May 10, 2024 • 11 mins
Neck pain from out of nowhere? In this episode, Chris shares the possible reasons (including the most common for golfers), where it comes from, and the fastest way to fix it yourself!
If your neck pain persists, schedule a call with us and we will find the root cause and solution: www.par4success.com/podcast
Subscapularis release: https://youtube.com/shorts/yrUPVbVskAU
Lat release: https://youtube.com/shorts/kX0hIsPUWMw
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Golf Fitness Bomb Squad podcast with Chris Finn,
a production of P for S Golf. Welcome to the
Golf Fitness Bomb Squad. My name is Chris and as
your host today, I'm excited to talk about something that
actually popped up for me the other day. And it
(00:22):
was like some neck pain basically that was starting to
feel like it was starting to spasm. And I had
played in a qualifier, was carrying my bag and it
was funny as I felt it coming on there actually
there was another guy in the group, it was his
caddy that was actually experiencing or talking about He was
(00:42):
experiencing the same thing, and so it got me thinking that, hey,
this is something that I don't think we've covered in
all the episodes that we've done on the Golf Fitness
Bomb Squad. So I wanted to talk to talk on
this topic today about what it is, what it's actually
coming from, and how you can fix it. Because less
than twelve hours later now I feel fine. I've actually
(01:03):
already worked out heavy leg day, like totally find no issues,
but unfortunate, I feel like for most people listening, you
start to feel that next starting new spasm and we're
talking two three, maybe you know, maybe seven days before
it kind of goes away. So let's start with the
kind of basically the understanding and the agreement that when
(01:26):
you start to feel like that upper trap and that
goes up into the neck, you start to feel that
start to spasm, that's the symptom, right, And I want
to be very very clear on that with everybody listening here,
that that is not the problem. That that when you
start to feel that neck or that upper trap is
starting to lock up, you know, whether you're it's from
carrying your bag, you're hitting a bunch of balls, whatever
(01:47):
it may be, the or maybe just slept weird, right,
and you feel like that's the symptom of something that's
going on, that's not the actual cause of the problem.
And what we see when we treat a lot of
these acutes spasms, or maybe there were current spasms, if
you tend to get them a lot. Yeah, sure, there's
going to be postural things where people's shoulders tend to
(02:08):
be slumped forward. Like sure, if you are a big
postural person, like I'm sure you know everything's posture problem, right,
And I think this is a you know, if you've
got to hammer. Everything's a nail. Right. So some people
will preach, hey, it's always postural. Sometimes it can be
a lot of times it's not even the posture made.
(02:29):
Maybe that's a symptom. Right. Uh So then people say, oh,
you have you know, your facet is off, or then
maybe they're more of a structural person, right, and so
everything is structural? Can that be? Sometimes you can get
a locked up muscle that sometimes can pull you know,
vertebrae off center, off alignment. You could also have something
(02:49):
that occurs in the neck and the alignments off and
that causes it. Right, It can go both ways, right,
it's that then you end up in a chicken or
the egg conversation. Again, in both cases we're talking about
that the problem, you know is the neck pain. You know,
then I think you can talk about uh, you know,
other people will say, hey, it's more tissue based. Right.
(03:10):
If you're using your upper traps, you're using them too much,
so you need to you know, maybe it's your classic
pt We need to you know, get your shoulder blades
in a better pack position. We need to get the
low trap more activated, uh, so that the upper trap
becomes you know, a little more inhibited. We need to
work on, you know, your upward rotation of the serratus
(03:31):
anterior activating as your shoulders move up overhead. All that's
totally correct too. And so I think the reason I'm
bringing this up to start is because there's a lot
of theories, a lot of practices that are actually makes
sense that like, yes, like I agree with all of them.
(03:51):
There's some cases I think it's important to understand. If
you're going to see somebody for you know, your neck
being bugging you, you want them to have all of
that in their repertoire. If it is a vertebrae, can
they manipulate it to get it back in place? If
it is the tissue that's pulled it, you know, can
they release the tissue and put it back in place? Right?
