Sometimes we see things here at The Reinge Clinic that are less than obvious. In a recent blog we highlighted how keeping wallets purses or phones in your back pocket can affect your pelvis and back position. Continuing along this theme, in this blog we take a look at how a completely innocent item of clothing can have quite an affect your back health......The Halter Neck Top 😮.
This innocent and popular piece of ladies clothing has an awful lot to answer for 🤔
As we have identified on a number of occasions in the past one of the main issues of headaches, neck pain, RSI symptoms in the wrist, mid and lower back issues is a head forward posture.
Now many things in modern life lead to this posture, continual use of laptops, smart phones, work computers, work stations. the driving position of modern cars and the list goes on. But amongst these well known causes of forward head posture, here at The Reinge Clinic we occasionally get a curve ball thrown at us 😬.
Quite a number of years ago I was becoming frustrated that a back pain client I was working with, would, no matter how effective the treatment sessions and no matter how many home exercises she did, would return a few weeks later with her head back in a forward position.
Then something struck me; I couldn't recall her ever wearing a top that wasn't a halter neck. "Do you have any tops that are not halter neck" I enquired. The answer was no, not one! At the end of that treatment session and having successfully encouraged her head back to its correct position....again! I asked her to humour me and buy a non halter neck top or two to try wearing over a couple of weeks. Well, two weeks later she returned with three things:
1) A non halter neck top 😃
2) Her head (still) held in the correct position 👍
3) No neck and upper back pain 🤗
This is a great example of something being less than obvious as a problem. We are used to the reason for forward head posture being quite heavily mechanical, but the neck band of the top and the top itself doesn't weigh enough to pull the neck forward? This was a neurological response, in this case the proprioceptors in the skin sensing an 'odd' stimulus on the back of the neck resulting in a 'message' to move forward and thus away from it.
Now of course, humans will be humans 🙄! Now out of pain she returned to her halter neck tops again....I don't think its really necessary to write what then happened 😖?
Now, just to wrap this one up, all you smug chaps out there thinking ah ha! This wont affect me then! Don't forget that lanyard hanging around your neck with the works I.D. card on it 😉
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