Best exercises for your Neck pain

Your desk job is destroying your body and ruining your health.

Sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day is giving you forward head posture, rounded shoulders and anterior pelvic tilt. You have these problems because your body spends too much time in unnatural positions.

Some of your muscles become shortened and overly tight. Others become stretched and weak.

You've taught your body that this is its resting position.

Now it has to unlearn it.

 Sitting in a chair for long period will do this too you.

Your butt sticks out, your belly protrudes, and you will have lower back pain and horrible hip mobility. Your glutes are weak. Your hip flexors are tight. Your abs are weak. Your lower back is tight.

First, the gluteal muscles

Do glute bridges. 3 sets to failure. If they're too easy, do the single leg version. 

If you have gym access, you can do barbell hip thrusts OR use this excellent machine if your gym has one. 

You also need to stretch out your tight hips.

The best exercise I've found for this is the banded hip distraction. 

You'll need a resistance band.

Loop it around an upright (squat rack or bed post works well).

Loop it around your rear leg and descend into a lunge. Lean back to increase the stretch. Hold 30s. 

Now, to fix your rounded upper back and forward shoulders, you'll need to do lots of pulling exercises.

- Barbell rows

- Dumbbell rows

- Machine rows

- Bodyweight rows

But if you're just going to do one, I would do face-pulls.

Face-pulls are NOT an ego exercise.

You do not want much weight here at all.

Go slowly, really squeeze the contraction at the end of the movement.

Go for high reps, 15-20 reps.

Stop when you can't get another rep with good form. 

You can also do face-pulls at home with a resistance band. Just anchor it somewhere at about head height.

Add in band pull apart to improve your shoulder posture. 

If you follow a well designed resistance training program, you will likely fix all of these problems.

The right compound exercises will strengthen weakened muscles from Years of desk duty.

The routine MUST NOT neglect lower body, core training or back training.

There should be more sets of pulling than pushing to keep shoulders in the proper alignment.

See this thread to see how to design yourself a proper routine in under 2 minutes.