Transcription
♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous ♪
♪ Physical therapists ♪
♪ On the internet ♪
- Hi, folks, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- I'm Brad Heinick, physical therapist.
- We are the most famous physical therapists on the internet.
- In our own opinion, of course, Bob.
- Hey Brad, we're gonna talk about two sleeping positions you must avoid. This is a good topic to me, or a timely one, because you know there's nothing worse than not getting your sleep.
- Right, being waken up in the middle of the night, painful, can't get back to sleep, wondering why, what can you do about it. We got the answers.
- We got the answers. And Brad and I just went through daylight savings time, the change. So we're losing an hour of sleep, basically. And I'll tell you, I was just all in a funk all day yesterday, so I'm just starting to come out of it. So this is a good timely subject.
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What are these two sleeping positions, Brad?
- Well, Bob, it's not that easy. We just can't say don't do this and don't do that.
- We gotta give them a reason.
- We're here for a little education, so that once you become educated, you understand and then you do, there's a whole philosophy on that, but we don't want to get into that. But the biggest areas that cause complaints of pain, are neck, shoulder, and back, right? Those are probably the most common areas that become irritated and painful throughout the night. So we've gotta take care of this and address it and understand a little bit.
First of all, joints in general, whether it's the joints in your spine or your shoulders or your back or whatever it may be, your neck, wanna stay in what we call the loose pack position.
- They don't like being at the end range.
- Right, so my shoulder here would be loose pack, up here, would be end range.
- Or back here would be end range. So I wouldn't sleep like this either.
- Right, so neck, if we put our neck over to one side this way or one side that way, all the joints to your neck are pushed to the end range, we call it. And that's uncomfortable after a period of time. Initially it may not be a problem, but you hold your neck over like this for, you know, 20 minutes or more, it becomes uncomfortable. So keeping that in mind, the next thing we wanna do is look at the spine and not just look at it, but understand the spine moves and it twists and whatnot. But we wanna keep it in a neutral position, Bob.
- Correct.
- Okay. So a neutral position is actually where there's a little curve in the back here, there's a curve in the other direction in the...
- So we've got a curve in, curve out, curve in.
- Right, yep. So we want to keep these curves in that kind of a general shape, you know? So we're not going way out. And if you look at it from the front view, now that typically want to keep straight. So the curves are looking from the side and this is looking straight. So this will all come to play when we look at our positioning with sleeping. So anything else that I missed?
- No, you got it right, Brad.
- Okay. So let's look at position. Yeah. For once. Well, it happens I was up studying late last night on this one.
So the first position is we're gonna talk about prone, laying on your stomach.
- So this is a bad position.
- Right. This is a position because it breaks a number of the rules we just talked about that create pain, gets you outta that neutral position, or puts you at end range. So if I'm gonna lay here and let's just take a regular pillow, Bob. And there are people who sleep prone and they have for a while and they do okay with it. But the problem that can really occur when you're on your stomach, you almost have to have your head one position over, over to the right or to the left. And that puts my neck at end range and I'm laying there for a long period of time. Now I'm assuming people who sleep like this that don't have pain, throughout the night turn their head right to left.
- Well the other thing is though, and I didn't see a study on this, but we did do kind of a informal survey of this at a classroom one time. We ask how many people have headaches? And a hundred percent of the people that laid on their stomach had headaches.
- Sure.
- Throughout the day?
- Throughout the day or throughout the week. You know, I mean, had a higher incidence of headaches. So that's something to consider is that if you are especially having those headaches that start from back here. You know, the neck headaches. That's one of the things I would definitely look into.
- Sure. And I think, you know, if you're a prone sleeper, you may or may not have a pillow. I guess without a pillow, it puts you more in a neutral position. But you know, still, if you can avoid the prone position for your neck, it's gonna be better. And then the other thing is, if you lay in your stomach and with your shoulders, if you lay like this, that puts your shoulders at end range and it also puts your brachial plexus at end range, they can get pinched off and actually cut the circulation off into your arms or pinch the nerves and you can wake up with numb or tingly nerve.
- And I have. One time I woke up, both my arms were numb to the point I couldn't and I was trying to turn the alarm off. So I'm going like this. It's just, yeah. It's a little embarrassing.
- Right. So, and that's, you know, there's a name for that, Bob.
- [Bob] What is it?
- When put your arms up like this working overhead.
- [Bob] Sure. What is it?
- I can't remember. I know there's honeymoon syndrome where if your, you know, spouse falls asleep on your arm and that becomes numb then.
