I've tried to be as active as I can all my life, dating back to my time in the Marines over 40 years ago. For years, until my knees wouldn't take it anymore, I was a long-distance runner. Now I bicycle, lift weights, hunt when I can, and shoot archery almost every day in the backyard.
The only thing I can tell you is that there is no magical cure for overuse injuries. In training for a marathon run, sometimes I would get an inflamed achilles tendon, maybe right before my training schedule called for a 15 mile run. That is disappointing, after you've trained for weeks to get to that point and are beginning to feel like you are almost ready to run the marathon. As you can imagine, I consulted every source I could find, and tried all the "tricks." Many years later, when I got an inflamed sciatic nerve, I did the same thing. All the manipulation the physical therapists and chiropractors did really accomplished nothing other than to keep the nerve inflamed that much longer.
When you have pain, like your sore neck, it is due to one of three things: Muscle pain, which is not a sharp pain, but kind of a "good" ache which comes from working out muscles that haven't been used for a while. It goes away after a day or so and the muscle is ready to be worked out again. A cartilage or tendon tear, which is a sharper pain, and needs more time to heal or may need a doctor's attention, depending on the extent of the damage. An inflamed nerve, which can happen in conjunction with other injuries, like my achilles tendonitis, or just flare up because of some joint problem, like my sciatica.
My guess is that you have an inflamed nerve due to aggravation of your old neck injury, and probably don't have any new muscle, cartilage, or tendon injuries, since it seems unlikely that shooting archery would strain the muscles in your neck. Maybe holding your head sideways when you shoot twisted your vertebrae enough to pinch a nerve in your neck.
If that's the case, the only thing that will help is to reduce the inflamation, and the only thing that will reduce the inflamation is resting your neck, with maybe 3-4 ibuprofen a day (as long as you shouldn't be taking ibuprofen for some other medical reason). It generally takes 3-4 days, or longer, for the ibuprofen and rest to have much effect.
Long-term, do whatever you can to expand the range of motion of your neck, just like you probably did with physical therapists or whatever after your whiplash. But this won't do any good until the inflamation goes down.
Topic: Whiplash! (Read 977 times)
