Recruitment patterns in the cervical paraspinal muscles during cervical forward flexion: evidence of cervical flexion-relaxation.

The phenomenon of lumbar paraspinal flexion-relaxation has been well established and its clinical significance to low back pain has been demonstrated. Conversely, cervical paraspinal flexion-relaxation has not been consistently observed. This may be attributable to the inappropriate use of trunk flexion motion used to observe the phenomenon in previous studies. This investigation reports on the observance of cervical flexion-relaxation when flexion is limited to the cervical spine. Results demonstrate the observance of cervical flexion-relaxation in ten of ten asymptomatic subjects when flexion is limited to the cervical region in the seated orthograde position.