Transcription
Hi guys, welcome back to the channel. In today's video, I'm going to talk about the hidden muscle causing cervicogenic dizziness that no one ever talks about. I'm going to tell you three reasons why this muscle is crucial for not being dizzy. And most importantly, I'm going to give you three awesome exercises you can do today to start getting relief from cervicogenic dizziness. Let's get into the video.
Well, welcome back everyone. I'm Maro with Physio Tips with Maro. I've been specializing in cervicogenic dizziness and cervicogenic headaches and cervical instability for 24 years. I'm the owner of Australian Physiotherapy Specialists here in Jacksonville, Florida. And I'm excited for today's video to share with you the hidden muscle that once it becomes weakened becomes a huge part of why cervical dizziness happens.
I'll start with what is cervicogenic dizziness. If you're new to the channel, you haven't seen any of the previous videos I've done, then maybe you might be thinking, okay, what is cervicogenic dizziness? Cervicogenic dizziness is a dizziness that can be caused with pain or dysfunction in the neck, particularly the top two or three joints of the neck. You have tons of nerve receptors embedded in the neck and the muscles and the tendons that play a huge role in your balance system. So, when your neck is sore, it can make you really dizzy.
So the hidden muscle that people never talk about is the suboccipital muscles. This is a group of four muscles that attach the upper vertebrae to the neck and skull and they have three super important functions. Let's go over these three functions.
Function number one is they provide stability to the upper neck. When I mention stability for spine segments, what I'm talking about is there's a little bit of motion between your spine bones. That's okay. We would call that within a normal range. But if your muscles become weakened, what'll happen is your vertebra your vertebra will begin to shift outside that neutral zone or normal range of motion. And that's what we would call clinical instability. If you have clinical instability of your upper neck, you could get symptoms like dizziness, headaches, nausea. Your neck will constantly pinch because it doesn't have that perfect stability. The bones are frequently falling into a pinched position, a malaligned position, and you'll notice, ah, I can't quite turn as well to the left. The next day, maybe you can turn a little better, and then one day later, you're back to not being able to turn. So, the suboccipital muscles play a crucial role in providing stability for the upper neck.
Function number two, they provide what's called proprioception or position sense awareness. Proprioceptors are nerves, tiny sensors that are embedded in the muscles, especially the smaller muscles of the spine. In the large muscles like muscles of the shoulder girdle, often times there might be less than one proprioceptive nerve per gram of muscle tissue. In the suboccipital muscles, these four muscles that crisscross at the upper neck, there are over 250 proprioceptive nerves per gram of muscle tissue. So when it comes to small muscles that do fine control and stability, we're going to find more of these proprioceptive nerves.
When it comes to balance, we could think of your balance as three parts. There's your ears. Sensors in your ears tell your brain if you're going up and down like on an elevator or if you're accelerating like in a sports car. Your eyes tell your brain if the room around you is moving. So that's an important part of your balance. And then the third is the proprioception sense of [snorts] where is my head in space. If your proprioceptive nerves are working pretty good, you can close your eyes and you can usually find the tip of your nose. You don't have to have visual input in input because your body just knows where your fingers are in space and where your head's in space. But if your neck has been sore, guess what? Those proprioceptive nerves become diminished and now you get a conflict of information to the brain. The brain relies on the eyes and the eyes say, "Hey, guess what? You're not moving. The room's not moving. You're stable." Your ears say, "Well, you're not going up and down. You're not on a merry-go-round." But your neck gives a false sense of what's going on. And that causes dizziness. Cervicogenic dizziness can be persistent. It can last for days. It can last for months. It can be almost all the time.
Let's go over the last function. The last function of the suboccipital muscles is eye-head coordination. Maybe you've noticed you go to the grocery store and you're scanning all these multiple items while walking down the the aisle and it could make you feel dizzy. Your upper neck and those suboccipital muscles play a crucial role in eye-head coordination. Or maybe you're the passenger in a car and you notice traffic's whizzing by and you're watching all these cars continue to move and you get really dizzy or maybe car sick. That would be an example of weakness of the suboccipital muscles.
Now you might ask, "Hey Maro, how in the world did my suboccipital muscles become weak in the first place?" Great question. And I always tell my patients, there's two big things that can happen that would make your suboccipital muscles dysfunctional. One is you could have pain. Pain could come from an injury, car accident or a fall or it could be come from repetitive injury like sitting with bad posture at your office for 25 years. Pain will reflexively inhibit the deep muscles of your upper neck and that will lead to atrophy. As a matter of fact, with car accidents, they found that not only will the muscles atrophy and get smaller in the suboccipital muscles, but it could also cause fatty tissue infiltration. Healthy muscle tissue is replaced now with fatty tissue. That's not a good thing.
The second thing, this is important too, that can lead to weakness of your suboccipital muscles is not fighting gravity. So low weight-bearing, prolonged positioning and low weight-bearing is harmful for our spine muscles. So what does that mean? That means if you sit all day, you get half the weight-bearing as standing. So standing, walking and moving is very crucial. If you sit poorly all day, it's even less than half of standing. If you sit in a recliner, you're getting very little weight-bearing. And if you're laying down frequently, you're getting no weight-bearing. It's microgravity. Microgravity studies show that your deep muscles, especially muscles like the suboccipital muscles, will atrophy if you're in that prolonged low weight-bearing position. So, if you've seen commercials that say, "Hey, get into the zero gravity chair and spend all of your day. This is lovely." Nope. They're actually prescribing disability. Don't listen to those commercials. Turn away. At the end of the day, Hippocrates, the guy that made the Hippocratic Oath, that that's what we name it after. He used to say walking was man's best medicine. I think Hippocrates was on to something. When you're holding yourself up with good posture and you align your chin neutral and you walk around frequently during the day, even though you might feel bad, keep getting up, that's going to be a great way to keep those occipital muscles challenged, strong, and healthy.
