 Movement Matters, a show designed to bring you the best physical therapy tips and exercises to decrease pain and get you back to doing what you love. I'm your host, Christine Linders, physical therapist and board certified orthopedic therapist. Do you suffer neck pain or numbness and tingling, traveling down your arm? If you do, this episode will teach you what to do to get out of pain and literally save your neck. The most common cause leading to neck pain is related to how you hold your head a neck for your day and your fun activities. If you sit slouched, your head and neck move forward. If you enjoy surfing, your head and neck are in a compromised position while you're paddling. And while a few hours sitting slouched or paddling on your surfboard won't necessarily hurt your neck, doing this over and over for years will. In this episode, David Kelly, owner of Hawaiian South Short Surf Shop on Ward Avenue, talks about 25 years of success in business, a lifetime of surfing and his own recent struggles with neck and arm pain. You'll learn the simple tips and exercises that saved my neck from surgery, as well as the ones that David's going to be doing. Welcome, David. I'm so excited to have you on the show. Hey, thank you very much for having me here live. That's pretty cool. I love it. I love it. So we were talking, I don't even know how long it's been now, like a month ago, I came in and I bought the Moe and I love it. And you mentioned to me when you heard that I was a physical therapist that, hey, you know, I was just having some neck and tingling. What should I do? What were you feeling? So actually when you first came in, I was telling you about my neck problem because I went to a chiropractor and also went to a acupuncturist. And I was getting this, I had, I guess, a pinched nerve and I didn't really know what a pinched nerve was at first because I was having it on my, my shoulder blade and then the acupuncturist is like, you know, it's actually not from your shoulder blade. It's from your spine. And then I started asking you about it. And you started getting into details about how surf is, you know, it's pinching the nerve and that's causing it and all that stuff. And then you started to give me some advice. I forgot about that. Yeah, because I think I was so excited about that. That's right. Did you get to do any of the things that I showed you? Like, is it feeling better? I've done a few. I'm still out there surfing, but yeah, I've been trying to, you know, pull on my neck and stuff like that. I think I told you I bought this thing on Amazon to pull on my neck, but it didn't really help. But some of the other exercises, I did it once or twice and, you know, just like a typical surfer, you know, if it feels a little bit better, you just go back out in the water and now sometimes I get that little numbness on my pinky. So and that's actually a common problem around all my friends that surf mostly shortboarders and they always say, I got that tingling in my finger. We were talking about that last night. And when you mentioned that you had other buddies or other surfers that were having that same problem, I was super fired up about the show today. And, you know, I was going to say the videos for later, but Eric, let's go to video number one right now. We have neck pain or worse of pain or tingling going down your arm, coming from your neck. The first thing that you want to do is get your head in your neck in a better position. It's usually from poor posture or holding your neck in the wrong position for too long over many years that happens when surfing, when you're paddling and you're kinking your neck up like this, or if you're slouching or looking down at your phone or hanging your head forward when you sit. So the first course of action is to do some exercises to help your neck and get it in a better position. So you get a just a squishy pillow. You want to first do what I call a chin tuck, you nod your chin down, make a nice double chin, nod your chin down, make sure not to lift your head. Nod your chin down. What that does is starts to strengthen the deep neck flexors that when your head is craned forward, they get very weak and it also helps to stretch out the muscles in the back of your neck down here. So that's what I call the chin tuck. The next one, now that you stretch these muscles out and you're starting to strengthen this is to move your head back over your shoulder where it belongs. So you tuck your chin and squish the pillow gently. Tuck, you don't want to push really hard. You don't want your body to come up. You just do a tuck and then squish, tuck and then squish. And that starts to bring your head back in between your shoulders. That takes all the tension up here for people that have headaches, eye grains, I call them right in here. So first tuck, you do 10 of those and next tuck, squish. You don't actually have to do them all the time on a pillow. You could do the tuck up against a wall. You can do it sitting in your car seat at the light and you can do the tuck and squish into your car headrest as well while you're at a light. My favorite exercise, then David and I were talking while the viewers were watching that and how you forgot those. But it's so important because what that's doing is it's, you know, every time you're surfing, your head is kinked up like this. So all these muscles are long and all these get tight. And that's where the nerve canals