Hi, my name is Dr. Katie Sleigh and today I’m going to talk about three exercises that you can do at home to help with headaches.
Stretching Exercises for Headache Relief
Headaches are a problem that we see a lot of patients with here in our office. And so we oftentimes will recommend these easy stretches to help those headaches go away.
Chin Tuck Exercise
So the first one is a chin tuck exercise. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to tuck your chin back and kind of give yourself a double chin if you will. So you’re going to push your chin down, and then you’re going to try to bring your head backwards, and you’re going to pause and hold for two or three seconds and then relax, you’re going to try to repeat that exercise about 10 to 15 times, I also sometimes will recommend doing that exercise in the car against the headrest as well that tends to relieve a lot of the tension in the muscles right at the base of the skull up here, which is a big contributor to headaches.
Head Tilt Stretch
The second exercise is going to be a stretch. So you’re going to tilt your head to the side. And then you’re going to look up toward the ceiling and where you should feel this one’s kind of across the muscles in the front part of your neck, all the way up to behind your ear. You’re going to make sure that you keep your shoulder back and hold for about 10 or 15 seconds, come back to the middle. Repeat about two to three times on on both sides of the neck.
Head Down Stretch
And then the third exercise, you’re going to tuck your chin down toward your chest, bring your head down towards your chest, you’re going to gently apply pressure to the back of your head and you’re going to push your head up into your hands until you feel a stretch right at the very base of your skull. On that one you’re going to also hold for about 10 to 15 seconds and repeat two or three times.
I hope that this helped give you some ideas of things that you can do at home to help relieve headaches. If you have any questions please drop them below!
