A Bear on Your Shoulders? Stretching Tips to Relieve Trapezius Muscle Pain

Modern medicine can explain chronic shoulder stiffness, particularly trapezius muscle and scapula pain, by translating the wisdom of Donguibogam into scientific language. Prolonged computer use continuously strains our trapezius muscle and the muscles surrounding the shoulders. At this time, the muscles fail to relax and remain continuously contracted, which is called static load. This static load impedes blood circulation within the muscle and reduces oxygen supply, causing fatigue substances such as lactic acid to accumulate in the muscle. This is similar to athletes developing muscle pain when overusing their muscles. However, in this case, it is even more severe in that the fatigue persists without movement. Furthermore, chronic muscle tension forms trigger points within the muscle. These trigger points feel like taut bands when touched, and while they are painful in themselves, they sometimes cause referred pain where shoulder pain spreads into a headache or arm numbness. Neurologically, this phenomenon occurs because the spinal cord segment connected to the muscle shares pathways with nerves of other regions. Just like a short circuit in an electrical system, a problem in one spot sends a faulty signal to another. In addition, psychological factors such as stress and anxiety are major culprits that worsen shoulder pain. When under stress, the sympathetic nerve of our body's autonomic nervous system becomes excessively activated, causing muscles to tense up and blood vessels to constrict. This directly aligns with the qi and blood stagnation mentioned in Donguibogam; in reality, as the blood supply to the muscle decreases, the pain threshold drops, leading into a vicious cycle where greater pain is felt from even small stimuli. It even affects the way the brain interprets pain signals. In particular, poor postures such as forward head posture or rounded shoulders compress the nerves around the cervical vertebrae, which in turn induces excessive tension in the trapezius muscle, locking the pain loop even more tightly. In this way, our body sends the signal called shoulder pain through complex connections among the brain, muscles, and nervous system.