happy and break down due to exercise.

As an adult, one's surprisingly left mostly to one's own devices when it comes to long-term holistic health. Most things beyond medical or mental emergencies are a lot harder to figure out, with a lot of fads, quacks and charlatans along the way.

In the before times, I was doing olympic weightlifting as well, and I had very similar problems. I've always had weirdly loose shoulder joints (and can partially dislocate them), as well as weird things with the tendons in my knuckles. And when I started lifting, I would always have trouble with the jerk. Any time I did heavy jerks frequently, I would get escalating shoulder pain. As I trained more, I got better at maintaining shoulder stability. Power jerks still give me a lot of trouble, but split jerks are fine. Though with the pandemic, I haven't trained in months, and my shoulders are feeling all wonky again.

On a similar note, squatting was the absolute best thing for my knees. I had knee pain since I was about ten, and it didn't let up until I started squatting heavy. And whenever I would stop for a couple weeks, the pain would come back.

Likewise, I sourced old old knee and shoulder problems with squats and deadlifts. When I stop, the pain free days stop as well.

Pull ups help me a lot too. I think I do push ups wrong, they seem to cause trouble.

For neck/back pain I highly recommend strength training - specifically focused on posterior chain exercises like deadlifts, squats (if you do not have any serious preexisting injuries preventing you doing them). Even you are unable to do those a good solid barbell strenght training program can work wonders. Anecdontal for me, but I find whenever I stop training my back/neck pain comes back.

Also important to move a few times a day if you are doing the kind of sitting work most of us do. I make sure that I take a 20-30 min walk before I start working and then at least 1 more time mid-day. This also helps a lot IMO

After doing moderate strength training in these areas along with core exercises as part of a cross training class (2x a week) my back pain that I’ve had for over a decade dissapeared.

Same for me. I have this mindset now that whenever I get back pain I need to deadlift / squat it out albeit with a slightly lower weight than usual. It seems to go away every time after a few sets.

Same for me, deadlifts and squats (with good form) kept away my lower back pain. One caveat, when I first started there was a bit of a learning curve on how to get core bracing and posture right, and bad form made my back a bit sore.

Unfortunately in the current virus situation the gym is out and my place isn't suitable for weight training. I'm starting some bodyweight exercises but they don't seem to help my back like the weight training did.

The most efficient kind of exercise to relieve low back pain involve bending backwards, such as the Cobra pose in Yoga

https://www.dummies.com/health/exercise/yoga/how-to-do-the-c...

Cobra and the exercises from that book are easy to do at home but I like the bioenergetic arch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=225tAQzCVhs

because it is standing and you can do it anywhere, just please wear better clothes than the guy in that video.

Hmmm, I don't doubt that those exercises may be helpful for many people, but I have tried a lot of stretches for my back, including those, and have never felt much relief. For some reason lifting weights was much more effective for me.

Yes, the squat if not done correctly can be bad for you back. Strangely I've never had a problem doing deadlifts with a degree of lumbar flexion, but I keep pinching a nerve in my lower back while doing squats.

For squats the one thing people need to keep in mind is it requires decent hip and posterior chain flexibility before you get to anything more than moderate weights.

Especially office workers often struggle with that. Simple test: squat all the way down without a weight without lifting your heels and without falling backwards... If you can, your mobility is pretty ok. If you can't.. Well, you should fix that.

I did the mistake of squatting with poor mobility a while when I first started out, and hurt myself before figuring that out. Took just a few weeks of stretches to fix. Incidentally the same stretches (touching toes or floor, squatting and holding the position without a weight - if you can't do it at all start by holding on to something in front of you to keep you from falling) is great if sitting a lot too.

I don't think 'mobility' is a factor for squats. If you think you have bad mobility, try the low bar squat where the back is more horizontal at the bottom of the squat. I have a great deal of difficulty squatting with a vertical back, but I find squatting with a more horizontal back quite natural and easy.

Yes, it very much is an issue with squats for many people.

