Neck Pain and Yoga - Why it occurs, and how can you prevent it?

My biggest passion is helping yoga teachers understand how injuries in yoga can happen. Not to instill fear in you but to educate you to be able to understand how they can happen so you can best prevent injuries from occurring in your yoga classes.

Why can neck injuries occur in yoga?
Think about everything else you do during the day, or in other exercise disciplines, how often are you weight bearing on your hands? Hardly ever. Then we come to yoga and we are asked to place weight on our hands in so many postures and for a large amount of the class, downward facing dog, chaturanga, plank, cat/cow.. a lot. There is nothing wrong with this, in fact, it’s a great way to build shoulder strength.
However, if the student does not have the shoulder and core strength to hold themselves in this position instead they will place too much load through their wrists or engage their neck muscles to hold them in this position, compensating, and setting them up for possible injury.

Secondly, a lot of students don’t use their diaphragm to primarily breathe. Instead they will use their accessory breathing muscles located around their neck, anterior throat and chest to breathe. This can enhance tension of the neck and prevent proper shoulder girdle and core engagement.

Thirdly, it is common for people to be very tight through the front of the chest muscles, maybe from poor abdominal breathing, desk work or stress. This tension can lead to poor movements of the shoulder girdle during yoga poses and over activation of their upper shoulder/neck muscles which can lead to again, tension, pain, and injury over time.

What can you do as a yoga teacher?
1. Make sure the student knows how to abdominal breath, I always spend the first few moments of the class getting the students to connect to their diaphragm through breathing and using their hands to feel their rib cage expand with each breath.
2. Open up the anterior chest muscles early and often throughout the class, think of introducing poses such as open wing, fish, binds, camel and other backbends.
3. Encourage the student to feel their shoulder blade and core muscles when weight bearing on their hands, rather than their neck muscles and their wrists. Cues such as imagine drawing the elbows together and down towards the floor can help switch on serratus anterior and engage shoulder blade muscles, taking the load off of other joints. Learn more about how to use the shoulder blade muscles correctly to prevent injuries.

I hope this helps you use this knowledge to more confidently cue, sequence and instruct your students in a safer more beneficial yoga class. Click here to learn more about neck injuries and yoga.