get compressed and start giving you the tingling. But if you do this first, it starts to strengthen this, but it opens this up. And then when you do the tuck and squish, it brings your head back. So now the canals have restored their normal relationship. And then the nerve doesn't get bumped into any more and you don't get the tingling. So it's tell your friends, tell everybody. And I said at the end of the video, you could do it on a wall. Just tuck the length in. You could sit in your car seat and talk to lengthen. You could try to maybe do it right now. Yeah, no, I remember you were telling me that. Yeah. And, you know, actually the next day I was doing that in the water and I did that for two days. And after that, everybody's like, OK, OK, OK, Dave, enough. Tell them if they get tingling, tell them to do it. I was doing it the other day because I was up at Pueena and I was paddling a lot. And I'm really hard to try to get into some of these waves. And because they were just a bit smaller, but I also do this. I class my hands behind my head like this and I push my elbows back. And that's another one because you could push your head into your into your hands. And it's like this, right? You're all like hunched over. Yeah. All here and you push back like this. Maybe they'll like that better or or this kind of thing, you know, just kind of stretching like this. Then then you do. No, but the arm part you were telling me that helped actually at night when I'm in bed after I surf, I almost surf every day. But at night, I take I stretch my arms out and I just kind of let it over. And it's been helping out. I remember you telling me that. So that's the great one. I have a video of that one. It's it's video number four. Can we play that one now? One of the best stretches I've come up with over the years to help your neck and to help improve your posture and get from this position to this position to allow your head and neck to move back is the doorway T chest stretch. Now, that stretch is not new per se, but how I add breathing to it really enhances the stretch. So you want to get in a T position like this with your arms at or just above shoulder height, elbows straight. We want to protect your shoulders. You're going to put one foot in front of the other also to protect your shoulders. And then you are going to exhale all your air and then take a sharp, brief inhale with your back foot, you're pushing forward. Inhale. Another one. Inhale, you can also turn your head to the right and turn your chest to the right to stretch more on the left side. Inhale, switch your feet and then repeat to the other side. Turn, turn your chest, breathe in. Why this is so useful and works so well to get rid of neck pain is because your pec minor attaches from your shoulder blade underneath into your ribs. And so when it's tight, it holds you down and you're trying to do all these exercises, you want to stretch it out first so you can get into that beautiful posture and save your neck. That's such a good stretch. So Dave and I were just talking. He said he was laying in bed and kind of what? Hanging your arms off the bed, right? And yeah, so I would actually I would I would turn one way and I would just kind of put my arm like this and just relax it and try to open up as much as possible. And then I would turn the other way on the bed. And then I would just let my arm kind of fall over without, you know, stretching it too much and just let it fall over on itself and I was helping out because I'm in front of the computer all day too. So after I surf, I'm in front of the computer. So when I'm surfing, I'm always like this, you know, sitting on the board. And then I'm in the front of the computer just sitting like this. And I remember your after you bought the board, you're following me behind you like, hey, better posture. And I was like, oh, man, because I have a tendency to pull my neck out like this. And yeah, somebody took a picture of me when I was sitting in front of the desk. And I didn't even realize how much my neck is sticking out like, you know, like a chicken or something. Like a chicken. I don't know if chickens do that, but you know what? No, it's so funny because I remember you helped me put the surfboard and I'm like, hey, chest up, you know what I always tell people? It's a horse thing, right? The horse blocks its neck out. But when it's like the show horse and they are riding the dressage and all that, they keep its head up like this because it kind of looks better for the horses, right? And they're probably trying to keep them under control. I don't know. I don't do that. But I noticed that they're always like keeping them all tucked in tight. And I always think of that when I tell people when they're like heads hanging out here, I'm like, you know, bring it in, bring it in like up over like the show horse who's kind of prancing around because it looks better. But it's also like over years, like I said in the intro, a couple hours like that is not a big deal. You might get some upper trapezius tightness. But when you do that over and over and over, your structure changes because collagen is laying down in your body all the time until you're like 90. And so you're laying down collagen in that position. And then you're paddling in that position. And then pretty soon, 10, 15 years later, you go to do this and you're like, oh, I can't quite get my neck up because it's still you can still change