Best Sleeping Positions (Dos & Dont's)

hey everybody dr oliver here from backintelligence.com and today we're going to talk about sleep positions and how some of them are good some of them aren't so good and what things you can do at home to make sure you're sleeping with the best posture you can and the least stress on your body if you haven't done so yet click the subscribe button to get more access to other videos we have so we got leon here leon's going to demonstrate for us some different sleeping positions we're going to talk about a few first and foremost let's just talk about the one we shouldn't do right so it's very common for people to be comfortable and sleeping on their stomach but it is the more stressful position for your body it's particularly stressful for your neck why because you have to breathe right so most people are going to turn one direction most of the night just think about it what would happen if you walked around with your head turned like this for four to eight hours a day probably not a great thing right so it puts a lot of stress on your neck because it's constantly causing stretching on one side and compression on the other side it's also very stressful for your jaw because of the amount of pressure so if you have any tmj or jaw related issues it's definitely a position to avoid you can also put your low back in a stressful position too so we just generally don't like stomach for most people i know it's hard for some people to get out of this position but do what you can do to work yourself to either the side or the back which we're going to go into next so let's go through the back position so generally most people find this position more comfortable but if you're going to go from your stomach to your to a different position you're going to find it probably hardest to go right to your back so you probably go to your side but the back position generally seems to be the least stressful for most individuals and we're going to show you why here and we're going to show you things to do and not to do so pillow thickness is the thing to really pay attention to so you don't want a pillow that's too thick if your pull is too thick it's going to place your head in an upward position right so some people have just one giant pillow some other people use multiple pills so we'll give leon a second pillow here and we'll show you what'll happen as he's laying down you can see that his head is flexed up so if he's sleeping like that all night he's putting a lot of stress on the base of his neck pressure into the back of his head and it can lead to a lot of headaches for people the strain and abnormal tension in your neck as well and again most people spend too much time sitting at computers with their head too far forward so let's not do that while we sleep too so let's reduce the height of the pillow so we'll get we'll back leon out of there we'll take this guy down and we'll see is this enough for him or not much better right so he's in a better position he's still slightly flexed up but he's really in a pretty neutral position and what we want to see if there's no flexion in your head and your ear is essentially in line with your body and it follows you all the way down to your hips so this would be a nice neutral position and you can find it to be nice and relaxing one thing we're going to talk about with this position this position tends to be a good position if you have a bad back or a blown out back in a particular situation if you have a hot back we tend to have people sleep on their back but we tend to have them bend their knees so we can have someone just have a slight knee bend and if you find it more comfortable you can stick a pillow in there or a little support that takes a lot of stress out of your back and it can take a lot of load out of it so this could be a comfortable position if you have a hot back or a back thing going on right now but all things being equal if we don't need it we don't need it we just take that away the other position that can be okay and it's fine for most individuals is on your side so i'll have leon roll onto your side so let me lay on your side facing the camera so again we're looking at the thickness of the pillow so what position is the head in in line with his spine and his back again we don't want if it's too thick he'll be leaned up here so we'll give leon an additional pill we'll see how he does with too thick a pillow good so he's in that position you can see that he has a slight cocked angle here his ear is elevated up towards the ceiling a bit and this is going to put more stress again more compressive load to one side more stretching load to the other side it's just not neutral we want that head nice and neutral not tilted so nice neutral position you got to find the space here so look from your ear to your shoulder what kind of space is that the pillow should be that thick actually a little thicker because your head weighs something so we want to be in that nice neutral position so we take this pillow away from leon and again we don't want to be too thin either if we're too thin here with it you're going to find that the head is tilted down and really cave it into your shoulder so again you just have the opposite effect so we want neutral position so for leon this pill is too thin if we go to this pillow by itself this is probably going to be a better pillow for him it's a little bit thicker it's going to provide him that nice neutral position so again we're looking for straight lines we want to fight if we were to trace it down we trace the line down through the middle of his face through his nose through his spine through his hips he's got a nice neutral position his knees are slightly bent that can take pressure out of your back as well this position can also be helpful if you have a bad back or something going on in your back generally what we'll tell people to do is just put a pillow between their knees so if we can prop up his knees a little bit put a little support there that just takes a little pressure off so if you have any s i pain or low back pain this can be also helpful so try these positions if you're on your stomach get yourself to your side at a minimum right now or if you can go to your back and again sleeping these positions with better support on your head is going to cause less stress on your body all right thank you for joining us today we hope you enjoyed this video and if you did please give us a like as well as subscribe to this youtube channel for more videos just like this now if you'd like to get three video exercises that we've done with dr david oliver that will help you to correct some of that forward head those rounded shoulder you know that kyphosis that we're all suffering from today because we're looking down at our phones we're hunched over our computers all day so these exercises are meant to correct your posture so if you'd like to get them uh they're completely free uh there's gonna be a link to get them somewhere here on the video or down below in the description just go to that page enter your email and we'll send you those videos right [Music] away

Channel: Back Intelligence

Views: 762,332

Keywords:

Id: b1Hdg2Nxs2E

Length: 6min 3sec (363 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021