Sore shoulders/neck

[Tiger79]

Finally sorted my knee and my shins and now my shoulders are giving me issues. After the first ten mins or so my shoulders and across the back of my neck starts to hurt and feels tight. Any ideas on why or how to fix?

[crox Graduate]

Are you too tense when you run? Try shaking your arms (without looking daft). You might also want to think about your posture.

[Tiger79 Graduate]

I've tried shaking my arms down a little and tryin not to be too stift. Maybe I need to get someone to video me running as I'm sure my posture might be off just not sure how lol

[crox Graduate]

You could try somewhere like sweatshop on the pretext of buying some new shoes...

[Beek Graduate]

I get a lot of upper back pain and have to consciously keep my top half relaxed and my head up. You may just be tensing up too much.

[cherimoya]

I was also getting an aching left shoulder towards the end of my first few runs - weeks 1 and 2. And something else too: at the end of my run I often noticed my left hand was quite cold compared with my right one.

I decided I must have some kind of muscle tension or stiffness in my left shoulder that was being amplified during my runs and causing the pain, as well as preventing the blood flowing properly around my left arm, hence the coldness. And so it seemed to me a solution might be to get into the habit of doing some regular flexibility exercises to loosen up these muscles and hopefully solve the cause of the problem.

In week 3 I decided to try the Strength & Flex podcast. I'm afraid I haven't stuck with it because I found some of the exercises a bit awkward and uninspiring. However, I thought it was quite good idea to do some dynamic upper body stretches whilst walking. I've adopted a couple of flexibility exercises in at the end of my runs - arm swings and neck rolls. I do these a few times during the 5 minute cool-down at the end of the podcast, which means that it doesn't even take any extra time out of my daily routine.

Ideally I would like to do more than this, like a 30 minute yoga session on my rest days, but I haven't gotten into the habit of that yet. But something is definitely better than nothing for now.

Anyway, I guess I don't know for sure if it's solved the problem, but I've just reached the end of the week 4 and I haven't noticed a sore shoulder or cold hand in any of my last few runs, so I think it's helped.