Ladies,
I know you have heard time and again that you need to have good posture because if you don’t, your body will become all tight and dysfunctional.
But when it comes to neck tightness, your posture actually isn’t to blame.
So often I talk to women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who deal with this chronic neck tightness day after day. Every time they try to seek out help, they are told they need to change their posture.
They need to sit up straighter. They need to stand taller. They need to stop looking at their phone with their head down and spend less time working on their computer.
But want to know the truth of it all?
In less than 60 minutes with me, many of these same women have complete relief from their neck tightness… and we don’t work on their posture at all!
Which leads me to the profound (and unpopular belief) that your posture doesn’t have a thing to do with your neck tightness.
BUT, do you want to know what does?
Your strength.
Yup. How strong your muscles are and how easily you can access that strength have a direct influence on how tight or not your body feels.
The weaker you are and the more dysfunctional your muscles are, the tighter you are going to feel. On the flip side, the stronger you are and the better your muscles are functioning, the less tightness you feel throughout your entire body.
Does this mean you need to start doing exercises to strengthen your neck to relieve your neck tightness?
More than likely not.
But, there are two areas of your body that need to be strong and functioning well that can have a huge impact on your neck–your back and your shoulders.
In fact, when my clients come in complaining of neck tightness, 100% of the time I have found there to be strength and function deficits within their back and shoulders. And once those areas get stronger, the tightness almost always completely disappears.
Now, what I do with my clients involves super controlled strength training, and it also involves a unique process called Muscle Activation Techniques®.
Muscle Activation Techniques®, also known as MAT®, is a hands-on process that identifies where in your body you have inhibited muscles–or muscles that aren’t working properly–and gets those muscles working better.
These inhibited muscles are often at the root of the tightness you may be feeling, which means once those muscles are strengthened with MAT®, the tightness you feel can go away.
With the neck, when the muscles of the shoulder and back are inhibited, the neck muscles often tighten up to try to compensate. You can do all the posture exercises you want, but until you get the inhibited muscles stronger, the tightness will remain.
If you are in the Chicago area, or are willing to travel to the Chicago area, I would love to see you on my MAT® table! All you have to do to schedule yourself for your initial consultation and assessment is click here and book the time that works best for you.
You don’t have to feel like your neck is always tight. There is a solution out there that can help you, and in my experience, MAT® has been the most effective modality for helping my clients relieve their tight neck.
I’d love to see you on my MAT® soon! Click here to get started.
In strength and health,
Julie
Julie Cates is an experienced, certified, and insured National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA) Certified Personal Trainer and mastery level Muscle Activation Techniques® (MAT®) Rx Specialist (MATRx). She is also one of the few practitioners worldwide certified in the MAT® Athlete process.
She is one of 88 certified mastery level Resistance Training Specialists® (RTSm) in the world. This combination makes her style of training impactful and still preventative and restorative of joint and muscle issues and pain that are common with exercise.
Julie specializes in working with women 50 and over. Specifically, her main focus is working with women with bone density loss, muscle loss, Osteopenia, and Osteoporosis.
Julie has incredible experience working with brand new exercisers. Very specific types and styles of exercises are needed for restoring and maintaining bone density, and Julie guides her clients through these in a pain-free way.
She is also well experienced in helping women exercise even with various joint, bone, systemic, and neurological diagnoses. Julie is definitely your go-to personal trainer for women with Osteoporosis!
She sees clients out of her studio, Muscle Activation Schaumburg, in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.