Before we do any stretching with our neck, we always want to warm things up first, so we’re going to start with some neck mobility exercises first. 

To start with, we’re going to take our chin and we’re going to bring it over our shoulder. I’m going to try to take it as far as you can. We don’t want to force this. We’re not forcing this as hard as we can. We’re just going to do it nice and slowly. 

Ideally, our chin goes all the way over our shoulder. If you can’t do that, that’s okay. You might hear some creaking and some cracking with this. That’s okay. That’s just bringing movement into those joints, and we’re going to do each side here about five or six times, just nice and slowly. 

The next one we are going to do is going forward, flexion and backwards into extension, so you’re just bending your head down, and you’re bringing this up into extension.

You are just going to go through this nice and slowly. Again, we’re doing about five or six repetitions of each of these. If this is painful, back off on the range of motion or just stop doing it. But again, we’re just going to go nice and slowly. We’re not forcing it and again, about five times down and about five times up. 

Next one is side bending. So we’re going to go with our ear to the side and we’re just going to go nice and slowly. We’re going to bring the ear to the other side. And again, we’re just bringing movement into those joints. Movement is life. We have to keep things moving. That’s absolutely critical. When joints stop moving, they start to degenerate. 

So motion is really important and again, we’re just going to do about five or six times to each side there. Now we’re going to actually start stretching some of those muscles. Now that we’ve got them warmed up. 

So to start with, again we’re going to go to the side, we’re going to take our hand and we’re just going to gently pull it down to the one side. Ideally we don’t want the shoulder rising up really high. We want to try to keep it relatively neutral, relatively down. 

We’re going to hold this stretch for about 10 seconds and then we’re going to switch sides and do the opposite side. This is a great stretch for all these side sort of lateral neck muscles. It’s going to really get your SCM muscle, scalene muscles. Great stretch for that. And again, we’re going to hold it about 10 seconds and we’re going to do each side about two or three times here as we do this. 

None of this should be painful. If it’s painful back off a little bit. Don’t stretch quite as far. 

And the next one we are going to do is that instead of going straight sideways, we are going to be going diagonally downwards. So it’s going to look something like this. 

I’m going to rotate a little bit with my chin this way and then I’m going to go diagonally down. So I’m looking kind of down this way and it’s like this. So I’m pulling this direction down like this. 

This is a fantastic stretch. You’ll feel it right at the top here. Generally this is going to really get some of these suboccipital muscles. Those are some of the muscles in the back portion right at the top of your neck. For a lot of people, that creates a lot of tension there that can cause headaches.

So this is a great stretch for anybody with cervicogenic headaches. So again, we’re going to go diagonally down this way. We’re pulling this down, we’re trying not to let everything drop forward here. Keep your back relatively back. The head goes down like this. Great stretch for suboccipital muscles and for that levator scap muscle. 

So you can feel a lot of tension through here, but oftentimes you will feel tension running into the upper back, shoulder blade, scapula area. Great stretch for that. So again, we’re going to hold this. You’re going to hold that for about 10 seconds there. Then I’m going to switch sides again. I’m going to rotate my chin slightly this way. I’m going to go diagonally down this way. So I’m pulling in that direction there. I’m going to go down like this and I can really feel that stretching right through here. It’s an awesome stretch.

And again, we want to try to keep our shoulder from rising up. We want to try to keep it relatively down and relatively back. If we can, hold that about 10 seconds. And then the opposite side again here, again we’re holding it for about 10 seconds. We’re trying to do two to three repetitions per side here. 

The last one we were going to do is neck retraction. So the issue with neck retraction is that for so many of us, because we’re spending way more time sitting right now, we’re getting into this posture and our head starts to really translate forward and that puts a lot of pressure on our neck and upper back.

So neck retraction is literally, we take our chin from here and we’re pulling it back like this. So we’re basically trying to make double chins. Everybody loves that. So we’re pulling it back like this. 

We’re not going into extension like this. We’re not going into flexion like this. Our chin stays relatively horizontal. So again, I’m going from here, I’m pulling it back and holding that about two or three seconds only. Then I let it come back towards neutral. 

When I come back to neutral, I don’t stick my chin really far out afterwards like a chicken. We just want to go from coming back like this and then just back towards neutral, not exaggerated. Okay, so two or three seconds this way, let it go for just a second or two and then another two or three seconds.

Ideally we want to do about 10 to 15 repetitions of that. When we’re pulling it back, we don’t want to go as hard as we possibly can, so I’m not going 100% back, which would be this. I’m going more like 70 to 80% and that’s going to really engage some of those suboccipital muscles there. 

That’s going to really loosen some of that area and really open that area up. If you have any questions about any of these exercises, please feel free to ask in the comments section. If you know anybody you think would benefit from these exercises, please feel free to share this video with them. Have a great day.