Text Neck is a term given to individuals who excessively use their smart phones in a forward head posture. This posture biomechanically forces a lot of load to your neck muscles, specifically in the back of your neck. This stretch and increase demand on the muscles in your neck causes them to become tight. This tightness makes you wanna stretch it out and a lot of times you feel relief from stretching.
The forward head posture causes muscles to become weak. A few muscles in particular are a group of muscles in the front of your neck called the deep neck flexor muscles. These muscles can be activated by retracting your chin towards your neck. A simple exercise to strengthen this muscle is simply laying down on your back and producing a retraction movement thinking about bringing your chin to your neck. The common faults with this exercise is flexing your lower neck and bringing your head to far off the ground. This exercise done correctly should only have your head a few centimeters off the ground. The image below gives you a correct picture of how the exercise should look
Strengthening your deep neck flexor muscles can be a great way to offset your muscle imbalances from staying in a prolonged head flexed posture. Finding ways to text in a position without having your head flexed is an obvious solution to solving pain from text neck.
Akodu, A. K., Akinbo, S. R., & Young, Q. O. (2018). Correlation among smartphone addiction, craniovertebral angle, scapular dyskinesis, and selected anthropometric variables in physiotherapy undergraduates. Journal of Taibah University Medical Sciences, 13(6), 528-534.
