Question
Hi,

My wife had a succesful operation for slipped disks in the neck part of her spine two years ago. Follow-ups (including X-rays) have given her spine a clean bill of health. But she is still suffering from pains and tingling/numbness in her right arm. Massage helps, but only temporarily. But we have noticed that her right-arm triceps (the long head part, on the upper arm bone just below the armpit) is extremely sore (can barely be touched without eliciting pain). I know from weight training that the triceps can actually be involved in locking the arm to the body, and my wife has indeed tended to lock the arm to the body ever since the surgery. Could this be causing some restriction in the ulnar nerve or other nerves going down the arm? And is there any somatics exercise that would help loosening up the triceps - I am a devoted user of the somatics exercises from Hanna's original "Somatics" book, but I cannot find any exercises that deal with triceps? Or is my guess completely off-target...?

Answer
Hello, Thomas,

Contracted muscles in the neck cause both disc problems and can cause nerve entrapment, which would account for numbness.  The locked triceps sounds related to something else, but could conceivably be related to a change of position of the elbow joint, which could pinch the nerve at the elbow.

Somatic training with a practitioner would be suited to correcting the problem, but I know of nothing (other than "reverse push-ups") that one could do for oneself to free ones triceps, and then the long head would not be as affected as the other heads.

"Reverse push-ups" would be to take the starting position of a push-up and then very slowly and repeatedly lower oneself to rest.  They might be called, "let-downs", I suppose.

The best approach I can think of is Lesson 4 of Somatics (twisting of the trunk), which involves rotation of the arms and shoulders; that might do it.

with regard,
Lawrence Gold