(04:12):
If it's something postural, you know, can they release the
tissue so that the symptom gets better and then it
can they actually train you so that you have improved
posture if that truly was the cause. So all that
said to say, it could be a lot of different things, Okay,
and to truly understand, you know, you're gonna obviously recommend
you need to go see somebody. But what I'm going
(04:32):
to talk about today is going to be like, what
is the most common way, the most common reason for
the pain that it pops up like that, and what
is the simplest DIY way that you can handle it yourself. Now,
if you go through and you do this and it's
still bugging you, then obviously it could be one of
these other things. You probably need to go see somebody.
(04:53):
You could certainly could jump on a call. We could
help you, you know, at least maybe tell you what
we think it is based on the assessment and give
you a direction of whether it's exercise or tissue work,
or maybe you need to go see somebody locally for
hands on manual therapy whatever. Maybe. But let's get to
what it usually is is a problem in the shoulder, right,
So what typically will happen is, uh, you know, if
(05:15):
you look at particularly in golfers, right. But that's what
we're gonna do this in relation to because it's a
golf podcast. So so when you look at the lack
of ability for the shoulder to externally rotate, right, the
ability for that shoulder to rotate backwards, think of a
quarterback or a pitcher in baseball or football, and when
they throw and they cock the their arm back as
(05:38):
it comes before, you know, right before it comes forward,
that the hand is way behind the body and the shoulder.
That's called external rotation, right. We need a lot of
that in the golf swing, particularly on our trail side,
but also on the on the lead side as we
follow through. And in order for that to occur, extern
rotation to occur, there has to be lengthening of the
(05:59):
muscles that internally rotate, particularly the subscapularis the lats, you know,
those are probably the two big ones. The pack obviously
is involved there as well. Those muscles have to lengthen
when you externally rotate, and vice versa. When you internally rotate,
then the muscles that externally rotate the shoulder need to lengthen,
(06:20):
right your infraspinatus tarries major, minor, you know, those sorts
of guys. So and then obviously all the stabilizers need
to do their work too, so that the moving and
the muscles that actually do the movement can actually move
the shoulder inside the capsule. What we tend to see,
particularly because golf most injuries are overuse. So you're hitting
(06:41):
a lot of balls, or you're playing a lot, you're
maybe you're carrying your bag, so your posture is upper
trap engaged internally rotated as you're carrying your bag up
and down, and then as you're rotating, you're trying to
externally rotate. Maybe the muscles just get fatigued. It's normal
after you're using, when you're using muscles, that there can
be trigger points that start to develop. For most people,
what will happen is you'll start to develop trigger points
(07:02):
in the subscap or the lat which are internal rotator
so that they try they basically are going to pull
you more internal and so when that happens, then you're
going to get other activation of other muscles musculature, and
a lot of times the upper traps will start getting
involved trying to help out, even though they don't do
any sort of rotation at all. So that's where you'll
(07:23):
start to get all this referred kind of compensitory activation
that will a lot of times present up in the neck.
So the number a couple of things, and we'll put
these the links to these to the free YouTube videos
that we have so you guys can kind of get
some idea of what these exercises look like, but if
you start to feel that upper trap locking up, the
(07:44):
first of all, the one tool I would always recommend
everybody has as a fairricane. It's really something. It's like
twenty thirty bucks on Amazon. If you don't know if
you can always message us. We can send you a
link to figure out how to find it. But that's
a that's an amazing tool to have. It helps you
to do some trigger and soft tissue point release, you
know up in the shoulder, shoulder area, the neck and
(08:05):
the shoulder area. But typically what we say is if
you start to feel that starting to lock down, take
a look at releasing your subscapularis so your subscap and
you actually use the butt end of a of a
golf club to do that. We look at rolling out
and trying to release the lap, so you can do
that on a phone roll you know, that's pretty easy
(08:26):
to get after even a softball on a wall or
on the floor, depending how aggressive you want to be.
Just obviously watch out for ribs, but those are the
generally the two areas that you go after trying to release,
you know, both from a pass of just kind of
get it to twitch. Out, but also a you know,
a pin and strip or a you know, kind of
an active release technique type move that helps to kind
(08:48):
of ease up, kind of get those muscles back to normal.