If your posterior chain is too tight, you will round your back to compensate for an inability to hold your legs in the right position while hinging your hip enough.

Low bar if anything requires you to be able to keep your back tight while hinging more at the hip.

A lot of people can't do that without a few weeks of stretches first, thanks to years at a desk.

I’d throw walking lunges in there, to; an excellent posterior chain movement that also gets your heart rate going at a healthy pace.

One thing that really helped me with back, and neck pain, and then later with all kinds of pain, is the trigger point therapy workbook. I forget which edition I have but there are one or two newer ones since then. I used to hurt myself and be useless for a week or two, since I got the book it's been a day or two. It's basically a guide for effective self massage.

Funny side note, I learned about it from a character in a fictional book called sex drugs and blueberries, which I randomly picked up from the local section of a book store while visiting Maine about 10 years ago.

I have this one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trigger-Point-Therapy-Workbook-Self...

ISBN 1608824942

Related, as a full-time keyboard jockey I have to make sure to take good care of my moneymakers. I’ve found this video of novel wrist and hand movements absolutely invaluable: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-hlWgH3_0NU

For neck pain take a look at your jaw. About 15% of people have a jaw that pops and many of them have pain from it.

When i followed my dentists advice to get a bite guard for bruxism, diffuse neck and back pain i had for years was greatly reduced, focalized in one muscle, and responsive to ibuprofen. 6 mo later it feels like the kind of injury that takes a year or so to heal. My dentist referred me to an orthodontist who referred me to another practitioner until i'd reached a university medical center a 2hr drive away and was told the doc would call me back in 7 days.

Review articles on pubmed said imaging and other procedures are not worth pursuing, maybe 100 papers were reviewed, 90% were rejected by Cochraine, the only supported treatment is biofeedback -- that is something you can sometimes do w/o equipment by feeling the muscle yourself or with your finger. Which I am doing this week and right now i feel great. There is some chip you can hook up to an arduino that i might try.

This condition is 100% physical, 100% mental, 100% spiritual. Stress causing teeth grinding, that damages the jaw, a very small lesion can cause big pain and distress, more tooth grinding, ... it is depressing and for some people disabling.

I neglected my sitting position for years, now I pay the price for it. Every time I turn my head it makes unpleasant cracking noises (luckily no pain), I went to the doctor who was not able help me further. Those exercise allow me to have some relief and to lessen the noise, but it's still there.

Anyone in the same situation here?

I was fine until Corona home office. Apparently I'm now too old to ignore these topics. Thanks to some inspiration from https://old.reddit.com/r/flexibility/ I'm ok again but not yet as good as a year ago.

I am. Had the cracking noises for years now, sometimes with pain, but mostly it's just a discomfort that won't go away.

I do neck rolls to help sometimes but too much will cause inflammation so I'm conservative with them. Turning my head side to side regularly also seems to help with the discomfort.

I'm guessing my neck will continue to sound like breaking bones for the rest of my life though.

One of my ex-GF had this as well, she's a pianist (that's why)and for her it got away. So I guess there is hope.

I had C1-C3 fusion[1], So the freedom of movement in my neck is severely limited. This aggravates neck/back pain when sitting before computer for > 30 mins. Obviously none of exercise mentioned in the article or most other neck exercises work for me.

So I've built myself 'Butt Pomodoro'[2] which gets triggered when I sit, reminds me to move after 25 mins, to come back after 5 mins and a larger break of 30 mins after 4 such sessions.

I got motivated to build this after a user in problem validation platform wanted a solution to remind them to take break from work without any user action and it ended up solving my problem too.

[1]https://abishekmuthian.com/i-was-told-i-would-become-quadrip...

[2]https://abishekmuthian.com/butt-pomodoro-a-butt-triggered-po...

Humans have only been sitting in chairs for the last two or three thousand years, and I think our bodies would thank us if we got rid of them completely. Our natural postures include sitting and lying on the ground, and standing, walking, running, and squatting. Our natural movements are moving between those natural positions.

