This real-time neck routine features easy stretches & exercises that can help strengthen the neck & relieve pain. It can also help improve posture, decrease neck tightness, and improve overall neck flexibility. Buy a worksheet with these Neck Stretches & Exercises:
These neck stretches and exercises are not only great for helping the neck, but they are also great for helping the shoulders and upper back.
Let’s begin with a quick 2 minute warm up to help get the muscles loose and ready to go. Cervical rotation, cervical side bend, neck circles and arm circles will help the muscles get ready for the routine.
After the warm up, isometric exercises are a great way to activate the muscles, but not make big movements that might cause pain. Neck side bend, rotation, extension, and flexion isometrics will help activate the muscles around the neck to improve stability and decrease pain.
Next chin tucks, which are one of my favorites, are both a stretch and an exercise, and it’s great to help reset your muscles if you work on a computer all day or like to game a lot.
Then going into some full stretches with an upper trap stretch and a levator scap stretch will really help improve motion and decrease tight muscles.
Finally, shoulder circles and shoulder squeeze are great exercises to work the muscles you have just lengthened and loosened up.
Tinnitus is often referred to as “ringing in the ears,” but it can include sounds of buzzing, hissing, whistling, swooshing, and clicking. These stretches may help relieve cervical tinnitus.
Frozen shoulder, technically known as adhesive capsulitis, is a condition that causes stiffness and pain in the shoulder joint from adhesion build-up in the joint capsule. Stretches & exercises like these can help speed up the recovery time.
Cervical radiculopathy, aka a pinched nerve in the neck, is basically when the nerve coming out of the spine gets irritated at the nerve root. This can cause pain & weakness going down into the arm. These simple stretches & exercises may help relieve the pain.
Headaches are often accompanied by neck pain. Relaxing the muscles around the neck and shoulder area with these stretches and exercise may help relieve the headache as well as the neck pain.
Are you looking for quick and effective neck pain relief? Luckily, stretches & exercises are a great way to help relieve neck pain. But with nearly 1,000 videos on the Ask Doctor Jo YouTube Channel, it can be hard to find the best one for you. So for 2025, here are some of my favorite Neck Pain Relief Videos that actually work!
Shoulder pain can be caused by tight muscles, especially when we have bad posture. Here are 3 of my favorite shoulder stretches to help relieve pain in the shoulders, neck, chest, and the upper back area.
These rotator cuff exercises are for the supraspinatus, infraspinatus, teres minor, & subscapularis, and many of the muscles around the shoulder. For pain relief & rehab, it’s important to exercise all of these.