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Neck/Shoulder Pain

Which Muscles Power Your 20,000 Daily Breaths?

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Here’s a number worth sitting with: most adults take somewhere in the region of 20,000 breaths a day. Now here’s the question that follows from it. Which muscles are performing them? If the answer is mainly your diaphragm, that’s a large workload distributed to the muscle designed for it. If a meaningful share of the work is being done by the muscles at the front and side of your neck, those muscles are performing thousands of extra contractions daily — on top of holding your head up, turning it, and stabilizing your shoulder.

6 Essential Muscles That Cause Pain Elsewhere

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One of the more frustrating features of neck and shoulder pain is that the spot that hurts is frequently not the spot causing it. People spend months rubbing a shoulder, stretching a neck, or icing a headache while the muscle actually generating the symptom sits somewhere they’ve never thought about — and it goes untreated because nobody looked there.
Muscles refer pain in reasonably consistent patterns. Those patterns have been mapped in detail, and knowing them is one of the more useful things a manual therapist brings to an assessment. Here are the six that account for a large share of what walks through the door.