When that happens, they're pulling one end of a of
a of a tug of war rope, right. The other
end is your upper trap of your neck, and that's tight,
so you can also just you know, well most people
try to you know, they'll put heat on their neck,
they'll you know, they'll rub with a spot that it hurts, right,
and you're just rubbing the spot that's just holding onto
(09:08):
the rope for dear life because the other team's pulling
so hard. If you can get the other team to
chill out and stop pulling, which is what you do
when you release a subscap or the lot, or you
can even go after pect, then all of a sudden,
the team in the neck and the shoulder that's like
in the upper trap that's pulling holding out for your life,
al sudden they can relax and they kind of chill out, right.
So the typical dy way that quick relief that you
(09:32):
can go after is releasing the subscap, releasing the lot.
Both links will have in the show notes here, and
then you can also use you know, the therapane is
great for this, just kind of rubbing on the top
of the you know, of the upper trap, just to
help that kind of relax down too, but knowing that
that will get better just because you've gotten rid of
the other side of the tug of war. The other
team's kind of chilled out, right, So that's kind of
(09:54):
the the acute, short term dy way to alleviate that
neck pain. And then obviously then you want to look
at the longer term solutions. Right, is there are there
postol imbalances, muscle imbalances where you're too tight in the
front and not strong enough in the back? You know,
do you know? Is it something structural? Is there a
facet that's stuck or a vertebrae that's rotated, Right, then
(10:15):
you can obviously look at those If this starts to
become a recurring problem. If it's just a one off,
go after the tissue, that's usually nine times out of
ten that the issue. And then it's just a matter
of getting yourself stronger and trained up where you can
you be okay for the amount of repetition a load
that you put on your body that causes this current spasm.
So hopefully you found that helpful today. Hopefully it's fused
(10:37):
a couple false beliefs so that if your upper trap
locks up and we call it like a neck spasm,
that it's not a neck problem. It's usually coming from
the other muscles on the shoulder, and that's just a
reactive response your body's attempt to correct it and be
you know, basically, up trap tries to help out too much,
kind of like the low back, the friendly neighbor that
helps out weigh too much and then eventually gets into trouble.
(10:58):
So hopefully found that helpful today. Obviously we've done the
last few episodes recently have been a lot about addressing
these kind of acute common things that pop up in golfers.
So hopefully you know, go back and check out those
other episodes, chick them on the back and the elbow pain,
those are those are fantastic ones to check out and
then are really just very useful. So I appreciate you
as always for hanging out with us on the Golf
(11:19):
Fitness Bomb Squad, and we look forward to catching you
on the next episode.
Welcome to the Golf Fitness Bomb Squad podcast with Chris Finn,
a production of P for S Golf. Welcome to the
Golf Fitness Bomb Squad. My name is Chris and as
your host today, I'm excited to talk about something that
actually popped up for me the other day. And it
(00:22):
was like some neck pain basically that was starting to
feel like it was starting to spasm. And I had
played in a qualifier, was carrying my bag and it
was funny as I felt it coming on there actually
there was another guy in the group, it was his
caddy that was actually experiencing or talking about He was
(00:42):
experiencing the same thing, and so it got me thinking that, hey,
this is something that I don't think we've covered in
all the episodes that we've done on the Golf Fitness
Bomb Squad. So I wanted to talk to talk on
this topic today about what it is, what it's actually
coming from, and how you can fix it. Because less
than twelve hours later now I feel fine. I've actually
(01:03):
already worked out heavy leg day, like totally find no issues,
but unfortunate, I feel like for most people listening, you
start to feel that next starting new spasm and we're
talking two three, maybe you know, maybe seven days before
it kind of goes away. So let's start with the
kind of basically the understanding and the agreement that when
(01:26):
you start to feel like that upper trap and that
goes up into the neck, you start to feel that
start to spasm, that's the symptom, right, And I want
to be very very clear on that with everybody listening here,
that that is not the problem. That that when you
start to feel that neck or that upper trap is
starting to lock up, you know, whether you're it's from
carrying your bag, you're hitting a bunch of balls, whatever
(01:47):
it may be, the or maybe just slept weird, right,
and you feel like that's the symptom of something that's
going on, that's not the actual cause of the problem.
And what we see when we treat a lot of
these acutes spasms, or maybe there were current spasms, if
you tend to get them a lot. Yeah, sure, there's
going to be postural things where people's shoulders tend to
(02:08):
be slumped forward. Like sure, if you are a big
postural person, like I'm sure you know everything's posture problem, right,
And I think this is a you know, if you've
got to hammer. Everything's a nail. Right. So some people
will preach, hey, it's always postural. Sometimes it can be
a lot of times it's not even the posture made.