it. But it takes you more like months of doing this consistently and this consistently, instead of like a couple days of it to stretch those muscles out. And that's why it's so important for surfers because if they got a desk job or whatever, and then they're paddling and you're going out there like you said, every time there's a swell and it's big enough waves head high, you're out there doing it. But then you're coming home and are back to the shop and you're sitting and you're working on your business. You have to be more mindful. So it's a combination too of that and the paddling that's giving you some of that, you know, tingling in your fingers. And we want to stop it before it becomes like a real problem. You know, yes, it's actually been like this for probably the tingling in the fingers probably like 10 years. OK, I'm on the challenge. Let me see if we can stop it in the next three. Oh, really? That would be nice. That's right. I mean, I'm going to write this down. I got three months. I didn't know you had it for 10 years. I thought it was a new. Well, the tingling is off and on. And a lot of guys around me have that. Do people that are sitting in front of just get that tingling tingling Duke like a surfer does or oh, they do. Oh, interesting. I the first time I saw a lot of that when I was working in New York City and I had a bunch of about like early 40 year old people coming in and complaining of tingling like that in their fingertips. And I was showing them how to sit up straight. And and a lot of the guys are coming back saying, hey, listen, like I'm on I'm on my computer. I'm in meetings. Like I'm answering calls on my Blackberry. I'm doing all these things. I can't even think of it. I'm so engrossed in this. And so I said, well, maybe you could set your your phone to go off something obnoxiously annoying like every 15 seconds. So you're constantly doing this because then your brain starts adopting that as a pattern to fix you up. And he came up with this thing called the LUMO lift. L-U-M-O-L-I-F-T. And I don't love it. I actually bought one for some corporate stuff I did in New York City just to test it out and see. It worked for him because it vibrates every time there's a slack in your business shirt. So they were a T-shirt underneath and as soon as the business shirt buckles, it would vibrate and he would sit up and that worked for him. He said he only needed it for three weeks. And then he remembered because his body would be like, oh, that kind of thing. And now there's all these kinds of devices out there. But I bought one. I tried it as a woman to hook it on my bra and it doesn't work because it doesn't really slack enough to vibrate. So there's pasture straps and braces like that. But I tell people like to form the habit, usually this is your biggest thing. Set the alarm to go off every minute or every three minutes and you have to stop and stop it in about an hour. You're gonna be so irritated that you'll just, you'll be correcting yourself and that will become unconscious. You need to app with your voice on it. Hey, sit up. That's what I've been wanting to do. And I wanted the bobblehead Christine that was like this, that people could sit right on their laptop every time they're like, that girl, I'm gonna sit up straight or stretch my neck out. So in the morning, when you get up, what kind of stretching do you do for your neck? OK, so I will take my hand and I don't like to just pull my head over because I feel like it compresses it. But I will take my hand and pull up towards the ceiling to the right. And then I will look down towards my armpit. I'm tucked in here. I'm like long neck is my thing. I'm tucked in towards my armpit. So first I put, yes, like that. And then you feel it pulling all back here, right? Yeah. And then I don't pull it forward, right? You're doing it right. You're tucking down long neck and then I do the same thing. I pull up to like stretch. It's like alleviate the compression and then tuck my chin and then I go over and then I look towards my armpit. And then I'm doing it right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go over your hand a little lower. Like lower to the base. Oh, OK. And then pull up towards the ceiling. So it brings your chin down a little bit and then go over. Oh, OK. Yeah, you feel how you're getting a pull like in the back of your neck? Oh yeah, I was doing it here. Yeah, no, no. I guess I don't care more. Oh. You get like a long, like the traction thing that you bought. It's like elongating your neck, not that I need a longer neck. I have a very long neck. So I mentioned in the show words how easy some of the exercises I did to prevent my own surgery. I had two really bad car accidents. So a vertebra in my neck while they're supposed to stack up like this, my bottoms are like this. And so I get lots of tangling down my arms. It's gone now, but I had it for about 10 or 15 years. And I've been doing all these exercises for 10 or 15 years. But the neurologist and the orthopedic surgeon that looked at my neck, I was working with them. But the email came back and said, wow, that's one crazy. All these have helped. I no longer have tingling in my arms. I sit up very straight. I do the pec stretches. I do my chin tucks. I do the chin tuck and press. I do this on my surfboard right here. And all those things that I'm at work, I do them. And if we go to video number two, we'll show you some of the things that