So, there we go. That's why the suboccipital muscles are super important. Now, let's go over three exercises that we can do to strengthen the suboccipital muscles. The suboccipital muscles perform for us two main functions. One is they perform rotation of the head on the neck. So, we're going to look at an exercise for that. They also perform extension of the head on the neck. So let's go over a couple options that you might be able to do today to start strengthening your suboccipital muscles and start getting some relief from cervicogenic dizziness.
Exercise number one, I'm going to look at maybe a target. In this case, I'm using my thumb, but in actuality, I wouldn't want to hold my arm up and look at my thumb because that puts stress into my neck. So you find something that's eye level and then what you do is you rotate a little bit to the right and you rotate a little bit to the left. If you're new at this exercise, you want to start very slowly. If you go quick, if you do it too vigorous, if you do it too quickly, this could cause pain in the upper neck, which could lead to dizziness. But if you can do this, you would repeat this looking at a target. This could be a sticky note on the wall, could be a focal point in the room. And you build to where you can do about 10 reps. Notice I'm keeping my eyes on a central object as I rotate. You get 10 reps, reassess, make sure you're not too dizzy, and then you could build up to two or three sets of 10. This is a great exercise to start using those suboccipital muscles to engage in rotation. By the way, if you want a step-by-step plan to finally fix cervicogenic dizziness, I put everything into my new book, Cervicogenic Dizziness Relief. In the book, I give you all of my exercises, explanations, and daily routines in a very simple format. It should be out December 2025. Check the link below and don't miss it. All right, back to the video.
Now, let's go with a scenario that you tried that and you said, "Wow, that makes me really dizzy. I don't think I'm quite ready for that." Okay, let's go over option number two. Option number two, same idea. I look straight ahead, find an object. This time, what I'm going to do is I'm going to rotate away and then I'm going to come back to the middle. I could leave my eyes in that target. Rotate away and come back. You can try that. Try 10 reps. And then what you do, you keep your eyes on the target and then you rotate away and you do it on the left. So instead of doing the rotation right and left as one exercise, what we've done functionally is we broke it into two parts. You do the right as one exercise and then you go to the left and come back and do that as one exercise. Sometimes breaking it into components, right first and then left, could be more comfortable and make you less dizzy. That's going to allow you to be able to start exercising those occipital muscles. A third detail that I'll mention is just monitor the range of motion. If you rotate too far to the right, even if you're looking at one object or not, and it makes you painful or it makes you have pain or makes you dizzy, then what you do is just don't go as far. Keep your eyes looking in the middle and maybe modify. Don't go as far but also modify the speed. So that's one option.
But let's go with another scenario. You tried that. You tried modifying it. You modified all the things that we mentioned and it still makes you dizzy. This happens frequently. Here's another option. Now what we're going to do is a rotation isometric. When we think of isometric exercises, I think about two opposing forces, but there's no relative motion. They're just opposing themselves, right? So I'm going to put the palm of my hand on my face. I'm going to look into my hand and I'm going to slowly push into my hand as if I was rotating, but my hand is going to block that action. I'm only going to do this with maybe less than 5% of your total strength. You don't want to put so much force into it that it makes your neck sore. So, I look into my hand, I gently push like I'm rotating, right? Hold that for maybe six, maybe eight seconds, and then I relax. What you could do is you could work up to where you do maybe five reps like this. Once you get five reps comfortably, later you could progress to 10 reps. And this could easily be a twice a day exercise. So that's a couple options that we could work on rotation.
Now, I'm going to move to a clip that I did where I'm going to show you a couple fantastic extension exercises that you could try and that's going to round off a really good routine for the suboccipital muscles. Let's look at this clip and look at a couple of these extension exercises.
Exercise number one, we're going to start with exercises that are maybe a little easier and then we're going to kind of go in an advanced direction. Um, if your neck's really really sore, maybe you have really bad headache and you're real dizzy and you want to strengthen your extensors, but you're kind of nervous about doing too much, this could be a good starter exercise. I'll show you how it's going to work. You could be bellied up to your kitchen table at home. I'm going to lean over on my elbows a little bit and I want to make sure that my shoulders are strong. If I'm too relaxed, my back will sag between my shoulder blades. So, I want to gently press through my elbows to make sure that my middle back does not sag. Okay. Now that you're in the correct posture, I'm going to curl my chin in and gently look down as if I had a book here and I was looking down to read. Okay. So, I get in the right posture, curl my chin in, look down, and then I carefully kind of uncurl my neck and come back up. I want to come back up to somewhere eye level slightly downward. Since I'm already leaning forward, I want to make sure that I don't go too far up where I could put stress and strain on my neck joints. So, I get my good posture, look down with my eyes, curl my chin and head in, slowly come back up. If everything goes well, let's do a set of 10 of this. This is number two. Back. We're going to go all the way to 10. If you're at home, you could do this with me. Three. Right. Come in. Four. Make sure it's pain-free. Make sure it's dizzy-free.
So, there's the hidden muscle, the suboccipital muscle, why it's important, and three great exercises to get your strength and stability back. Give the exercises a try. Go slow, start easy, keep it dizzy and pain-free. And then drop me a comment and let me know how you're doing. I love to hear great stories how people are starting to feel better and respond to some of the exercises. Well, don't forget to subscribe to the channel so you never miss another video. And if you got anything out of today's video, do me a favor, hit that like button and share it with a friend. Well, that's the video. Thanks for watching everyone and we'll see you next time on Physio Tips with Maro.