Optimize your neck rotation mobility with Lift Clinic’s team of physio, chiro, RMT and strength coaches!
This post will focus on reinforcing exercises used to improve strength and mobility in the neck rotation movement pattern.
The ability to rotate your neck through a full range of motion is important for the health of your neck and for optimal control of your arms. Neck rotation is also important in everyday life for things like shoulder checking when driving!
This post is a continuation of our blog series on our full body assessment. If you haven’t already, visit our blog page to learn more about how we assess and treat other movements in the body.
For any given movement pattern, our treatment approach follows 4 primary steps:
- Assessment
Techniques used to test ranges of motion and find the root causes of limitations
- Reset
Hands on treatment techniques used to improve & restore limited range of motion
- Reinforce
Exercises or self treatments that help maintain the gains made from the reset techniques.
- Reload
Exercises that develop strength, resilience, and coordination for the desired movement pattern.
3 assessment techniques to find limitations in neck extension:
1) Top-tier neck rotation assessment
This is usually the first assessment we will perform to test neck rotation. We want to see if the client can rotate their neck to the point their nose is in line with the middle of their collarbone.
2) Supine neck rotation assessment
If the client was unable to perform the previous assessment, we will do the same test while the client is supine (lying on their back). This test removes the postural requirement of the previous test.
3) Upper neck assessment
We want to find out wether limitations in neck rotation are happening in the lower or upper neck. In this assessment, we are bringing the client into neck flexion (bending the neck forward) which prevents the lower neck from rotating. From there, we can rotate the client’s head to the side which isolates rotation in the upper neck.
What's next?
After a thorough assessment of your neck rotation, the next step is to treat the root cause of your limitations so you can get back to 100%. This will consist of a combination of hands-on treatment techniques as well as specific exercises.
Stay tuned for the next post in the series: Neck Rotation Resets
