Why Do My Shoulders Hurt When I Paint? 

Are your shoulders tight? Do your fingers cramp-up or tingle after you’ve been sculpting? Have you had a knot in your shoulder that seems to be worse after you’ve been painting? You’re not the only one. As the Official BrushThrall  Massage Therapist, I’ve worked with them to fix the badness they’ve done to themselves through years of hobbying. I also see these things in my private practice. Neck, shoulder and back pain are amazingly common. I mean, how many people do you know that DON’T have tight shoulders? In this article, I aim to explain which muscles are the problem and a couple of things you can do to reduce the pain you might have. I’ll also tackle a few referred pain conditions, which is where one part of you hurts but the problem is somewhere else.

Muscles are interesting. There are three types - skeletal, smooth and cardiac - but we’ll be talking about skeletal muscles. These are the ones that give your body shape and move your bones. They can be soft or hard, flabby or toned, overstretched or contracted. And they are responsible for most of the aches and pains we have. Now, I’m not a medical doctor, I’m a clinical massage therapist. That means I deal with soft tissues, like muscles and fascia. Fascia is the thin fibrous covering that surrounds your muscles and muscle fibers. Picture a clear produce bag with a bundle of celery in it. The celery is your muscle, with different stalks (muscle bundles) and each stalk has strings that run the length of the stalk (muscle fibers). The bundles and fibers make up the whole muscle, like the stalks and strings make up the whole bunch of celery. The plastic baggie is the fascia. It surrounds the whole bundle like a protective coating, yet it allows the muscle to move around like the celery moves in the baggie.

There are two reasons muscles hurt - they’re too tight or they’re over-stretched. Believe it or not, it’s usually a combination of both. This happens because most of our muscles are bilateral, which means we have them on both sides of our body. Good thing too, because our chairs would look really funny if we were lopsided. But because our muscles are working in pairs, one side gives while the other side takes. When you bend forward, your abdominal muscles contract to pull you forward and your back muscles, the Erector Spinae group, have to stretch and let you go forward. The pain happens when one muscle is stuck in contraction. Either the contracted muscle will spasm from being tight too long or the overstretched muscle will scream in pain because it’s not getting any oxygen and it can’t breathe. When treating the pain, sometimes the massage therapist will have to do a little detective work to see if the problem is contraction or overstretching. Because everyone’s body is different, there is no hard-and-fast rule that "if this spot hurts, it must be this muscle." It doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes it’s the complimentary muscle, the other half of the muscle group.

My guess is that a lot of you hunch or scrunch your shoulders while you paint. You probably lean forward and brace your elbows on the table and paint with your wrists, locking up your neck, shoulders and torso. You probably take shallow breaths too, at least in that position. If you do, quit it! And if you can’t stop, then take more breaks. Trust me, the model isn’t going anywhere. Take a break at least once an hour, a standing up break, please. I mean, go to the bathroom, smoke a cigarette, do something that gets your body moving. Don’t just lean back in your chair and change the channel on your TV. That doesn’t count as a break. Get up, stretch, take 5 minutes and come back.

Now that you’ve done that, let’s talk about neck pain. There are two main culprits for neck pain, Levator Scapula and the Scalenes. Levator Scapula does just what its name says, elevate the scapula. This one shrugs your shoulders. If you’ve ever painted for a long period of time without a break, especially if you hunch your shoulders, you’ve probably felt that tightness in the top of your shoulder. Your Scalenes are located in what is known as the Anatomical Bermuda Triangle. They are underneath other muscles, sometimes they can be hard to find and I can get lost there. They are also the cause of pain in your back, chest, neck, shoulders, arms, hands and fingers.

Levator Scapula lives between your neck vertebrae 3-5 and the top edge of your shoulder blade. When it contracts, it pulls your shoulder blade towards the ceiling. To fix pain here, you need to lengthen or loosen the contracted muscle to keep it from going into spasm. Go get yourself a tennis ball. No, not the one the dog has slobbered on, get a new one. And get a clean tube sock too. Put the tennis ball into the sock and hang the ball end over your shoulder. Now, lean up against the wall with the tennis ball on the belly of the muscle.

You can adjust the pressure just by leaning into the wall more or less. There are really fancy tools that accomplish the same thing, but a tennis ball and sock work just as well. To strengthen the Levator Scapula muscles, grab a couple of weights or your textbooks and let your arms hang while you shrug your shoulders. ArkenTyre demonstrates how this works.

Strengthening your muscles is really just building up your tolerance level. The stronger they are, the more punishment they can take from you before they start hurting.

The Scalenes are a set of three muscles, Anterior (front), Middle and Posterior (back). They’re located in the side of your neck, between vertebrae 3-5 and the top two ribs. They start in the same place as the Levator Scapula, but they wrap towards the front instead of the back. The Scalenes do work they’re not supposed to, like help us breathe, and they don’t get a lot of relief. The primary function of the Scalenes is to extend, flex and rotate the neck and head. Lengthening the Scalenes usually requires the work of a trained professional, but you can use strengthening exercises to keep the tissues from contracting into painful bundles. ArkenTyre is demonstrating rotation.

 You can also stretch the tissues by flexing and extending your head.

Just don’t make your head go all the way back because it hurts.

Time to get up and stretch again. Go take five and come back. Seriously. See you in five minutes.