Rowing - A Great Exercise For Your Back That Will Help Keep Chronic Tension Headaches Away
by Paul Bacho
An Exercise for Your Mid and Upper Back
If you want to get rid of chronic tension headaches, you must correct poor posture. You do this through retraining your muscles to adapt to proper posture.
Through stretching and exercise. It's particularly important to strengthen your back. Strong back muscles will help hold up your shoulder girdle so you can pull your shoulders back and maintain them in that position all day.
It’s very important to remember that in order to keep tension headaches away, your back, shoulder and chest muscles need to function in the proper position as long as you’re up. For most of us, that’s 16-18 hours a day.
Not only do you have to strengthen these muscles, you have to work on their endurance as well. Obviously, they’re going to need a lot of endurance to hold you upright all day.
Probably the best exercise for strengthening the muscles of your mid and upper back is a seated rowing exercise. You can do this exercise in a number of ways.
If you have a rowing machine, use it. Emphasize the pullback and really stretch out the shoulders and chest as you pull and squeeze your shoulder blades together.
If you don’t have access to a rowing machine, a simple, inexpensive alternative is to get an old inner tube or one of those therapeutic bands that are available in sporting goods stores (they’re like giant rubber bands). Or, you can simply get some old tubing, like the inner tube of an old bicycle tire.
How To Do the Rowing Exercise Properly
Sit on the floor, with your legs out in front of you. Take your tubing, theraband, or old bicycle tube, hook it over your feet and duplicate a rowing motion. Pull back, making sure to keep your shoulders, back and head up, and squeeze your shoulder blades together as you pull the tubing toward you. This is simply a very basic rowing exercise.
To keep things simple, do this exercise until the muscles in your back begin to burn slightly. That burning sensation indicates that you’ve reached the fatigue point of those muscles. It’s almost the same burning sensation you feel about midday or late afternoon at work - the burning sensation that happens right before your tension headaches kick in.
When your muscles begin to burn, quit and note how long you did the exercise.
If, for example, you did the exercise for two minutes before your muscles began to burn, then your goal should be to increase that time by about 15-20 seconds. Each time you do the exercise, try to improve your performance by that amount of time.
When you do this exercise, pull back until you come to an upright position, then pull your arms back as far as you can. Make sure you’re squeezing your shoulder blades in. Don’t do the exercise rapidly, but keep up a good pace.
Your goal is the same as it would be for any other weight lifting or aerobic activity - you want to gradually increase your performance until you reach your target. That target is to be able to do this for 10 minutes three times a week.
Paul Bacho is a certified athletic trainer in Cleveland, Ohio with over 28 years experience treating patients with chronic pain.
He's also co-author of "How to Get Permanent Relief From Chronic Tension Headaches," a holistic program that he's used to help people from all over the world get rid of their tension headaches.
For more information, go to http://www.tensionheadaches.org