At Home Headache Relief Exercise in Portland, ME

Hi, I'm Dr. Sean Murphy here from Chiropractic and Sports Health. And I'm going to talk to you today a little bit about an exercise that we do for patients who have chronic headaches.

Chin Retraction Headache Relief Exercise

Okay? So there's a lot of things that can contribute to headaches, but often it's due to an imbalance in the muscles in your neck. Okay, so we're going to do an exercise called the chin retractions, and I'm here with Austin and he's going to demonstrate it for you. Okay, so first thing you're gonna do, is you want to start with good posture, okay, so you want to try to keep your head up nice and tall, shoulders back, then all you're going to do is you're going to try to pull your chin back, almost like you're trying to pull it through the wall behind you, and then come back to neutral.

Okay, so when you do this, what you're going to feel is as you pull the head back, you're going to feel a stretch in these posterior muscles, your suboccipital 's that are kind of tight causing those headaches. And then you also feel activation of these anterior muscles that are often weakened when you have poor posture. And then you come back to neutral. And then one more time I sit and pull back, hold it for a few seconds, and then back to neutral.

So this is a great exercise that you can do in the office at home watching TV. You can do them at a red light in the car. And all of these will help to rebalance some of those tight and weak muscles in your neck to help with your chronic headaches.

Learn more about Chiropractic Care and Headaches.