(02:29):
Maybe that's a symptom. Right. Uh So then people say, oh,
you have you know, your facet is off, or then
maybe they're more of a structural person, right, and so
everything is structural? Can that be? Sometimes you can get
a locked up muscle that sometimes can pull you know,
vertebrae off center, off alignment. You could also have something
(02:49):
that occurs in the neck and the alignments off and
that causes it. Right, It can go both ways, right,
it's that then you end up in a chicken or
the egg conversation. Again, in both cases we're talking about
that the problem, you know is the neck pain. You know,
then I think you can talk about uh, you know,
other people will say, hey, it's more tissue based. Right.
(03:10):
If you're using your upper traps, you're using them too much,
so you need to you know, maybe it's your classic
pt We need to you know, get your shoulder blades
in a better pack position. We need to get the
low trap more activated, uh, so that the upper trap
becomes you know, a little more inhibited. We need to
work on, you know, your upward rotation of the serratus
(03:31):
anterior activating as your shoulders move up overhead. All that's
totally correct too. And so I think the reason I'm
bringing this up to start is because there's a lot
of theories, a lot of practices that are actually makes
sense that like, yes, like I agree with all of them.
(03:51):
There's some cases I think it's important to understand. If
you're going to see somebody for you know, your neck
being bugging you, you want them to have all of
that in their repertoire. If it is a vertebrae, can
they manipulate it to get it back in place? If
it is the tissue that's pulled it, you know, can
they release the tissue and put it back in place? Right?
(04:12):
If it's something postural, you know, can they release the
tissue so that the symptom gets better and then it
can they actually train you so that you have improved
posture if that truly was the cause. So all that
said to say, it could be a lot of different things, Okay,
and to truly understand, you know, you're gonna obviously recommend
you need to go see somebody. But what I'm going
(04:32):
to talk about today is going to be like, what
is the most common way, the most common reason for
the pain that it pops up like that, and what
is the simplest DIY way that you can handle it yourself. Now,
if you go through and you do this and it's
still bugging you, then obviously it could be one of
these other things. You probably need to go see somebody.
(04:53):
You could certainly could jump on a call. We could
help you, you know, at least maybe tell you what
we think it is based on the assessment and give
you a direction of whether it's exercise or tissue work,
or maybe you need to go see somebody locally for
hands on manual therapy whatever. Maybe. But let's get to
what it usually is is a problem in the shoulder, right,
So what typically will happen is, uh, you know, if
(05:15):
you look at particularly in golfers, right. But that's what
we're gonna do this in relation to because it's a
golf podcast. So so when you look at the lack
of ability for the shoulder to externally rotate, right, the
ability for that shoulder to rotate backwards, think of a
quarterback or a pitcher in baseball or football, and when
they throw and they cock the their arm back as
(05:38):
it comes before, you know, right before it comes forward,
that the hand is way behind the body and the shoulder.
That's called external rotation, right. We need a lot of
that in the golf swing, particularly on our trail side,
but also on the on the lead side as we
follow through. And in order for that to occur, extern
rotation to occur, there has to be lengthening of the
(05:59):
muscles that internally rotate, particularly the subscapularis the lats, you know,
those are probably the two big ones. The pack obviously
is involved there as well. Those muscles have to lengthen
when you externally rotate, and vice versa. When you internally rotate,
then the muscles that externally rotate the shoulder need to lengthen,
(06:20):
right your infraspinatus tarries major, minor, you know, those sorts
of guys. So and then obviously all the stabilizers need
to do their work too, so that the moving and
the muscles that actually do the movement can actually move
the shoulder inside the capsule. What we tend to see,
particularly because golf most injuries are overuse. So you're hitting
(06:41):
a lot of balls, or you're playing a lot, you're
maybe you're carrying your bag, so your posture is upper
trap engaged internally rotated as you're carrying your bag up
and down, and then as you're rotating, you're trying to
externally rotate. Maybe the muscles just get fatigued. It's normal
after you're using, when you're using muscles, that there can
be trigger points that start to develop. For most people,
what will happen is you'll start to develop trigger points
(07:02):
in the subscap or the lat which are internal rotator
so that they try they basically are going to pull
you more internal and so when that happens, then you're
going to get other activation of other muscles musculature, and
a lot of times the upper traps will start getting
involved trying to help out, even though they don't do
any sort of rotation at all. So that's where you'll
(07:23):
start to get all this referred kind of compensitory activation
that will a lot of times present up in the neck.