Chairs are probably hurting our posture in the same way running shoes are hurting our feet and knees.

Might be unconventional, but I've noticed that _breath patterns_ and correct posture while stretching (i.e. being in a rounded neck posture while stretching probably adds to harm...)

For that, I've found this video guide to be one of the best and it feels significantly better than others. https://yogawithadriene.com/10-minute-yoga-quickie-neck-shou...

I invite any HNer to try it out and _really focus on the mindset and breathing patterns_ recommended by the guide. It's excellent, especially the part where you put the opposite hand on the ear and stretch.

I started a yoga practice just over a year ago after I recovered from a terrible, constant series of back spasms brought on by working on my laptop on my couch for too long.

I probably did yoga for one hour 2-3 times per week on average last year, which helped me avoid a repeat of my back issues. It’s helped me improve my flexibility, muscle tone, and my awareness of my body. What I mean by that last point is that I am more immediately aware when I experience back issues, now, and I also have a clearer sense of how to move and stretch my body to fix those issues before they become worse.

Yoga is great, and really doesn’t require any special equipment. You can try out a video and get pretty far without needing to buy mats, blocks, straps, Lululemon clothes, etc.

That is a great point about "awareness of the body". I found that a lot of neck pain stemmed from improper neck angles while viewing my dual monitor workstation. And I would be so numb to sensation that I would stay in the incorrect pose for hours, leading to pain when I got up from work.

After some months of yoga, I am much more clearly able to recognise within minutes as soon as my neck is in any improper angle and fix it rather than letting it pain me after hours

Yep, 100% agree. It's pretty cool.

While we certainly need to take care of our bodies, it would be helpful if we reinvented computers enough so we aren’t hunched over our computers all day.

I sit relaxed with a tablet in my lap and use an Apple Pencil when possible.

Of course, it’s not a great productivity device but at least it’s a slightly different position.

Voice, cameras or radar for gestures, etc could be used to augment computing devices.

4 hours a day with a keyboard and the rest standing or sitting back using a different method of interface would be better.

Soli everywhere?

https://atap.google.com/soli/

If I could write code and attend meetings while I walk around, I’d be out walking and hiking all day. I’m imagining some fantasy where I could wear lightweight AR sunglasses and use gestures and/or voice control and somehow be able to do everything I do with my desktop. I’m not sure it’s realistic even ten years from now, but I’m also not sure this kind of setup is out of reach either. I use standing & treadmill desks on and off. They’re good for taking care of my body, but take effort to use consistently, and have some tradeoffs.

Wolfram has his “walking desks”

https://boingboing.net/2019/03/04/stephen-wolfram-explains-h...

I like the one of him walking outside. The problem is he’s still using a keyboard.

My problem is that his neck has to crane very far down.

These exercises seem pretty tame for exercising the neck. There is a long history of ways to increase neck muscle strength. The Nautilus 4-way neck machines are the best engineered, though you won't find them in many gyms, probably because they can be very dangerous for untrained people. Under full load, a distraction that causes you to twist your head suddenly can seriously injure your neck.

For cheap and safe neck exercises, the best method today is a combination of timed static contractions (TSC)[1] and a cheap webbed strap[2]. As with all strength training, intensity of effort is 80-90% of the training effect, followed by proper form. The disadvantage of TSCs is that there is no simple way to record your progress week to week as you grow stronger. But if you load and unload your neck slowly, you can exercise each of the four directions to momentary muscular failure (MMF) in a safe and very time efficient protocol.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph8If3u67kw

[1] http://ren-ex.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/TimedStaticCont...

[2] https://www.strapworks.com/Side_Release_Buckle_Belts_p/srbb2...

