Neck Joint Mobility: Self-Mobilization Exercise for BJJ

Hi there Joel Kriska, sport physiotherapist back here again today. We're gonna talk about ways to help get your neck moving again when it gets jammed up either from a neck crank or from inverting weird and you just get caught. It happens to almost everybody in jujitsu so please listen really carefully to this one. I want to make sure that we do this properly and that we don't end up you know making things worse.

Our goal here is obviously to make you better and get you back on the mats. So the first thing when you get a neck crank or you know you jam up the joints in your neck please make sure before you do these particular things I'm going to show you that there's no referral of pain or numb tingling down the arm. That's a different injury we're looking at a little bit of a nerve irritation or a nerve compression and That's not what we want to be playing with right now. This is strictly joint in the neck.

It hurts in the neck usually when I turn my head to one side extension or in deflection. So we're gonna stick to that kind of criteria and specifically we're gonna talk about rotation right now and if I rotate to my right side and it's stiff on the right and it hurts on the right this is the exercise for you. So and on a side note if you do have that and this isn't working for you please make sure you find a local chiropractor, physiotherapist, osteopath, someone that can get the joint moving either through joint mobilizations or manipulations. Sometimes the exercises just aren't enough to kind of get those joints to get moving.

So regardless what we're going to talk about here is a technique by a gentleman who goes Mulligan and he's a that's his last name he's a New Zealand physiotherapist and it's a fantastic little trick that you can use. All I do is take a towel you can also use your belt which works really well but I just take a towel and I put it on a diagonal and this is a hand towel standard length nothing crazy but I'm looking for a nice straight edge here and what I'm gonna do is take this little guy and put it behind my back almost like a superhero cape. Now what I'm gonna do with this and this is everyone screws this up so hopefully this will make sense is if I'm turning to my right I think in the camera it looks like a left but to this side my opposite hand is gonna grab the towel and hold here okay so I'm not pulling across my throat we're not trying to choke ourselves out this is a totally separate thing this is to get your neck moving and this is an anchor that I'm going to be turning on. My injured side my right side and I'm gonna be turning this way it's gonna grab the towel and I'm pulling the edge of the towel up along the angle of my eye okay now it's important because the angles of the joint coming from my neck they actually go in a plane that is diagonally up towards the eye so if we're trying to get those joints moving we want to facilitate the movement of the joints along the plane versus if I were to pull across my chin it actually compresses the joints even more and that's obviously what we're not trying to do so the way we do this is we hold the towel again a nice firm grip here and we're just gonna hold this one against our chest so I'm going to then turn my head as far as I can and for some people it might only be 45 degrees it might be 6 degrees it doesn't matter you're gonna turn as far as you can and you're gonna keep turning against that resistance you're you're a sort of inherent internal resistance which is the joint being stuck I'm gonna keep turning into it and as I do that I'm gonna over pressure with the towel okay so I'm gonna turn to the right and I'm gonna over pressure with the towel usually when people are really sore they'll keep turning their torso to kind of take pressure off the neck so you know maybe sit with your torso up against the back of a chair to kind of give you that feedback because we're really trying to isolate the movement to the neck and if you're doing it and it feels like it's sore higher up than what you're doing then you're just gonna shimmy the towel up a little bit and do the same thing okay if it's below that then you shimmy the towel down so you're kind of chasing the pain and then working on that mobility and you should see some pretty quick changes in terms of return of rotation of your neck now if we're getting issues like we don't have issues with rotation but we have an issue with extension we're kind of doing the same thing except what we're gonna do now is rather than rotating we're gonna take both ends of the towel and we're gonna lift up towards our eyeball and as we do that we're gonna look up as high as we can keep looking up into that resistance I'm gonna lift up with my arms almost like lifting my head off my shoulders as I rotate so what it looks like from the side is I'm gonna be here and this is as far as I'm gonna go and I'm gonna lift my head off my shoulders as I look up and you'll notice that I keep the angle of the pull going through the angle of my eyes I don't lift up and do this because that's gonna jam up the joints so I lift through the eyes and I'm gonna keep looking up up up up up and part of that's gonna come from thoracic extension up here again a lot of neck jams come from people being down here and then they bottom out their neck joints and so obviously when we do these we want to be nice and tall through the torso and then we're gonna try and encourage very specific joint movements to happen into extension now the last one I'm gonna show you is looking at cervical flexion and this one's pretty obvious but I'm gonna show you every anyways people do it instinctually and what we basically want to do is if I have a limit in flexion of the neck I'm gonna grab the back of my neck and I'm just kind of cupping the back of my neck with both hands almost like so like so and I'm gonna grab it somewhere above the level of pain so say if I'm getting pain at what I would call c4 or the mid part of your neck I'm gonna grab above that and I'm going to flex my head as much as I can now as I do that I'm gonna use my hands to try and lift my head or rather lift the the little sort of spiny portion of the neck I'm gonna as it flexes this I'm gonna try and lift that little pointy part up towards the crown of my head so I bring my head forward and I'm gonna lift right at the neck and then back and I'm gonna sort of encourage again that joint to flex at that particular level now if it doesn't feel like it's working and again it's higher up than what I'm doing then I'm just move my hands higher up and again if it's lower than I lower down so the general theme here of what we're trying to do is make sure that we have nice tall posture we're gonna turn extend or flex into that restricted movement and then we're facilitating the movement of those joints either with rotation extension or flexion and it's a absolutely gem thing that you can use to kind of get your neck moving particularly if you don't have access to someone who can get in there and mobilize or manipulate the joint of your neck ok so if you're competing and you kind of get neck torque get right in there and loosen up right away don't wait for things to tighten up and then make sure once you've loosened up your neck that you get right back into the sort of various inversions or rollovers or bridges and stuff like that to kind of make sure that your neck feels nice and stable as you return to the mats and get going again I hope you enjoyed that I'll see you on the mat soon have a good one