Mindful Clover
January 18, 2025
Tech Neck and the Process of Physical Therapy
Like many others, for years I have struggled with different types of physical pains that seem unresolvable. My first serious foray into physical therapy came at the hands of chronic lower back pain, which at its worst shot down my leg. After years of poor treatment, medication, and activity restriction―all in cycles of motivation and demotivation, of doing exercises daily for a few weeks until the pain negated the prospects of improvement―I finally found a physical therapist who instructed me on my body.
It wasn’t simply “stretch your hamstrings,” the constant advice from my first PT (who smelled mildly of Vodka during my 12pm appointment). It was much more of a reciprocal process, of my instructing him about my pain, him instructing me on physiology and exercises, on repeat as I experimented and explored. More importantly, though, he instructed me on the process of PT, including the cycles of pain on the way to recovery.
Understanding the process has helped more than any specific exercise I’ve been given. When I understood how to navigate the pain of exercise and movement, it was a relief: Pain isn’t a sign of failure. Of course, I can’t help but think of how the process of counseling facilitates a similar experience with emotional lability.
The stories of our physical pain lives at the intersection of our interoceptive senses and the stories we make about them. Chronic pain hijacks both fronts: in the body-sense, we begin to amplify these signals in an effort to protect our body, which usually leads to other body parts tensing and compensating. In this process, we may think of ourselves as especially fragile or broken if the pain doesn’t subside. When addressing chronic pain, we usually have to address just this process of story-telling and body compensations if we want lasting change. Even when the body part recovers some function, our body and postural habits may perpetuate weakness or lack of function that we must identify and overcome.
As a personal aside, I think this explains why I experienced a tremendous sense of release and relief when focusing my attention & awareness on my lower spine to the tailbone. I was on a 7-day meditation retreat amidst another round of PT. The meditation I engaged in was a mixture of intense focus on the sensations of the area, accompanied by a deep acceptance of what those sensations felt like, painful or otherwise. This resulted in a strange feeling of release, like a rattling followed by involuntary shaking in my low back. It was like something just disappeared from that area.
To begin this New Year I’ve decided to address some new back pain―this time, pain and dysfunction I’ve had in my upper back since mid-2021. I have the dreaded tech neck, which seems to be referring pain down toward my right scapula. The exercises I’ve been given to address the issue are, by extension, provoking a left shoulder injury that I’ve had since 2019. In the spirit of addressing these pains, I’m also lumping in some lingering Achilles tightness in my right heel since 2020, as well as some groin pain that’s lingered since I played soccer in high school.
Reflecting on the combination of these pains, I’m questioning why it’s taken me so long to address these concerns. Though not a complete answer, my love for weightlifting and its results―especially muscle hypertrophy―have led me to prioritize weight on the bar, for overloading purposes, exclusively. My approach led to some deep pops in my shoulder and groin when going for weight PRs, which seems a bit ridiculous now considering all the various ways to reach my goal of muscle gain. Addressing my beliefs and practices in bodybuilding are part of the process of dealing with these lingering pains.
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