Simple Shoulder and Neck Releases | Fitness EP 02

🧘🏼  The Amazing Movement Podcast with Carol Beringer: Neck & Shoulder Relief

Get ready to revolutionize your day with just 10 minutes of functional neck and shoulder movement with the Carol Beringer Method! In this wellness episode, Carol introduces her philosophy of "unremarkable movements with remarkable benefits" by focusing on your neck and shoulders - areas where many people experience tension and discomfort. Learn simple, effective techniques to release tension, improve posture, and relieve stress using just your own body. 

Carol demonstrates how proper neck engagement can create space between vertebrae, reduce stress, and even impact your overall posture. Perfect for all ages and abilities, this episode helps build your movement repertoire with exercises you can do anytime, anywhere.

CHAPTERS:
00:00 Introduction to Amazing Movement Podcast
00:31 Why Neck & Shoulder Movement Matters
01:52 Understanding Good Posture and Core Engagement
03:00 Connection Between Stress and Neck Tension
04:18 Neck Stretches for Length and Space
05:33 Head and Neck Alignment Exercises
07:38 Twisting Movements for Relief
08:30 Shoulder Release Techniques
09:43 Final Energizing Movements

ABOUT CAROL BERINGER:
With over 22 years of experience running her Pilates studio in Wayne, Pennsylvania, Carol combines expertise in functional movement to help clients achieve improved posture, pain relief, and lifelong wellness. Her approach addresses the common neck and shoulder issues that arise from our modern lifestyle.

TECHNIQUES MENTIONED:
🧘🏼 Ear to shoulder releases
🧘🏼  Chin up/down movements
🧘🏼  Head pressing exercises
🧘🏼  Twisting with proper posture
🧘🏼  Shoulder settling techniques
🧘🏼  Arm swinging for circulation

BENEFITS HIGHLIGHTED:
🧘🏼  Stress relief
🧘🏼  Improved posture
🧘🏼  Space between vertebrae
🧘🏼  Jaw tension release
🧘🏼  Core engagement
🧘🏼  Better circulation

CONNECT WITH CAROL:
Website: https://carolberinger.com/ 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pilatesandmore110/ 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CarolBeringerMethod 
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-amazing-movement-podcast/id1801483560 

SUBSCRIBE and Join us again next week for another quick tip in the Amazing Movement Podcast series!


#NeckRelief #ShoulderTension #PilatesInstructor #MovementReeducation #StressRelief #AmazingMovement #carolberingermethod

Transcript

00:05 - Carol Beringer (Host)
Hi, carol Berenger here and welcome to this week's episode of Amazing Movement, and Amazing Movements are unremarkable movements with remarkable benefits that carry you through your day. How do you get through your day? You sit, you stand, you walk and you drive. We want to have good posture to do that and there will be episodes where we specifically work on posture and when people come into. I do have a Pilates studio in Wayne, pennsylvania. 

00:31
It's over 22 years now and when people come in their neck, because we have this 12 to 15 pound bowling ball on top of the thinnest part of our spine and everything happens in front of us and our brains are very close to our jaws and shoulders. So any stress that we're feeling, or even if it's happy stress when we're busy in the brain, it pulls us tight here. So so many people come in and they just go oh, my neck, my shoulders. I really want to, you know, get in touch with those and loosen them up. It's really simple and it feels divine. So we're just going to start with good posture, with hips, knees and feet in alignment and again, the hip sockets are in here in your pelvis. This is your pelvis. Your femur goes up and there's a ball and socket here, and this is your hips. You want to have hips, knees and feet in alignment where your heels. If you were looking in a mirror you wouldn't see them. So you're not turned out, you're not turned in, that you're here, and the weight is equally distributed behind the big toe, the little toe, on the heels of the feet. So you want to find this A lovely way to engage your core properly and all the layers of your abdominals is take your pinky and put in your belly button, thumb on your breastbone and just pull those two places apart. 

01:52
I'll show you what that looks like sideways, because it's pretty profound, alright, so pinky in the belly button, thumb on the breastbone and just pull those two apart. The tailbone goes down, the breastbone lines up. Space is created between all your vertebrae. So your neck is our vertebrae, so that's your cervical spine. Your thoracic spine is where your ribcage is. Your lumbar spine is your low back, where 85% of humans have discomfort, tightness or even pain in their low back, because this huge torso plugs into what should be a mobile pelvis, because our hip sockets are often tight and even your hip sockets will lighten up when you lighten up what goes on in your upper body, because if your head is hanging forward there's so much pressure. If this were were your chin on your spine, and also that's where stress hormones are come out of your your nerves, come through your spinal column and so with that's where they come out, so it keeps loading your stress. 