So the number a couple of things, and we'll put
these the links to these to the free YouTube videos
that we have so you guys can kind of get
some idea of what these exercises look like, but if
you start to feel that upper trap locking up, the
(07:44):
first of all, the one tool I would always recommend
everybody has as a fairricane. It's really something. It's like
twenty thirty bucks on Amazon. If you don't know if
you can always message us. We can send you a
link to figure out how to find it. But that's
a that's an amazing tool to have. It helps you
to do some trigger and soft tissue point release, you
know up in the shoulder, shoulder area, the neck and
(08:05):
the shoulder area. But typically what we say is if
you start to feel that starting to lock down, take
a look at releasing your subscapularis so your subscap and
you actually use the butt end of a of a
golf club to do that. We look at rolling out
and trying to release the lap, so you can do
that on a phone roll you know, that's pretty easy
(08:26):
to get after even a softball on a wall or
on the floor, depending how aggressive you want to be.
Just obviously watch out for ribs, but those are the
generally the two areas that you go after trying to release,
you know, both from a pass of just kind of
get it to twitch. Out, but also a you know,
a pin and strip or a you know, kind of
an active release technique type move that helps to kind
(08:48):
of ease up, kind of get those muscles back to normal.
When that happens, they're pulling one end of a of
a of a tug of war rope, right. The other
end is your upper trap of your neck, and that's tight,
so you can also just you know, well most people
try to you know, they'll put heat on their neck,
they'll you know, they'll rub with a spot that it hurts, right,
and you're just rubbing the spot that's just holding onto
(09:08):
the rope for dear life because the other team's pulling
so hard. If you can get the other team to
chill out and stop pulling, which is what you do
when you release a subscap or the lot, or you
can even go after pect, then all of a sudden,
the team in the neck and the shoulder that's like
in the upper trap that's pulling holding out for your life,
al sudden they can relax and they kind of chill out, right.
So the typical dy way that quick relief that you
(09:32):
can go after is releasing the subscap, releasing the lot.
Both links will have in the show notes here, and
then you can also use you know, the therapane is
great for this, just kind of rubbing on the top
of the you know, of the upper trap, just to
help that kind of relax down too, but knowing that
that will get better just because you've gotten rid of
the other side of the tug of war. The other
team's kind of chilled out, right, So that's kind of
(09:54):
the the acute, short term dy way to alleviate that
neck pain. And then obviously then you want to look
at the longer term solutions. Right, is there are there
postol imbalances, muscle imbalances where you're too tight in the
front and not strong enough in the back? You know,
do you know? Is it something structural? Is there a
facet that's stuck or a vertebrae that's rotated, Right, then
(10:15):
you can obviously look at those If this starts to
become a recurring problem. If it's just a one off,
go after the tissue, that's usually nine times out of
ten that the issue. And then it's just a matter
of getting yourself stronger and trained up where you can
you be okay for the amount of repetition a load
that you put on your body that causes this current spasm.
So hopefully you found that helpful today. Hopefully it's fused
(10:37):
a couple false beliefs so that if your upper trap
locks up and we call it like a neck spasm,
that it's not a neck problem. It's usually coming from
the other muscles on the shoulder, and that's just a
reactive response your body's attempt to correct it and be
you know, basically, up trap tries to help out too much,
kind of like the low back, the friendly neighbor that
helps out weigh too much and then eventually gets into trouble.
(10:58):
So hopefully found that helpful today. Obviously we've done the
last few episodes recently have been a lot about addressing
these kind of acute common things that pop up in golfers.
So hopefully you know, go back and check out those
other episodes, chick them on the back and the elbow pain,
those are those are fantastic ones to check out and
then are really just very useful. So I appreciate you
as always for hanging out with us on the Golf
(11:19):
Fitness Bomb Squad, and we look forward to catching you
on the next episode.
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