Right. So next position, Bob. I'll think of that in just a little bit. Sideline. Now this is, you might say, "Well everyone sidelines." Most people do, which I do myself. But oftentimes a shoulder problem will happen when you're laying on the point of your shoulder if you will, and the joint when you relax you can sublux or actually push the ball, the shoulder joint out slightly and can put pressure on the ligaments and the capsule, et cetera in your shoulder and cause pain. So laying like this on the shoulder, can really create some pain. So what you'll wanna do is pull this shoulder out a little bit so you're actually on a little bit of a slant here versus here.
- And then you're getting more on the meaty part of the shoulder that can handle it on the back there.
- Yep. And that's gonna help reduce that. So the sideline can be a problem, but if you do these little twerks that we're talking about it'll help you out.
- We can show another thing for that too. But Brad, the other thing, while you're in this position, the other thing is your back is sagging a little bit when you're in this sideline position.
- Yeah, let's get the spine out and show that.
- So here, you know, it's straight, but now it's gonna sag a little bit right here in the low back. And so if you're having back problems and if you especially you sleep like this a lot, all the time, you should take like a rolled towel like we did here and you can put it in that position. Or there's actually a sleep roll you can buy. We have it in our Amazon section there by McKenzie. And this one you can actually tie around your waist so it's in your back when you sleep on your back or it's on your side when you sleep on your side.
- Right, yep. And you know, in my case, I know I can sleep on my side for about 10 minutes. I never even get to sleep 'cause my back starts hurting then I have to go to my back. But that's just 'cause of my spondylolisthesis. So this is how this works. This one's a little bit small for me, it doesn't wrap around. But people who have a disc problem often use something like this so that here you have the support on your low back in the lordotic section. And then when you roll to either side, you also have that hollow spot being filled in.
- There's another possibility, Brad, here besides it being too small for you, maybe your waist is too big for it.
- Yeah, there you go.
- [Bob] Just point out that possibility.
- Should we show 'em the trick with the pillows?
- Yeah, sure. Let's do that. Let's go this right here. So this is a cervical pillow here, but another way, I'm gonna put this on this side, Brad, just for my mic purposes here. So, you know, generally when you're on your side, if you're gonna lay on your side, you want to have a thicker pillow so that your neck isn't going like. Wanna take it out once, Brad? It isn't going like this. You wanna have your neck right in the middle too. So this is almost a little bit...
- This one would actually need to go up a little bit.
- Right. So, but the other key, we've showed this many times, is actually you take a pillow, a lot of times it's more of a throw pillow and that's what I use. And I just create the little canal here. And you can put your arm right in there and now there's not nearly the pressure on your shoulder there was before.
- So this is at sideline, making sideline tolerable and acceptable to keep the shoulder pain from waking you up.
- And now if you're having pain in this shoulder and you don't wanna lay on it, which is good, then you should actually, besides the canal, well you might not even need the canal. But you would put a pillow here and another pillow here and support the arm like this. And again, it puts that shoulder in that loose pack position that Brad was talking about. It's not in end range and it's kinda a little bit forward. And it's not going to cross the body like this, which is also bad.
- Right. Because then you're getting towards that end range and you know, irritating them.
- Right here in the middle. That's where you want to keep it in. It's gonna do it well.
- Right. And the last thing is sideline, a lot of people will get a pillow like this that actually has the form and it's a memory foam.
- Oh right. So there's a gap for the neck.
- Right. So you get the neck in a neutral position. And that's not necessary. You can use a regular pillow and some people, you know, I'll have some people try just a towel roll to fill in that gap to get that neutral position in the neck.
- So if I lay here now with the towel roll, see how it really cradles my neck nicely. So, and now we don't have the neck sagging either. So that's actually pretty comfortable.
- Yeah. If this works, but it's not quite as cushy, you may wanna invest in the memory foam, they cost a little more, but...
- Or there's the cervical roll too.
- Oh yeah, the cervical roll.
- We got all sorts of good things.
- Yeah, there's a lot of things to keep you comfortable.
- McKenzie makes a roll here for a cervical, we can put it in there. And if you find the towel works well and you don't want to keep using the towel, you can go and get one of those.
Right. So what it boils down to we got two positions to avoid, the prone which we don't have any solutions for and sideline, which we have a number of solutions for that we just went through. So you know, we're helping you out at least on half of the...
- We're half smart.
- Right.
- So thanks for watching.
- Take care.