Apr 30

Apr 30 How to relieve neck tension - try this!

Whether you’re working from home, socialising virtually via Zoom calls or Facetime, scrolling through social media or sending and receiving more texts and WhattsApp messages than usual, we’re all spending far more time, almost certainly hunched over, staring at screens at the moment.

Pity our poor necks

And that means our poor necks are suffering as a result. Neck tension and aches that delightfully fan out to our shoulders and even down our arms, and headaches that emanate from the top of our necks are an uncomfortable at best, and sometimes painful, reminder that our head is the heaviest part of our body, and the long-suffering neck is responsible for balancing and moving it about. And right now, it’s having to work overtime.

What you can do to help

Of course there are all kinds of exercises and stretches you can do to relieve this pesky, poor posture pain (sorry, I couldn’t resist the alliteration), like these ones for example, and I’d certainly recommend that you do those as frequently as you need.

But there’s something else too

But I also have another recommendation. It’s for something I serendipitously discovered at a health show I went to at the start of the year, when coronavirus and lockdown were words that hadn’t entered our collective vocabulary or consciousness.

I came across a stand with people lying on massage beds with their necks balanced on a strange contraption, so, of course, I was intrigued.

The contraption, I discovered from its creator, physiotherapist Wes Marshall, is called a necksaviour and it does, well, exactly what it says on the tin.

Physiotherapist Wes Marshall explaining his creation

Wes explained how, looking around for a product he could recommend to his patients to use between treatment sessions, he couldn’t find anything that he felt was safe and effective enough to suggest. So he set about inventing one himself.

More than 70 prototypes later, necksaviour was born.

A combination of experience, and trial and error

Combining his clinical and biometric expertise with cutting edge design techniques, Wes has devised a product that is lightweight - it’s made of dense, hardwearing foam - simple to use and, critically, targets and eases the trigger points that cause head and neck pain.

Of course I had to give it a go. Wes showed me how to bend the flat necksaviour so that my neck balanced in its curved edges, with one end at the base of my skull and the other where my neck meets my shoulders.

Trying out a necksaviour at the health show where I first saw them

Because the necksaviour is flat, when you bend it, it tries to lie flat again. But it can’t because of the weight of your head. The tension created by the layers of foam attempting to flatten creates a traction that gently stretches your neck. So simple and so clever.

How necksaviour works to ease the tension in your neck

Wes showed me how, because of the ‘density’ (that’s almost certainly not the correct technical term) of the foam, bending the necksaviour with the white side inwards gives a more gentle stretch, whilst the black side, which is harder to bend, gives a stronger stretch as a result.

The necksaviour comes in two sizes - the classic, which gives you four stretch options depending on what strength you want and how long your neck is, and the mini, which is, unsurprisingly, a smaller version offering just the two strength options.

necksaviour comes in two sizes, the larger classic (left) and the smaller mini (right)

Although it was the classic I tried at the show, it was the mini, which Wes designed to be more portable and easily carried in a gym bag or suitcase for travelling, that I came home with. And it’s the mini that I’ve used regularly - and more frequently in the past six weeks - ever since.

I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise, considering the credentials of its creator, that it should be as effective as it is, but I can honestly say that between 5 and 10 minutes of lying on my necksaviour and any neck ache I have - which can sometimes be quite severe - is magically gone.

The details you need to know

The necksaviour isn’t cheap - the classic (the one I’m trying out in the pic above) costs £44.95 and the mini is £32.95, but on a per-use, pain-relief basis it’s honestly worth every penny.

You can buy them from the necksaviour website where you’ll also find excellent information and videos on how to use them.