And for the problem of poor posture from "computer crouch", the simple answer is the machine in your gym labeled "rear delt"[0], often combined with "pec fly". Build up your strength on the rear delt machine and you are building exactly the muscles that restore your natural posture.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WP4mBAg3Ng

I started having problems with my elbow and two (when looking at my palm) innermost fingers (pinky and ring fingers). At the beginning I thought it's tennis elbow, but then started having problems with my neck as well and getting dizzy (vertigo, headache and sometimes nausea) when lying down and getting up from the bed. I've noticed that that happens most when my head is on flat surface and even more when it reclines back (when a physiotherapist lowered my head below the flat surface of the bed I was ling on). Did anyone experience something like this or has any advice?

I did have an ultrasound and EMG (electromyography) done which did not show any problems in my elbow.

I do exercise for my neck now and hope that will help... I might add some exercises from the OP to my routine.

PS. Funnily my problems (at the beginning it was only elbow and fingers) started during lockdown, when I finally started doing yoga-type exercises and I felt like I'm getting better at it (I think it's just coincidence, not causation though).

Curious about this, what was the issue with your fingers? Pain or numbness?

feeling weaker grip and sensations leading sometimes to clumsiness. I would describe it as slight numbness (in the sense of weaker sensations and a weird, kind of tingly feeling in the fingers). It was becoming a proper numbness when using phone/tablet for prolonged periods, but now I try to avoid doing that.

I have similar tingly sensation in my elbow, and in the worst time I actually woke up at night with pain in the elbow.

It's sometimes better, sometimes worse, and I'm trying what else (other than giving up my job and using computer) can I do to help relieve this issues. COVID pandemic is not helping either getting proper medical attention.

Check your blood sugar

I actually had some fasting glucose tests done recently (different labs)

20.10.2020: 92 mg/dl 23.10.2020: 91.5 mg/dl

Both labs give around 70-100 as a normal range.

Would you suggest something more?

I had glucose tolerance test done around 2 years ago (glucose&insuline tested before/after consuming 75g of glucose; sample taken at 0h, 1h, 2h). Looks like I have "insuline resistance" which prompted me to eat more vegetables and lose some weight, but I need to admit that it's hard for me to give up on fruits and sweets.

Many people will tell you that your fasting glucose should be as "low as possible" and you'd be better off at the low end of the range than the high end of the range, but really if you are under 110 then doctors are not going to get excited.

If you were a lot higher than that it would be a concern in and of itself and a source of tinglingness and other nerve trouble in the long term.

If by "using phone/tablet" you mean the hand holding it up is getting these symptoms I actually also get this and my guess is that it is a general circulation problem (I am not a doctor!).

FWIW I didn't find an exercise solution, but actually some common spices that apparently promote circulation did help me (not medical advice!): ginger, garlic, cayenne pepper.

I get something like that as well

I just sit there normally and my arms start tingling. Or the leg falls asleep. It has been getting worse since I am 30

Not so good to sit 14h/day at the PC

Elbow plus those two fingers implicates ulnar nerve, which passes from your lower neck (C8 and T1 vertebrae), through your clavicle and behind your elbow, into pinky and ring finger. If it gets entrapped by tight tissue anywhere on the way down (look up “thoracic outlet syndrome” for example), it can cause issues below, e.g. in elbow and those two fingers. For the neck and dizziness I forget how things work, e.g. if it means the the problem is rooted in your neck / spine area or if the neck symptoms could also be rooted lower further along the nerve. It could all be due to mobility problems along the same nerve, or if you’ve been hunching at a computer for a while, there could be additional issues in the neck with other nerves or circulation.

This is the kind of thing physical therapists and chiropractors work on, but at least when I went through it a decade ago, it was really hard to find one who could troubleshoot the problem and reason about the body vs. going by a lookup table of symptoms and approved treatments.

The things that helped me were tissue-loosening massage in the neck, shoulder, and upper rib area. It finally went away one day when the therapist loosened my top rib enough to stop impinging on the nerve. Just to give you an example of how counterintuitive it can be.

As a general cheat sheet, be thinking about places nerves could get impinged from vertebrae through wrist. Tight muscles, tissue locking you into certain postures, vertebral misalignment.