you can do in the proper paddling stance. To save your neck when paddling, it's very important to retain the long neck position. And this is so that you can prevent neck pain from keeping you out of the water or worse, needing a surgery after 30 years of keeping your neck in a rough position while you're paddling. So when you're paddling on your surfboard, a lot of people are just like this with their head up. And so it's almost like your head is resting on the back of your back, your upper back. You wanna maintain this long neck position. So it's like your chin is down. So I don't know if you can see my neck is longer versus kinks like that. You wanna keep that position. So you can still see your eyes look up. You're keeping this long neck versus hanging out down here. That's the problem is you don't wanna hang out down here. It really compresses the joints in your neck, really stretches this out. So you wanna go up long neck and then do your paddling. Enjoy that quick tip. Okay, that's a good video. And because of time, and I wanna tour the surf shop and see what kind of boards Dave has, let's go to video number three where we're gonna show how to undo the sport. Once you're done with your surf session, you wanna make sure that you can undo the sport. The same goes when you're done working on your laptop or looking at your phone. You wanna exercise the pastoral muscles on the back to strengthen your body, to hold your skeleton up. Couple of my favorites are to hold a band or not, rotate your hands out. It's a great exercise. It relieves a lot of the tension here, but it also is hard to slouch and do this. It kind of pops me up. So you wanna sit up straight, squeeze your shoulder blades. Again, keep your chin level, maybe 10 times. You could do it here, pull back until the band hits your chest. Pull back until the band hits your chest. You could also do this. You could use an exercise band and tie it to a doorway and pull back this way. What a way to get rid of neck tension. And also, if you catch yourself like this sitting at your desk, and you don't have anywhere to do exercises or you're paddling and you forget because you're trying to change your habit into the more long neck position, you could simply just take your fist, put it under your chin, sit up as straight as you can and squeeze your fist, squeeze your fist. It's a chin tuck, squeeze your fist, squeeze your fist. Those are my favorites, but I do have one more. It's a little bit hard to do. You want to hold the band like this so it's flat. Put it behind your head so it doesn't slip right here. Straighten your arms out into a V position and then just move your arms back and forth. You don't want to pull your head forward. You want to push into the band like that. Move your arms in and out. You can turn your head left to right. All of these are great exercises to undo your sitting posture, undo the surfing posture to save your shoulders and your neck. Start high, pull low. Again, long neck is the key. Long neck and shoulder blades squeeze. Enjoy feeling better. Dave, are you doing a post-surf, undo the sport workout? Like something like that? Any bands or any things or? My post-surf workout is coffee. That's it. I mean, I want to start a post-surf workout revolution because it probably could only take about, I don't know, 25 seconds. Like I'll do this or I'll open up or I'll do this kind of thing. Something to exercise the muscles on the back because you were just working the ones on front. And again, like that overtime thing, these over time get tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter and those over time get more tired and not so much weaker but more tired from stabilizing. And so a quick little pushback, not just a stretch, a quick little pushback. I always tell people this is like a W, this is a T, something to exercise them or the bands is critical. Maybe when you surf later today, you could do a couple of W's and see what your friends have to say about that. I'll try it. I think it'll be good for me. Yeah, because we're in the, all of us are in the water for three, four hours. So I read almost every morning. So yeah, it'd be good to do that. If you ever want to paddle out on a small day, I'll paddle out with you and I'll show everybody. Well, I go pretty much any day. Even if it's small. Okay. Yeah, even when it's like waist high, still go out. So now you, do you have this brace underneath your arm? And I want to talk about that because you also partially tore your ACL the very first time I met you and you were asking about hip exercises. And last night you told me about this brace. Tell everybody about this brace and how it's helped you with your crashes and bigger waves. Yeah. So when I first, I was being dumb and there was a little closeout barrel and I knew I shouldn't have pulled in, but it was a good day and I pulled in and then ended up tweaking my knee. And I heard it pop. And that was the first time I ever heard my knee pop. And it was really painful, but it was a really good day. So I went out and caught a couple more waves and on the fourth wave, it just got really bad. So I went in and then long story short, did an MRI and had a pretty good tear in it. Did some rehab only a few times. And then I found this brace online and this thing's been helping. You know, after I did a little recovery, I hurt my knee right after it. And then when I found this brace, I can surf on pretty good sized days. And it stabilizes. It's so good. It comes with this like, it's like a spandex kind of a thing that you put underneath it and then you crank down on it. And man, it works good. This thing's like a year, probably, I don't know, like 18 months old now, and it's still good. It looks brand new. It's from using it a lot. Yeah. It just has a little rough spots, but it's good. No, but still like salt water. I mean, that thing has held up great. I need to, I'll find out from you what that is. So I can post it for everybody. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. No worries. So now let's go to the last video number five. So we can see how to fix your posture. And then we're going to tour the surf shop. Sitting with poor posture is one of the major causes of neck pain in anyone. So if you're sitting like this with your head forward of your shoulder, instead of your ear over your shoulder, or if you're hanging your head down, looking at your phone, or leaning like this, looking at your computer screen, whatever you're doing when you're sitting in poor posture like that, over time, it changes the position of your neck and the bones start to become stiff here. And this tends to be get, tends to get more rounded. So the biggest thing you can do right now to improve your neck is to sit up straight. And when I say sit up straight, I don't mean sit up straight and lift your chin up. You want to keep your eyes level and your chin level, not down level. So that's how you want to sit. And so you can use a pillow in your back here to help support you in the chair. But the key is to get your shoulder blades and your butt touching the seat without rounding your back. As soon as you round the back, you can see what happens to my neck. And you see this curve get more, you don't want that. You want a nice, gentle, slow blinker. So pay attention to how you sit. You can squeeze your shoulder blades to help you. Again, keep your chin level, don't lift your neck up like that. Keep your chin level, squeeze your shoulder blades, rotate your arms out. You can also do what I call a stick-up. Squeeze your shoulder blades. This is one of my favorite, you just get in the W position and you squeeze your shoulder blades, enjoy. If you guys are, okay, here we go. All right, we're gonna tour Dave's Surf Shop, Hawaiian South Shore on Ward Avenue here in Honolulu. So let's go check out what you got. All right, so I'll do it this way here. I'll start like this. So it's a half boutique and half, you guys see it, yep. Oh yeah. So these are all the clothing sections, a lot of board shorts, suits, we got tons of surf accessories. So if you're in the Honolulu area, we're in Pacaaco, right across the street from the former sports authority. We got tons of fins. All our staff are trained by the vendors and we have a lot of knowledge from the vendors that come out and help us. We get things released to us really early. We've got tons of surfboard and boom, these are the modes that you've got. I love my mouth. I see this. You didn't have that? Yeah. I love my mouth. Yeah, so the model is called Moe and the person that it's hardly gonna be Moe in the construction is a special type of a construction that we have exclusive here in Oahu and the guys at Firewire are the distributors for it now. So all the long boards and the fun boards we carry are Thunderbolts and then we have a bunch of... Wow. We're pretty empty. I mean, boards right now, everybody's getting served during COVID and stuff so. And then we got tons of lofts. We've been working with lofts for 23 years and they've been around 25 or 26 years now. So we've been with Matt for almost since day one and that's it. I love it and you know what? I have to tell you, my Moe, I've been talking about it so much since I got that board and I have had the most fun and the longest rides. And I have three fins on it, right? But I can turn on smaller waves. I can not get injured on the other waves. I can catch these waves. It's light. It's like, that's what I wanted just cause I have the shoulder injury from work. And so I actually can turtle roll it if I need to and I can hold it through like if I'm coming out in bigger whitewash and not get it ripped out of my hand. So that board has been great. And I have to tell you the biggest thing that I love about that board is the smile on my face when I catch a wave and I could ride it over and over and over and over again. I was out at Toad's or Secrets or my friend Michelle's the second time I was out there and it was the second wave and I rode it all the way and I came back out like this. Like so happy that I didn't even need to catch another one but I couldn't wait to catch another one. So thanks to you. And it's all because you came in for bikini and you ended up buying a board. I met you and was like, Hey, what do you guys have words and guess what I did? I walked out with a board that day to demo and I came back two days later because there was no ways the day I took it out. Two days later and I bought my own mow that sleek white one. I love it. Thank you. Right on. Thank you very much. Thank you. So that's all we have for today. Do you have anything you wanna say, David? No, I had fun. Time flew by. Thank you very much for coming on to Think Tech Hawaii to Move It Matters and for sharing your board and your experience with us. And thank you everyone for tuning in. We look forward to seeing you in two weeks. Aloha everyone.