Treatment Considerations:

Note: make sure that you can passively flex the patient’s cervical spine in supine lying through its full ROM without feeling any resistance before initiating retraining of the deep neck flexors.

Retraining for this dysfunctional movement test focuses on improving the patient’s sensory awareness and ability to activate the deep neck flexors once the inhibiting factors for recruitment of these muscles has been removed. Therefore the exercises selected will depend upon the ability of the patient to “find” these muscles and recruit them appropriately.

Before attempting to retrain the deep neck flexors the sources of abnormal afferent input need to be addressed first. To review these sources and the recommended treatments see Module 6.