[Angelique]

Today, for some reason I started thinking about the range of motion exercises that I learned in massage school years ago. We did them on clients, but you can do them on yourself. Here's a couple of tips that I remembered today.

If you are trying to increase your flexibility in a position, follow these steps.

1. Always warm up. Don't hurt yourself, please.

2. Get into the position you are working on and go as far as you normally can go without hurting yourself.

3. Now, relax a little and find something that you can use for resistance, I usually use my hands.

4. Push in the opposite direction (that you were originally trying to stretch) providing resistance with your hands (or whatever else you are using for resistance).

5. Try the original stretch again. This should allow you to go a little farther. MAKE SURE you don't go too far and hurt yourself. You want to go little by little, even though you might feel more flexible right after providing resistance.

Also, I wanted to share that if you are feeling a lot of back or neck pain from being on the computer, you might get someone to rub your back and neck.
That's good, but make sure that you are also rubbing your chest area (pectorals) and stretching by looking up (slowly) and trying to touch your shoulder blades together.

The idea is to massage and stretch your posterior and anterior parts in a balanced way so you're not 'over-worked' on one area. You need to do the opposite of what you were consistently doing to cause the pain. (For example, the opposite position of hunching over your computer, if that's the problem.)