I bet there’s more info on reddit and places like that now, but one book that used to be good for modeling the whole system was called “It’s not carpal tunnel syndrome”. Also look up trigger point therapy. During pandemic you may be more on your own so be aware of self-massage tools like Theracane. Posture work may also help, and walking / general cardio fitness.

I had sever neck and upper back pain for years. My solution? I used cardboard boxes and old books I found laying around at the office so that my laptop's screen is at eye level (around 20 cm up, which made me realize how bad my posture was).

Coworkers were laughing at me but I didn't care; just few days later and the pain all but disappeared. I couldn't be happier.

You can get good monitor arms to a Achieve this. Make sure to measure though because, as someone who is 6’, some have a max height lower than what I need. The nice thing about an arm is it’s easy to adjust when switching between sitting and standing.

But I agree I can’t believe how far I had to scroll town to see someone mention monitor height.

I wish I could; but here (not USA) such equipment are hard to find and, when available they're generally way too expensive -- just link standing desks and even good, decent office chairs.

Until this is no longer the case, my poor-man's platform will live on :,D

Reams of paper are also good for raising monitors or laptops, and easily found in an office.

Of course, if you use the screen and the keyboard of your laptop, you have to balance height of the screen (eye level should be about the middle of the screen) vs height of the keyboard (arms should be about level)

If people are giving out free pain advice in this thread, I have a mystery...

I frequently wake up with pain in the left side of my neck, right under the base of my skull. When this happens, my right neck flexion is fine but my left neck flexion feels like something is misaligned and stops far sooner than flexing right. I also feel pain at the base of my neck near my SC joint, but a little towards the middle of my clavicle.

The weirdest part is that when this happens, i spend all day stretching trying to undo the kink, and what fixes it is something that happens in my elbow - there's a loud clunk and a snap and then my neck feels better, my range of motion returns, and I feel like I have better feeling in my left hand.

What gives? It literally feels like a structure(nerve or something) gets misaligned and is getting pulled in weird ways until at one point it snaps back into place.

For two years I had been suffering back pain from muscle spasms around my scapula, and pain in the joint between a rib and my spine. It would start every day at 12-2pm, and continue for the rest of the day.

I worked out (incl. DL, Squat, running), but had to stop because it exacerbated the pain.

Physio/Doctors/specialists/X-ray/MRI came up with nothing.

WFH exacerbated the issue.

It was impacting my life every day: I could only work for ~3 hours per day, and walking/driving became painful.

I'm 95% better now, and working on rehab.

Here's what helped (thanks to a spine physio):

* Avoiding craning my neck: raise monitor, raise phone. * Frequent breaks. * Scapula mobility. * Deep neck flexor exercises.

I think this started when I heavily used my laptop on my couch, which relied on craning too much.

Resolving this has been my highlight of 2020.

Usually neck problems are accompanied by stiffness in the upper ribs and spin. More flexibility in these structures that support the neck will lead to less demands on the neck and more comfortable movement overall.

How does one increase mobility in one's upper ribs?

I studied a method where a series of related movements done slowly with attention helps parts of the body to move together more flexibly and fluidly.

Here's an example, if you lie on your back, put your right palm on your forehead, fingers parallel to hairline or wrinkles in your forehead elbow in air... In this position, you can use the arm and hand to roll the head going very slowly over several seconds, taking a long time for the nose to move to the left just one centimeter. Just as slowly use your arm and hand to move the head back to the middle.

By repeating it a few times while taking care to continue breathing smoothly in the background, it becomes possible for you to learn to use your arm muscles to roll the head gently and precisely, taking over the work usually done by the neck muscles.

For their part, the neck muscles are learning to let go of habitual tonus to accept passive movement.

Pause between movements. When you start again, go so gradually you can feel how soft intention to roll the head with the hand begins to manifest as movement.

You can also try moving the head 1cm to the right. The head rolls differently that way and if you do it slowly you can feel the details.

