To unstiffen your neck, move your head instead of your neck

Is your neck the bit you bend to move your head?
Most likely.

Is you neck the bit you should bend to move your head?
Definitely not.

Your bones of your neck are the top part of your spine, the bit that comes up above your shoulders. Your neck is not meant to be bent. Bend your neck around and you will have a bent neck. A bent neck is not a free neck.

Few movements are best performed by bending any part of your spine. A healthy spine rarely bends. Free, easy movement of your head is almost always between your head and your spine. Since your neck is part of your spine, that means free, easy movement of your head is not in your neck but at the joint between your head and your neck: your head/neck joint.

What is a head/neck joint?

A head neck joint is actually two joints:–

1. The atlanto-occipital joint between the bottom of your skull (your occiput) and the top bone of your spine (your atlas).
2. The atlanto-axial joint between the top bone of your spine (that’s your atlas, remember) and the second bone of your spine, called your axis.

Any nodding movement of your head should be from the your atlanto-occipital joint. It should never involve any bending of your neck. Any turning movement of your head should be at your atlanto-axial joint. It should not involve any twisting of the joints of your neck. There are exceptions but they are few and far between.

Turning your head will be the subject of a future article. Right now, we need to consider how you nod your head.

How do you nod your head?

Admit it: you bend your spine.

So what happens to your head when you look down? When you look down, your whole head moves forwards on top of your bending neck. Because your neck is bending, it’s also shortening and you’re getting squashed in your throat.

And what happens when you look up? When you look up, your whole head moves backwards on top of your bending neck. Because your neck is bending, it’s also shortening and you’re getting squashed in the back of your neck.

Kind of familiar and obvious, isn’t it?

Now how should you nod your head?

Because you don’t nod your head in the way you should, this is neither familiar nor obvious. It will therefore take a fair bit of explaining, a lot of understanding and an enormous amount of getting used to.

How your head should nod is determined by the shape of your atlanto-occipital joint.

First understand the shape of your atlanto-occipital joint

Imagine an egg-cup with a little ball sitting in it. Imagine also that the space at the top of this particular egg-cup is not deep. Instead, it’s a hollow that exactly fits the ball sitting in it. What happens when you turn the ball as it sits there in its egg-cup?

As the ball turns, its surface slides across the hollow at the top of the egg-cup. As it does this, the ball turns around its own centre.

Your atlanto-occipital joint is shaped rather like the joint between the ball and our special egg-cup. (The structural details are confusing so I’m relegating them to a foot-note at the end of the article. Don’t worry about those details, I’ve already told you what you need to know.)

Now locate your atlanto-occipital joint on your own body

The actual joint between the atlas and occiput is not hard to locate (though it’s too deep in to actually touch).

Put the tips of both index fingers at the bottom of your two ear-lobes. The backs of your finger-tips will each find a bony bump. Those bumps are your mastoid processes. Move your two finger-tips so that you can just feel the front of the bottom extremities of those bumps. That’s the spot: now imagine a line going straight through your head from one finger-tip to the other. That line passes right through your atlanto-occipital joint.

So when you nod your head, your head should hinge at that joint you’ve just found?

No, it shouldn’t. That’s where the ball sits on the egg-cup, remember. The ball doesn’t hinge there. In fact, the ball doesn’t hinge anywhere. Instead the ball turns around it’s own centre. For you, that ball is just a very small part of the surface of your occiput.

Locate the centre of that ball in your head

Lightly put your fingers in your ears as though you were trying to stop yourself hearing something. Then move your fingers back slighly so they’re just behind the ear canal (and you’re no longer stopping up your ears). The straight line between your finger tips now passes right through the centre of the ball.

This means that if you were to use only your head/neck joint to nod your head, your head would turn around that very axis that you are now marking with your finger-tips.

How does this change your head movement when you nod?

Remember how looking down normally brings the whole of your head forwards and downwards. Using just your head/neck joint to look down is, instead, a turning of your head around a still centre located exactly between your ears. Consequently, all of the lower part of your head, below your ears, is going to move backwards, not forwards as before. Since that part of your head includes your jaw, your jaw is also going to move backwards.

In the same way, all of the back part of your head, behind your ears, is going to move up, not down as before. Your looking down movement is going to stretch the back of your neck without in any way squashing your throat or any part of the front of your neck.

Why no squashing? There’s no squashing because the movement is not a bending, it’s a turning. Whatever moves has space to move into provided ahead of it because what was in the way has also moved as part of the turning. When did you last squash a ball by turning it? No squashing is required and, if the nodding is performed perfectly, no squashing occurs.

How about when you look up?

Remember, again, looking up normally brings the whole of your head backward and downwards. Using just your head/neck joint to look up is, instead, a turning of your head around that same still centre located exactly between your ears. All of the lower part of your head, below your ears, is therefore going to move forwards, not backwards as before. Again, that includes your jaw so your jaw is also going to move forwards. Your looking up movement is also going to stretch your jaw-line without in any way squashing the back of your neck.

Again, the reason no squashing is required is that the movement is a turning, not a bending. Again, whatever moves has space to move into provided ahead of it because what was in the way has also moved as part of the turning.

There’s another interesting consequence of all this.

Nodding your head correctly requires zilch effort

When you bend your spine for any reason, you always have to squash something to do it. That requires force and effort. It meets resistance. When you freely nod your head on top of your spine, none of that happens. No squashing, no resistance no force, no effort.

That’s a wonderful freedom. It’s a freedom that enables a properly-nodding head to lead its attached body into movements of otherwise-impossible ease, grace, power, strength and beauty. So, you see, knowing what a neck is does much more than just unstiffen your neck. And none of that is possible until you have learnt what a neck is. And your learning must be not just in theory: it must be in very movement.

Your next step

Re-read this article and repeat the experiment of finding the centre of that ball in your head with your fingers and allowing your head to make a very small nodding movement. Notice how your fingers don’t move. They’re an axis that your head rotates around.

Repeat this experiment often. Always make your movements small enough so that your fingers never move at all. Make a note of what happens. If you wish, you may post your findings on the forum, telling me what you found. (If you don’t get any strange experiences, you really haven’t done the experiment with enough care and attention). When you post, I will help you understand your experiences and use your understanding to progress further on that path to otherwise-impossible ease, grace, power, strength and beauty of movement.

If you’re not already a member of Repoise, you need to join to post on the forum. Do that here.

FOOT-NOTE: The detailed shape of your atlanto-occipital joint
(You don’t need to know this, so only read it if you’re curious)

Unlike the egg-cup, a lot of the egg-cup’s hollow is missing from the top of your atlas. In fact, there are only two little sections of that hollow remaining, one on the right side and one on the left. In between is a space for your spinal cord to pass through.

Also, unlike the ball, the part of the surface of the occiput that sits on top of your atlas has only two little sections remaining. These are shaped so as to fit neatly on top of your atlas. The rest of the ball’s surface is missing. Those remaining sections are all that is required for your atlanto-occipital joint to move like the ball in the egg-cup.

Of course this limits the range of turning that’s possible when you nod — unlike the ball that’s able to turn over and over.