Why Migraines and Neck Tension Are Connected
- Syna Gensterblum
- May 29
- 5 min read
What I did about it with a client who hadn't had a pain-free week in years
Marco (name changed) came to me because his back hurt. That's how it usually starts.
He was in his mid-forties, ran a successful online business, worked long hours in front of screens and had been dealing with recurring migraines for as long as he could remember. He'd tried everything. Medication, osteopathy, a better chair. The migraines would ease off for a while, then come back.
The back pain was the reason he contacted me. The migraines were something he'd simply learned to live with.
The first thing I noticed about his migraines and neck tension
Before we did a single exercise, I watched him walk, move, and breathe.
That's where I always start. Not with a questionnaire or a fitness test but with observation. How someone walks into a room, how they sit down, how they gesture when they talk, how their ribcage moves when they breathe. Within about a minute of watching someone move through their everyday life, I already have a rough picture of how the pieces connect. Where the compensation patterns are. Where the body is bracing. What it's protecting.
Once I have that overview, I go into the detail. And the detail, in Marco's case, was the breath.
Shallow and high in the chest. The kind of breathing that I see a lot in high-performing professionals and that happens when your nervous system has been on low-level alert for so long that it just became the default.
Then I looked at how he stood, how he held his head, where his shoulders were sitting. His neck was forward. His upper back was rounded. His shoulders had crept up somewhere close to his ears and he didn't even notice.
That's the thing about chronic tension: after a while, you stop feeling it. It just becomes the background noise of your body.
What Marco had was a textbook pattern I've seen dozens of times. The neck and shoulder tension wasn't separate from the migraines; it was feeding them. The constant compression on the cervical spine, the restricted blood flow, the shallow breathing that kept his nervous system in a low hum of stress. His head was working overtime and his body had completely checked out.
Going back into the body — slowly
I didn't give him a workout in the first session. I gave him his breath back.
We started with breathing exercises. Nothing complicated, just relearning how to breathe into the belly, into the ribs, to let the exhale be long and slow. For someone like Marco, who'd been living entirely in his head for years, this alone was noticeable. He told me afterward that he hadn't felt that calm in months.
From there, we worked on body awareness. Small, precise movements — not to build muscle, but to rebuild the connection between his brain and his body. Where is the tension sitting right now? Can you feel the difference between this and that? When I ask you to relax your jaw, can you actually do it?
Most people can't. Not at first.
Over the following weeks, we built on that foundation. Posture correction, deep stabilisation work, mobility for the neck and thoracic spine. Gradually his shoulders dropped. His breathing deepened on its own. The forward head position improved.
The shift nobody expected
About six weeks in, Marco mentioned something almost in passing: he hadn't had a migraine.
He said it like he wasn't sure he should say it out loud, in case it jinxed something. But it held. And what happened next was what I find most satisfying about this kind of work: he started to read his own body.
He learned to notice the early signals. The tightening in the back of the neck. The moment his breathing went shallow again. The particular kind of tension that, for him, was the warning sign that something was building.
And when he felt it, he knew exactly what to do. Not because I gave him a list of stretches. Because we'd spent weeks building that body literacy together, specifically for him, based on how his body works and where it tends to go under stress.
That's not something you can Google. It has to be built.
What this isn't
I want to be clear: I'm not a doctor, and I'm not treating migraines as a medical condition. What I do is work with the body — with posture, movement, breathing, and nervous system regulation — in a way that addresses the physical patterns that often sit underneath chronic tension headaches and migraines.
Not every migraine has this cause. But in my experience, when someone presents with chronic neck tension, forward head posture, shallow breathing, and high stress levels — which describes a lot of the executives and high-performers I work with — there is almost always a movement component that hasn't been addressed.
Because nobody looked at the body as a whole system.
As an elite personal trainer in Paphos with over 25 years of experience — including years competing at world-class level as a professional athlete — I've worked with enough bodies to spot these patterns fast. That depth of experience is what makes the difference between treating a symptom and understanding what's actually driving it.
The transformation nobody saw coming
A year later. Marco still trains with me. He still gets tense sometimes (that's life when you run a business). But he hasn't had a migraine since those early weeks of our work together. When he feels the tension creeping back in, he catches it early. He knows what it means and what to do.
But what strikes me most isn't the absence of migraines. It's everything else that changed.
His posture is completely different now. His back is straight — genuinely straight, not forced. He carries himself differently. He developed a body awareness he never had before, and with that came something I see happen sometimes when the work goes deep enough: he started enjoying movement and has taken up new sports since we started working together — something that he would have never imagined before. His world got bigger.
His wife told him he's like a different person.
And then something happened that I hadn't expected: she started training with us too. The two of them now train together. Something that would have been completely unthinkable a year ago — not because of a lack of interest, but because Marco simply wasn't there. The migraines, the tension, the constant low-level exhaustion had made him someone who got through the day and not much more.
Now he shows up differently. In his body, in his energy, in how he is with her. The migraines are gone. The tightness that used to take over his whole demeanour has lifted. And they've found something they do together: quality time, shared effort, a different kind of closeness than a dinner reservation gives you.
That's the result I care about. Not just that the migraines stopped but that he now has the tools to manage his own body, a new relationship with movement (and his wife), and a quality of life that he'd quietly stopped expecting. He doesn't need me to tell him what to do anymore. He can feel it himself.
That's what 25 years of working with the body teaches you. Not just how to train people but how to give them back the connection to themselves that stress, screens and a modern lifestyle quietly take away.
If you recognise yourself in any of this — the tension, the headaches, the sense of living entirely in your head — I offer a free 20-minute consultation. No obligation. Just a conversation about what's going on and whether my approach might be the right fit.
I work with clients in Paphos and online — in English and German.
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