What if going for a walk could be an opportunity for your neck to naturally “stretch” itself? Could you “walk your neck well”?
Neck motion in the gait cycle is pretty cool. It arises out of our need to keep our eyes level (not walk with a bobblehead).
In the 0.6-0.8 second journey from one foot to the other, your neck should be able to access every motion available to it, in all three dimensions, from one end of the spectrum to the other. Unless it can’t…
That means, in the space of just one footstep, your neck will (hopefully) get a full spectrum experience from:
– Flexion all the way to extension
– Lateral flexion right all the way to to lateral flexion left
– Rotation right to rotation left
But not like a bobblehead…
VID
The cool thing is neck motion happens by virtue of the skull itself staying STILL (eyes stay level so you can walk straight), and the rest of the body articulating underneath.
This is true of animals too. Check out this owl:
The next two video clips are a brief demo of how this works in the frontal (head tilts) and transverse plane (head roation).
How did those two movements go for you? Are you able you separate your skull from your ribcage with your eyes level? (and yes I am aware I did not make a sagittal plane video…)
I call it a “whole body neck stretch”, because it emulates how the muscles on one side of the neck would naturally lengthen (and the other shorten) with each footstep. Or, in the case of the transverse plane neck rotations, more like a torquing motion, like a towel wringing out.
But its more than “stretching”- It’s specific, sequenced joint motion our bodies crave in efficient gait, obtained via coordinated whole body movement. The by-product of which is that your neck joints and tissues actually move in a healthy way with each step.
What if, by practicing gait-based movements like this, you could walk your neck well? What if you started to notice you no longer need to deliberately stretch your neck? (unless you actually wanted to)
Let me know if you find this quick video useful.
These two clips are from a Movement Deep Dive session I filmed in May 2021 for my Liberated Body all-access students. The complete 60 min session explores this idea in three planes, integrated with the whole body, down to the feet, based on the teachings of Gary Ward’s Anatomy in Motion.
PS can you tell how differently my head tilts from one side to the other?? 😅
