Tech neck is the bane of any writer’s existence, and it’s more common among cyclists than you’d expect. When we had Jaclyn Fulop, a board licensed physical therapist with more than ten years of clinical practice in sports medicine and orthopedic rehab and owner of Exchange Physical Therapy Group in Jersey City, come on the Consummate Athlete Podcast, I was both embarrassed and excited to be able to pick her brain about tech neck, since I know it’s an issue I struggle with and one that a lot of us are dealing with now that we’re working from home in imperfect setups.
For me, yes, I’ve always worked remotely, but because we’ve moved around so much typically, I rarely would end up with stiffness issues because I didn’t have one specific desk setup. But now that we’re home and not traveling, I’m at the same desk and same chair every day and holy crap, I feel it. So, what does Jaclyn advise?
Here are her best tips:
Move more
Staying active and moving is so important. You have to think of movement as medicine. It has so many health benefits. If you sit in one place and you don’t move, that can lead to possible challenges. We see a lot of that tech neck, forward head posture and hunching forward.
It’s so important to stand up or move every 20 minutes! I tell patients to get up every 20 minutes, I don’t care if it’s just a “stand up and stretch backwards.” A trigger point, or a knot, takes 20 minutes to form and when they become activated, they can cause pain, loss of range of motion, and weaken the muscle. We’re not meant to sit still.
Get out of ‘head forward’ mode
If you think about it, like a lot of activities we do, eating, sleeping, driving, texting, using the computer, like we’re all in that forward head sort of posture. So over time, that will start to get tighten and like adapt to that position. I probably see like 40% of my patients come in with this problem and over time, it leads to neck pain and bulging discs or herniated discs in a worst case scenario, so awareness is the number one thing.
You want to stretch out those internal rotators or those pec muscles, and you want to strengthen the posterior shoulder. When one side of the body gets tight, the other side of the body gets weak. And that starts to lead to structural changes. I like to get in the corner wall and like stretch in the corner wall or use a Thera band and start doing some like abduction or external rotation of the shoulders backwards. And you’d be like surprised a few simple exercises can really correct that.
Think of the AFTER
I’ll take pictures of people before and after a three month period of doing those exercises and you can actually start to see the body and the posture to change. People start standing up straighter, looking more confident.
Boost your monitor
The laptop, it’s not like the best for like an ergonomic position. I probably would recommend using a monitor and a keyboard. You want to make sure the monitor is around 20 inches away from your face. It should be tilted 10 to 20 degrees. With the keyboard, you want your wrist to be flat and not flexed or extended, because over time that can lead to carpal tunnel syndrome.
I think the best situation, if you’re doing a lot of work from home is to get a monitor and a keyboard and a great chair with adjustable features. Make sure that your feet are flat on the floor, your knees and hips are at 90 degrees and you’re able to sit all the way in that seat. It’s also good if you can actually have a stool to use for 20 minutes, then switch back to a supportive backed chair.
On that note, I got this keyboard and this little cheap wire shelf (Canadian keyboard here and shelf here) to use with my laptop so I can prop it up and stop staring down:
But really, the most important thing is three times an hour, getting up and stretching because that can really wreak havoc on the body just sitting still and especially in the wrong position.
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