If you pay attention, you'll probably notice that when you roll the head like this, there are small supporting movements of the shoulder blade and sternum. You might feel a shift of weight to the left where you feel your upper ribs against the floor.

Then you have a rest and go through this process using the other arm.

You maybe think if you do more, you can force the stiff ribs to move, but it's the opposite: strong stretching movements, cause the ribs to protectively tighten themselves. (That's how I think about it, but of course it's actually muscles around the ribs that hold them in place.)

Instead by going near the limit of slow and small movements, each movement generates more information, there is time and space for ribs, sternum, spine, shoulders, and head to let go and allow themselves to move together in a new way.

Hundreds of these movement lessons devised by Moshe Feldenkrais to improve human functions are called Awareness Though Movement. Hands-on work for this same purpose is called Functional Integration.

One thing that helped was a standing desk with monitor arms. When my neck hurts I change the height of my monitors so the angle of my neck changes. It's not a cure, but it helps.

Also, shrugging my shoulders up to my ears periodically helps. PT docs tell me it's the wrong thing to do. I think they figure I'm strengthening my traps, but really I think the movement just helps reset something in my neck. YMMV.

If you're twenty something and don't have physical issues from sitting in front of a computer all day, just wait, you will.

Doing these gives me a 100% guaranteed 3 day long headache.

Does doing sit-ups exercise these muscles? I find that my neck goes forward when trying to do sit-ups.

Can we get videos of these?

These exercises are definitely not for everyone. I've been suffering with disequilibrium/vertigo for nearly a year now (no headaches, just a weird bobbing/floating/falling sensation that comes and goes). After brain/C-spine MRIs (all "normal"), countless blood tests, carotid ultrasound and vestibular testing, the only thing that's apparently wrong with me is that I have a "vestibular dysfunction". It's come and gone, which is apparently strange, and my family doctor still thinks I have "cervicogenic vertigo". After $2000 spent on physiotherapy, acupuncture and vestibular physiotherapy in 2020 I'm no better off.

Some of the exercises recommended in this article were recommended to me too, and they made my disequilibrium significantly worse and gave me headaches.

Then I found this article: https://mskneurology.com/vestibular-impairment-and-its-assoc...

Organized a consultation with with the guy who wrote the article and he took another look at my MRI. Turns out the radiologists totally missed several things that could clearly be causing my symptoms:

- I've got forward head posture and the top of my neck's straightened. Possibly from previous whiplash injuries several years ago combined with many years' computer use.

- My C1 vertebra seems to be compressing one of my internal jugular veins (one of the primary outflow veins from my brain). Radiologists are trained to ignore this sign apparently because it's so common, but this clearly affects the blood flow dynamics in your head and can apparently trigger migraines and other problems. With my C1 just 4mm too far forward, it almost totally closes off that vein.

- The increased blood pressure in my head from the decreased outflow of blood clearly shows one of the signs of increased cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) pressure: an "empty sella sign" (my pituitary gland is squashed against the bone because of the increased pressure). Apparently increased blood pressure in the head causes increased CSF pressure, because they're related to each other. No mention of this sign in my radiology report.

- This increased blood pressure might be interfering with blood drainage from my vestibular apparatus, which could be the cause of my weird vestibular problem.

Of course, the MRI was taken while I was lying down, and other tests I had imply that my CSF pressure is normal while upright, but I lie down for 6-8 hours a night. How much damage is that increased CSF pressure doing while I sleep? I'm not sure, but I definitely tend to feel like shit most mornings, even though I sleep on average 7.5 hours a night.

What I've learned from this experience so far:

1. If these exercises cause you headaches, don't do them, you might actually be doing them incorrectly or you. may have structural issues that cause these exercises to hurt yourself. Like me, you may need exercises tailored to your specific problems, so consulting with someone who knows what they're doing is super important.

2. If you're symptomatic and your radiologist says your MRIs are "normal", try get a second opinion.

3. I really wish more physiotherapists were trained in interpreting MRIs and doppler ultrasounds, especially to pick up on more subtle issues.

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