How To Fix Tension Headaches: Top 5 Physical Therapy Exercises
To say tension headaches are not fun to deal with is an understatement. Tension headaches are annoying at best, but can be totally debilitating at worst. Tension headaches can negatively impact your ability to think, move, and function…no one has time for that.
It can be hard to find relief from tension headaches. Some strategies just take the edge off.
If you want to know how to fix tension headaches for good, this blog post is for you.
Here’s what we are going to talk about:
What is a tension headache?
What causes tension headaches?
How can physical therapy help tension headaches?
How to fix tension headaches in the short term: get relief NOW
How to fix tension headaches for life: addressing the underlying cause
What is a tension headache?
Tension headaches are quite common and are characterized by their name- tension. Tension headaches feel like dull, achy, painful pressure or tightness in the head or face. Tension headaches typically start at the base of the head and can wrap up the back of the head.
Sometimes, tension headaches are felt in the forehead, temples, behind the eyes, or around the ear. It is common to feel tightness in the jaw and/or neck when a tension headache is present.
Tension headaches can be felt either on one side of the head and face or can be felt on both sides.
Tension headaches usually build gradually and may be associated with stress, repetitive overhead activity, or lifting heavy objects. They often improve or go away after a night’s sleep, then build throughout the next day.
What causes tension headaches?
Tension headaches are caused by tight muscles in the neck, shoulders, jaw, and face (yes, you have muscles in your face!). When these muscles get tight and tense, they send pain to the back of the head, forehead, eyes, ears, and jaw.
Causes of this muscle tension include:
Mental or emotional stress
Postural stress, including prolonged desk work
Overhead lifting
Lifting and carrying heavy objects or small children
An increase in weights used in an upper body workout
Poor lifting mechanics
Core weakness
Poor core stabilization
Improper breathing techniques, including mouth breathing
Postpartum time, including core weakness and breastfeeding
In my experience, there often are several causes at play from this list that need to be addressed!
How can physical therapy help tension headaches?
Underlying tension headaches, there is muscle tightness, limited range of motion, muscle weakness, and poor breathing mechanics that must be addressed. A lot of these problems occur in the neck, shoulders, and core. Physical therapists are movement experts and know exactly what to do to identify and address these underlying problems!
An excellent physical therapist will also identify mental or emotional stress at play with someone coming to them for tension headaches. Physical therapists can guide you through mindfulness exercises, mind-body techniques, and breathing techniques to help you process your stress. This way it doesn’t get stored in your body as muscle tightness and cause tension headaches.
Common techniques used in physical therapy to treat tension headaches include:
Dry needling (if you want to learn more about dry needling, check out this blog post where we explain what dry needling is and how it works)
Cupping (here’s a blog post where we explain what cupping is and how it works)
Hands-on soft tissue release or massage
Breathing exercises
Mobility drills
Core and shoulder strengthening exercises
How to fix tension headaches in the short term: get relief NOW
Phew, that was a lot of background information to cover before getting to the information you’ve been waiting for…how to fix your tension headaches. We needed to cover it so you know exactly what to target in your strategies for relief!
Here are my top two exercise recommendations to do for quick relief from tension headaches. I added some bonus strategies to do as well to make the exercises more effective!
Peanut ball neck release
The peanut ball is my favorite tool to use for tension headaches. I recommend them to all my clients plus keep my own on hand at home to use when I feel a tension headache creeping up.
To perform this exercise, you’ll need a peanut ball. Don’t have one? Not to worry, just take two tennis balls and put them in a long sock or pillowcase, then tie a knot at the end. If you’d like to buy one, I sell them in the office or you can get one on Amazon.
Lay on your back with the peanut ball at the base of your head, right at your hairline. Take a rolled up hand towel or wash cloth and place it below the peanut ball to support the curve of your neck (it also keeps the peanut ball from sliding).
Lay here for 5 minutes and relax. Do some belly breathing or meditation to get even more benefit from this exercise.
You can check out my step-by-step demo of how to do this peanut ball neck release here.
Core activation breathing
In the first drill we went after releasing the tight muscles, here we are going to release tight neck muscles through the “back door.” Oftentimes muscles are tight because they’re trying to stabilize you because something else is not doing its job to stabilize. Oftentimes, this is the core.
With this breathing technique, you’re getting a double whammy. First, we will be activating the core which lets the neck muscles relax. Second, breathing with the diaphragm directly relaxes the neck muscles.
