Pain in the neck is a sign of trying too hard and straining. Like a dog on a leash, eventually the dog feels it in their neck and stops fighting the leash.
All along, while training, I could be straining and trying too hard to improve faster than my body is capable of doing. The nature of training is striving to improve; yet, we also must learn that we are not going to achieve our goals in one workout, day, week, month or year. When we try to achieve a goal in one workout we are as likely to injure ourselves as have success. Too often a wheel comes off while drag racing.
While lifting weights, it’s a temptation to want to lift more and more weight (improperly too) and the strain can show up in our necks. This results in neck pain that pretty much restricts weight lifting for a while.
While cycling, neck pain shows up again when we wrestle with the handlebars while getting out of the saddle. The tension we create between hands and head shows up in our neck and it hurts. We must back off because neck pain does not go away quickly or easily. Neck pain stays with us long after the injury is over. And still, do we learn not to strain and repeat the pain?
Surprisingly neck pain is not as bad while walking or running as I would think it could be. The body and head, without something to hold onto, are synchronized to naturally move together. I can be leery of going for a walk or a run with a pain in my neck and be happily surprised that the pain is less than when stationery. Thank you God.
Easy swimming can also bring so much relief to neck pain as the water floats the weight of the head and the body/head are not fixed on something that strains the neck. However, knowing how to swim before you have neck pain is a huge advantage. If you don’t know how to swim then you could be twisting needlessly and straining which could result in more neck pain. Make good swim technique a priority.
It’s just too easy to ever so gradually strain while we train. While neck pain seems to appear during or after one “good” workout, we probably have been hurting ourselves over a longer period with our body adapting to the straining, up to a point. And once hurt, it’s hard to back off because we were just getting good.
Life is so humbling and a pain in the neck reveals a lot about us. Focusing on technique rather than effort is a safer way to train while our bodies adapt to the training effort.
Perhaps a neck pain also helps us away from the training. With a pain in my neck, I become aware of my poor posture while sitting, standing and “relaxing”. That pain in my neck teaches me that I have gotten sloppy in my technique while performing basic and simple activities too. Boy, do I need to shape up.
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