If you suffer from jaw, neck, or shoulder pain, your physician may recommend exercise as part of your treatment. But which exercise? How do you find exercises that help to resolve your condition?

For example, with a jaw injury, exercising just the jaw muscles won’t resolve your problem. In fact, it may make the pain worse. This is often because all the surrounding muscles and tissues are also restricted or injured – but are not exhibiting pain syndromes. These structures may even be the cause of the pain in your jaw!

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Work the Kinetic Chain

Rather than working with only the single area of injury, the exercise routines in this book treat your body as a dynamic web of interconnected links – a kinetic chain

The first volume in the Release Your Kinetic Chain series of exercise books applies a functional approach to exercise and helps you to achieve two basic objectives:  

• The primary objective is to rehabilitate your body after an injury (or restore function after a long period of inactivity) and prepare it for more intensive exercise programs.  
• The secondary objective is to help you prepare your body for sport or athletic performance training.

Developed by the internationally best-selling authors of Release Your Pain, these exercises – when performed on their own or when combined with a treatment modality - will help you to take a key step towards resolving long-standing soft tissue injuries and neuromuscular problems.

Jaw, neck, and shoulder...what’s the connection? We don’t normally think of these structures as being interconnected...until we suffer from pain or injury to one of these areas. And suddenly, we become very aware of the inter-relationships between these areas.

Our bodies are a remarkable series of kinetically linked systems which, when working efficiently, store and release impressive amounts of energy when we need it!

It is important to understand that our body is one very large Kinetic Web, in which tension within one area directly affects the soft tissue structures in adjacent areas. When a structure in your jaw, neck, or shoulder is injured or restricted, it becomes unable to effectively perform its normal functions such as chewing your food, turning your neck, or even shrugging your shoulder.

Copied from Chapter 2: Understanding Your Kinetic Chain – Exercises for the Jaw to Shoulder

Read the case studies in this book to see how an injury in one part of your body can affect structures in quite distant areas, and affect how you function on a daily basis. In this book, our sample case studies use the following examples to help you understand how kinetic chain relationships impact your ability to perform tasks normally:

Case Study 1: Shoulder Injury caused by playing baseball: Resulting in jaw and neck pain.

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Case Study 2: Golf injury causing chronic TMJ.

Isometric Jaw Resistance

In this exercise you will apply resistance to the actions of closing, opening, and lateral deviation of your jaw while it is in a resting position.

There should be no movement of your jaw while doing this exercise. The goal of this exercise is to establish normal alignment of the jaw while maintaining its correct postural position.

Internal-External Shoulder Stretch

The rotator cuff, scapulae, and joint capsules of the shoulder often become tight with repeated throwing motions, racquet sports, or tasks that require you to continually reach overhead.

Beginner’s Front Bridge

This very effective exercise targets your shoulders and core abdominal muscles.

Use this exercise to strengthen your core and to power all the actions of your body.

All the routines in this book integrate your core structures into the exercise program…very important since the core forms a critical component of any kinetic chain. 

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ur exercise routines always take into consideration a key fundamental aspect of good rehabilitation – Kinetic Chain Relationships.  

Since injury or weakness in one area of your body always affects the function of numerous other related areas, we ensure that our routines take into account direct muscular connections, muscle antagonists, fascial connections, as well as the fact that tissue restrictions affect the primary mechanisms of energy storage and release.

See “Understanding Your Kinetic Chain” in this book for more information.

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Our exercise routines always consider how the core of your body acts as the power generator for your entire body. This is true even for movements of your neck, shoulders, arms, hands, legs or feet. No matter what the action, you need a strong, stable core to be able to transfer energy to your extremities.

Improving the Elastic Quality of Your Tissues

Our exercise routines also address the development of your elastic power or the ability of your muscles, ligaments, tendons, and fascia to store and release energy. The ability of your soft tissues to store and release energy is dependent upon the quality of your soft tissues.

Low-quality tissues are full of adhesions, scar tissues, and knots. These tissues do not store or release energy efficiently.

High-quality tissues can move easily through their full range of motion, are not restricted or adhesed, are capable of long periods of endurance, and are not easily injured.

One of the primary goals of our exercise routines is to help you improve your overall tissue quality.

Integrating Aerobic Warm-ups

Aerobic warm-ups are an integral component of all of our programs. It doesn’t matter if we are dealing with a jaw, neck, shoulder, back, or leg injury; aerobic training is essential.

By developing your aerobic system you increase your circulatory function and your ability to produce energy on demand.

Aerobic exercise does this by increasing the density of capillaries in your muscles, and the density and activity of mitochondria (your personal energy factories) in your cells.

Exercises for the Jaw to Shoulder

Volume 1 of the Release Your Kinetic Chain Series of Books