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Episode #57: Neck Tweaks, Tension Headaches, & Dizziness in Barbell Training - What you need to know!
How you position your gaze and maintain your neck position when you lift is important. Your body’s balance responds to your neck and eye position so when you are barbell training, it’s important to keep your neck still and your eyes fixed to one point.
The position of the cervical spine when you lift is extremely important because many of the muscles that support the bar and shoulders attach to the cervical spine. Additionally, the neurovascular structures responsible for innervating the limbs, brain, and organs all pass through the neck.
When we do not pay close attention to the position of our neck and eye gaze while weight training, you may experience some problems like:
Tension headaches
Dizziness
Radicular pain in the arms
Upper extremity weakness
Stiff neck
Why do you get dizzy, headaches, a stiff neck, etc. when you barbell train?
Stiffness in shoulders, hips, or thoracic spine causes you to get range from another area in the body.
The position of the bar relative to your neck causes tension on the neurovascular structures in the neck.
Too much movement in the cervical spine when you lift. This area should remain stable to protect the joints and neurovascular structures which aren’t meant to be loaded as much as the other areas of the body
In this episode of the PRS Podcast, co-hosts Dr. Rori Alter and Dr. Alyssa Haveson discuss position of the cervical spine and neck injuries in barbell training and powerlifting.
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Dr. Alyssa Haveson, PT, PRSCC: [00:00:00] If you were to draw a line from the point that you're looking at to your eyeballs, and if you were to draw a line up your spine and those lines were to intersect, it should be a 90 degree angle. It should be a perpendicular line to the line of your spine, and it should help you maintain your neck in neutral throughout the lift.
Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC: [00:00:19] Welcome to the Progressive Rehab & Strength podcast.
Dr. Alyssa Haveson, PT, PRSCC: [00:00:22] We're your hosts, physical therapists, strength coaches, and clinical coaches Dr. Alyssa Haveson and Dr. Rori Alter. Join us on our journey of barbell strength training and rehabilitation.
Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC: [00:00:27] All right, folks. Welcome back to the Progressive Rehab & Strength podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Rori Alter, here with my lovely co-host who doesn't have food poisoning this week, Alyssa Haveson, although I do have some breathing issues today, so I apologize if I sound like a smoker. My asthma has been not so great because of this stupid air quality issue here in New York. Really all over the place that people are getting affected by. But anyway, that's not what we're talking about today. What we're talking about today is something that also affects me pretty significantly, which is a near and dear problem to my heart, which is cervical spine issues in barbell training. Sometimes we can have these things like any other issue in our body that arise from non barbell training issues, and sometimes we can have issues arise because of how we are lifting, how we are training, and how we are progressing our program. A lot of the things that people experience, there's not a lot of acute injuries to the cervical spine in barbell training. They're more chronic or they kind of creep up on you or they happen and they're isolated to a training session or two. But again, I don't really think that we see those acute low back tweaks or low back blow outs that happen with the squat and the deadlift. We don't really see that with the neck. I think this is because we're not loading it like we load the lumbar spine, you know, the bar is always below our cervical spine except in the press. I think with the press, that's kind of where we see those neck tweaks happen, similar to back tweaks, but those neck tweaks are never as bad as lumbar spine tweaks.
Dr. Alyssa Haveson, PT, PRSCC: [00:02:36] Yeah, and I think when we see those neck tweaks, it's usually with someone who has some history of neck symptoms or tightness, who have experienced them before. I mean, obviously they can come up for the first time, but it's just not as common as low back stuff.
Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC: [00:02:52] So the first one I think I want to talk about is a stiff neck. We pretty much see those with the overhead press and chin ups and pull ups. This is where you can't turn left or you can't turn right. They could be really, really acutely painful. They can affect your mobility for a couple of days, a few hours, and really just some heat and ibuprofen and laying off of it for a day or two can really have a significant impact on that type of stiffness that arises. I always say, don't sound the alarm. This one's going to go away in a couple of days. However, it can turn into ridiculous symptoms. We've seen pretty significant herniated discs or compressed spinal nerves in the cervical spine. That's going to present with radiating symptoms into the shoulder blade, into the the deltoid, and really more into the tricep and the forearm, then the bicep and the hand. I've seen that a lot. We have someone coming on the podcast, I'm interviewing him later today, who is a client of mine for rehab through that type of injury. He's come back and competed and hit press and all that stuff. So these things arise, but if we manage them appropriately and we don't irritate them more, then you can really make a full comeback without true medical intervention, like a surgery or an injection or something.
Dr. Alyssa Haveson, PT, PRSCC: [00:04:41] Aside from radiating symptoms, we can also have just weakness in one area of the upper extremity or both with or without those.
Dr. Rori Alter, PT, PRSCC: [00:04:53] So with or without the pain, and that's a red flag when you have unexplained weakness that comes out of nowhere, which is kind of what we're going to be talking about with Chris, who I'm going to interview. I'm in a coaching network and Trent, our podcast producer, just asked me, he's starting strength coaching and he asked about this client of his who had unexplained weakness in the bench press and overhead press. All of a sudden, it was gone. When we see this unexplained weakness in the upper extremity, that can clue us into something going on in the cervical spine and we want to get that checked out. Rlags, I would say, for the cervical spine are really acute onset of severe pain, and we're talking like eight out of ten. We're not talking like four or five, six out of ten like that. That's your neck tweak. That's like you can't turn left or right and you have difficulty sleeping for maybe a day or two. But when it's ongoing and it's a high level of pain and there's associated grip strength weakness or tricep or bicep weakness, we want to get that checked out. We don't want that weakness to linger because that means something's compressed. The longer something's compressed, the the longer it takes to recover from. So just a stiff neck tweak, like my husband walks in from his early morning training sessions a lot and and I'll be like, So how was your training session? And he'll turn around and he'll turn his whole body in one piece, and I'm like, Oh, did you press today? And he's like, Yep.