category: Neck Pain and Stiffness

How to do a swan dive exercise

To do the swan dive exercise; start by lying flat on your belly on a pilates mat, fold your hands up so they are palm down either side of your face. Take a deep breath in, as you breathe out lift your head up off the mat, then your collar bone, then your shoulders, then your breast bone, keep lifting or ‘peeling’ off the mat until you either start to feel tension in your lower back or your arms are straight whichever happens first, then breathing in deeply return your body to the mat, starting with your rib cage little bit at a time, then breast bone, then shoulders, then collar bones then head. 

Important: If your lower back starts to feel sore, think about pressing your pubic bone into the mat and don’t lift so high, some people can only come up onto their elbows in the exercise and that is totally fine!

Swan dive combines strength and mobility of the neck and upper back. 

1. Strengthens the muscles and improves shoulder strength: 

Using your muscles to lift your head and chest off the ground strengthens the muscles that run along the back of your neck and draw your shoulders together. The benefits of this are twofold, they increase the muscle support and stability for the head on top of the neck (especially important in rehabbing whiplash type injuries). It will also improve shoulder posture, therefore allowing the neck to be in a more neutral relaxed position while the eye gaze is still forwards. Bonus points: your arms are supporting your shoulders so that you have support to fall back on if your muscles aren’t quite up to the task yet. 

2. Improves neck and back mobility

Slowly moving joints repetitively through range has been shown to improve their mobility and decrease stiffness, the benefit of the swan dive exercise is that as well as strengthening your muscles you are also moving throughout the whole range. Therefore you are also working to decrease any neck stiffness. 

Commonly in patients with mechanical neck pain report pain provocation from activity, these activities may involve prolonged sitting postures, movements towards the extremes of range, such as looking up high, or repetitive, prolonged (computer/ office work)  and/or strenuous upper-limb activities (such as stacking a shelf overhead). All of these activities may have moved the cervical spine away from the neutral zone for a prolonged period. 

When viewed anatomically the neutral zone is a region of intervertebral motion around the neutral posture where little resistance is offered by the passive spinal column. 

This means that the loads associated with maintaining a regular neck posture are reduced. By reducing abnormal strain on supporting muscles and joints, it promotes a more sustainable physical state that may withstand daily stresses without injury or pain.

It is when these loads are no longer within the normal parameters for the muscles, tendons, ligaments and joints of the cervical spine that pain may arise, this is known as mechanical neck pain (MNP).