03:00
So when we do these next neck exercises and shoulder exercises, they will relieve a lot of stress in your life, and you know that because this is tight, but it is because your brain is close to that and what goes on in there goes on everywhere. All right, so we're going to stand with this nice posture and lifting the breastbone up off the belly button to make space, like if someone were behind you with a spotlight, they'd see space between each vertebra. All right, so just let your arms hang naturally at the at your sides and with that lift it should bring your shoulders back over your torso as well. Let's just take your ear over to your shoulder, reach the same arm out to the side and rest it on the outside of your skull and then push your head up into your hand and just the weight of the hand will give feedback and you will feel this lengthening. I really feel like my ear is draining and it will open up the jaw. Your chewing muscles, for size, are the strongest muscles in your body and so, right, I'm just going to inhale. As I exhale, I'm just going to think of feeling the length of what's going on. I might even feel it down into my shoulder blade, into the clavicle, this bone across the front. Everything's connected and it's a lot. 

04:18
If you ever look at a picture of a musculature and then just raise that arm up, we're trying to create as much space, own all our real estate and then take the other ear over to the other shoulder, Reach that arm out, reach it as long as you can, decompressing from the center of you out to your fingertips. Place the hand on the outside of the head and then press the head up gently into the hand and breathe, inhale and exhale. I like three nice breaths, because that's about six or seven seconds and that's how long it takes for your body to start to build a muscle memory. And then reach that arm up, create, take, all, reach all the space that you can. Now let's just nod the chin up towards the ceiling and then look up at your eyebrows. It'll feel like your neck grows. I mean, it might not even be moving, but just ocular cueing, eyeball movement. There's a lot of tendons that go from the back of your head to your eyeballs and this is giving them some length. I don't like to think of stretching, because stretching has no end, but if you find your edges, you're finding your length, and that was probably three breaths. 

05:33
And then you draw a line down the wall with your nose, keeping that breastbone lifted, bring your chin towards your throat, lengthening through the back of the neck and just looking down past your body to the floor, and then take one hand and place it on the back, the roundest part of your skull, the other arm, reach it out long, bring it back there and I'll push the back of the head into the hands and you'll feel this all the way down between your shoulder blades, maybe into your upper low back, and then draw that same line, keeping the elbows wide, and lay your head back into your hands. Don't let your ribs pop forward. As you lift up like this, you might feel like your tailbone is going down towards the floor, that your thighs are lengthening in the front and that your hamstrings where your glutes connect and that's a bonus because there's so much sitting going on in our lives these days that there's this saying called gluteal amnesia. So we don't want to have that. And then bring the head back, keeping the hands connected to the head, put one hand on top of your head and and then the other one on top of that and then push your head up into that and your neck will grow both directions. Okay, we're going to take one elbow up to the ceiling. We're going to keep lifted as we do this, keeping the separation in your spine, in your head, you can think again how someone behind you would see space between you, because the more we involve our mind in our movement, it becomes a new habit. And then push your head up into your hands to come up to reach the other hand on top, because we always put our favorites, we repeat the same kind of movements and the three breaths every time you exhale. Push a little more with your head into your hands and it's nothing strenuous or stressful, it's just lengthening, creating all your length. Come back up to the center. Switch your hands again. 

07:38
Now we're going to lift the breastbone to turn You're keeping your hip sockets facing me like they're headlights and just lift up through the breastbone to take that turn and three breaths again. And I like to inhale through the nose and exhale through a soft jaw, because those muscles are so the chewing muscles are those strongest muscles in the body per size, and how many people do you know? Come up through the center pressing your head up into your hands. Switch the hands and lift up and twist to the other side and keep breathing, inhale through the nose, exhale through the soft jaw. If you have good posture and use your abdominals, you're strengthening your core, because the abdominals are meant to push the air out of your lungs and the junk out of your lower intestines, believe it or not, but as long as you're breathing, all that's working really well. 

08:30
Switch which hands on top and just think of drawing your shoulder blades down your back and pushing your head up into your hands and it might look to you like my neck's growing, because it feels like it is and then keeping your hands on top of each other it's palm over palm. Bring them down in front of you like you're hugging a tree and then just settle your shoulders. Keep the shoulders settled and just raise those up and down, and up and down and again and again. Three if you're doing it with a good inhale and exhale is about that six seconds. Then let's just take our arms down by our sides and shake them out and then just swing like a maypole the big strings. Just let the arms be as long as they can, initiating from your waist and then just let the arms start to swing, quiet your body, shake your hands. 

09:43
Again Three breaths it's getting circulation going too. And remember any of these things that we're doing. If you just do one at a time, my hands are tingling. It feels so good. One more breath, set of three, and using the releasing the tension here, it takes all the tension out of your face. Reach your arms up and shake and then, when they come down, you'll just feel invigorated. Alright, join us again next week for another quick tip.