Can Massage Therapy Help With Neck Pain?

Being someone who has had chronic pain for most of my life, I find that it’s really important to stay on top of it before it snowballs into a full blown pain flair. One of the tools that’s helped me the most is receiving regular bodywork/massage. In this post, I’m going to explain how massage can help reduce your neck pain.

For a lot of my clients, one of their most common complaints is neck pain. Sadly, with how things are set up in our society a lot of people just take this as a way of life. But, there are ways to help reduce, or completely get rid of this. 

Oftentimes, the most common cause of neck pain is being at a computer for most of the day. Even typing this now, I feel my neck starting to be a little vocal. 

So, we all know that massage relaxes muscles, right? Pretty much every article/research study focuses on that(I would know, I’ve written a few published studies). But, the real magic happens when things are relaxed in a specific way. 

For example, the muscle in the back of your neck that causes most pain, and that oh so annoying crick-in-your-neck feeling is called Levator Scapulae. As the name suggests, it brings your shoulder up so that it can try to cosplay as those really cool hoop earrings. Sadly, shoulders don’t really make good earrings. They are much better at being shoulders. 

Levator Scapulae, in all of it’s glory.

One of the things I do is remind those muscles to calm down and keep their cosplay aspirations for other things. The Levator Scapulae muscle starts on the medial point of the scapula. You know, that spot on the top of your shoulder blade that gets really achy around 2 or 3pm when at work? It goes all the way to the little spikey bits that stick out the side of your spine, called the Transverse Processes. 

An example of forward head posture.

One of the most interesting things about working with neck pain is how many layers are involved. You know, like an onion or an ogre. Sometimes, neck pain can be caused by the muscles in the front of your shoulders rolling everything forward, destabilizing the foundation the neck sits on. 

Another common thing that causes neck pain is a destabilization in the lower back/hips. The spine is like one of the many suspension bridges we have here in Portland. The bones of the spine are like the road you drive on while all of the muscles that move the spine are like the cables that keep everything up and moving in the way it should be. If a few of the cables were exceptionally tight and some others were really loose, the bridge wouldn’t function very well. 

One of the cool things about massage is, when you get a session from a skilled therapist, we look at how the entire body moves and the various places tension may cause issues further up or down the road. So, a skilled massage therapist can absolutely help with most causes of neck pain. Have you tried massage in the past for it? What did you think of the results? Please leave your thoughts on this in the comments below.