To perform this exercise, lay on your back with knees bent up. Place a hand on your chest and a hand on your belly. Breathe, focusing on the belly expanding first, then the chest. You want your chest to expand outwards, NOT upwards towards your ears.
Once this feels comfortable, make your hands into a C shape and place them on your side abdomen, right below the ribs. Now, do the same breathing technique and focus on expanding your ribs and abdomen 360- to the front, sides, and back. Inhale through your nose. Exhale through an open mouth like you are fogging a mirror. You should feel a bit of tightness in your abdomen as you do this. Continue breathing in this manner for 5-10 minutes.
You can check out my step-by-step demo of how to do core activation breathing here.
Pro tips:
Use a heating pad before doing the peanut ball neck release. This will help the muscles relax even more.
You can do the core activation breathing and peanut ball exercise at the same time! Combine this with heat before and you’re going to feel so much better once you stand up.
How to fix tension headaches for life: addressing the underlying cause
Quick relief is great, but to get off the cycle of always having headaches, you must address the underlying cause.
Remember, there are several causes of tension headaches. The primary causes must be addressed to get lasting relief. Here are some of the most common causes of tension headaches I see in my practice plus exercises I often prescribe my clients to address the underlying cause.
Shoulder blade weakness
This cause of tension headaches is most apparent if you feel your headaches after arm day, especially if the workout involved overhead lifting, raises, push ups, or planks. To address this, you have to properly engage your shoulder blade muscles (think of them as the core of the shoulder) and retrain your arm how to reach overhead.
My favorite exercise for this is the child’s pose rockback.
To perform this exercise, position yourself on your knees and elbows with forearms flat on the floor. Gently push your elbows into the ground to engage the shoulder blade muscles. From here, push back through your elbows until you feel a stretch in your side ribs. To return to the starting position, pull through your elbows.
The key here is to make it super active through the upper body by pushing and pulling through your elbows.
You can check out my step-by-step demo of how to do the child’s pose rockback here.
Stress
Poor stress processing is a huge contributor to tension headaches. We all encounter stress, the key is learning how to process it productively. When left unprocessed, the body stores tension in the muscles, most commonly muscles of the neck, shoulders, and jaw. This over time leads to tension headaches.
Here, the underlying cause of the tension headache is poor stress processing. The exercise to do for relief in this scenario isn’t physical.
The goal is to find a productive outlet for your stress. This can include activities that simply bring you joy.
I also recommend active stress processing. My favorite strategy for this is journaling or brain dumps.
To perform a brain dump, take a piece of paper. Write down what’s going on in your brain stream of consciousness. It can be bullet points, phrases, or sentences; it doesn’t really matter. Just get all your thoughts out of the thought tornado in your brain and get them down on paper.
This helps clear the stress and gunk from your brain. It also allows you to gain clarity on what is really stressing you out…it may be deeper than the superficial situation that triggered your stress response.
Try journaling or brain dumping daily. It can take as little as 5 minutes or as long as you need to work through your thoughts.
If you’re saying to yourself, “Ugh I hate journaling,” don’t knock it until you try it. It can be super helpful!
Posture
I like to say that the best posture is one that is always moving. No one posture is inherently the best or worst. The problem lies in getting stuck in one posture at the exclusion of others.
Everything in life brings us forward. Over time this leads to the forward head posture.
Forward head posture puts lots of extra strain on the muscles of the neck to hold up our heavy heads against gravity. Check out my blog on posture here.
To work on upright posture, I like to give my clients a half kneel breathing exercise. This gets the body upright and stacks ribs over the pelvis, which is a great neutral position for posture.
To perform, kneel on one knee with the other leg in front of you, hip and knee each bent to 90 degrees. From here, take a full inhale through your nose and full exhale through your mouth, feeling the core engage.
Sound familiar? This is the same technique as in the core activation breathing, just in a different position!
You will feel a big stretch in the front of the thigh of the leg that is down, as well as lots of glute and core activation.
You can check out my step-by-step demo of how to do half kneeling breathing.
Conclusion
That’s a wrap! If you made it to the end then you learned a lot about what tension headaches are, what causes tension headaches, how physical therapy can help fix tension headaches, plus exercises you can do for both instant and long term relief
Give these exercises a try!
If you’ve tried them and want more individualized help, please contact us! We would love to talk in more detail, hear your story, and see how we can help.