neck muscles

Yes, you read that correctly. Not only do you not need to damage your neck every time you use your cell phone, but instead, you could be improving it!

Most of us use our cell phones quite frequently. If you train yourself to adopt a healthy stance every time you use your phone, you will have a built-in posture practice that repeats throughout your day. 

Identifying the problem

Cell phones are unfairly regarded as the inevitable cause of neck problems and slouching. It’s not that you use a phone, but how you use it, that matters. Images from Clare Chapman, Pixabay and Pexels

Most people tend to let their head be drawn towards their screen when they use their cell phone. That’s why social media and wellness features are full of warnings about “text neck,” including graphics about how the head gets effectively heavier the further forward it is, and how that puts increasing strain on the neck. This is certainly true. The advice to avoid text neck is often to hold your phone straight ahead, rather than downward. Since this is physically and socially awkward, most people don’t do it.

Common advice to hold a cell phone straight out ahead feels awkward to most people.

Fortunately, there is a better solution…

Neck Saver #1: Adjust your head, bring your phone to your face, and look down

I like to use an analogy with eating...You may have been trained to bring your food to your mouth, rather than your mouth to your plate. Your mother was right! Following the code of table manners, she was teaching not only a more elegant, but also a more healthful way of dining which avoided squishing your neck.

Infants instinctively like to keep their neck tall and head well aligned. Pexels

Similarly, when you use your phone, you want to first establish a healthy head and neck position, and then feed yourself your information by bringing the phone towards your face, rather than your face to your phone. We recommend you get started by watching this free video, which will teach you the basics of how to glide your neck back and up to a healthy baseline position. 

Next, you will want to look down. Blaming a downward line of vision for neck problems ignores the reality that for tens of thousands of years our ancestors have looked downward, without any ill effects, and that we are fully adapted to do this. We’ve looked downwards to track animals, avoid snakes, find food, avoid thorns, make tools, prepare food, nurse infants, and more—these activities were essential, often for many hours at a time.

It may be enough to just move your eyes to look down. To look down further, you may need to do a combination of angling your chin down, and/or angling your neck from its base—where the bump of your largest neck bone (C7) may protrude at the back of your neck. No matter how you are looking downward, with your eyes, neck, or head, be sure your neck maintains a good baseline length. 

The aim is not to avoid looking down, but to improve how we look down. This teenager has his eyes down, his chin down, and has maintained a tall, spacious neck which remains centered over his body. Image from Pixabay

Neck Saver #2: Get some new wallpaper!

It’s true that a picture is sometimes worth a thousand words. Our species has a very large visual cortex—by choosing a home screen on your cell phone that inspires and reminds you to reposition your neck, you will be reinforcing healthy neck posture every time you pick up your phone. 

A little posture know-how turns your cell phone into a smartphone! Image from Freepik

We have put together a selection of downloadable images for you to choose from below. 

Smartphone image #1. Image from Pixabay
Download image #1 

Smartphone image #2
Download image #2 

Smartphone image #3
Download image #3 

Neck Saver #3: PostureTracker™

If only you could be reminded instantly every time your neck migrated forward or your chin jutted upward. Well, we have your back—and neck! Our recently released PostureTracker™ device uses a pair of sensors you can place in many pairs of locations on your body. Via an app on your phone, it gives you real-time feedback (visual, sound, or vibration) every time you depart from your calibrated ideal. No more over-contracting your neck muscles and compressing your cervical discs! 

When your chin lifts, compressing your neck (left), PostureTracker will alert you and guide you back to your healthiest calibrated posture (right).

We are often asked why we do not sell the PostureTracker as a stand-alone device. It’s because without training, the device would likely be used to reinforce common misconceptions about good posture; people would use the device to “sit up straight,” for example, and likely do more harm than good. So PostureTracker is available only to our students, past and present. For people who understand what good posture is, the device is invaluable—it helps close the gap between knowing what to do and doing it as a habit. You can sign up here for our next Alumni PostureTracker Course, starting Thursday June 27, 7:00 am PT.

Best next action steps 

If you have had trouble with your neck and would like to improve it, get started by booking a consultation, online, or in person with one of our teachers. 

You can sign up below to join any one of our upcoming FREE Online Workshops…

August is peak holiday time across the northern hemisphere, and many of us who live here will find ourselves poolside, or even better, in it!

Being in water has the natural advantage of lifting weight off the joints while providing gentle resistance training. Aching backs or knees can find relief from compression in the natural buoyancy that water provides. This has made pool exercises a popular prescription with physical therapists over many years, especially for post-operative or post-injury rehabilitation. 

On land, to relieve pain and compression, people usually use elaborate measures like inversion tables, traction units, or going to outer space! In the Gokhale Method we provide decompression for the lower back relatively simply with the Stretchsit® Cushion or the nubs on our Gokhale™Pain-Free Chair. But stepping into water is the simplest of all, giving you freedom of movement and the ability to strengthen yourself simultaneously.

Pool exercise also provides a fun and refreshing environment for exercise in summer heat waves! Wikimedia

This blog post gives you three ways to harness the unique benefits of being in water to practice and develop healthier posture. These exercises are challenging enough to do as a stand-alone workout or as a way to prime your swim session.

Healthy posture habits honed in water will benefit your daily life on land, as well as giving you greater stability and power for your swimming or other sports. 

For safety and best results, I recommend that you progress the session in the order given here, starting with Exercise 1 and, once you are familiar with it, move on to Exercise 2 and finally add Exercise 3. 

1. Stabilize your spine by using your inner corset

You will use a natural brace of muscles as you walk across the pool. It will give you the stability you need to cut through the resistance of the water without wobbling and threatening the alignment of your spine. 

Imagine you are getting into ice cold water. Feel how all the muscles around your middle can contract and make you more slender. You want to work hard enough to feel this from deep in the pelvis all the way up to your rib cage. You want to feel the muscular engagement all the way around your mid torso, like a tightly laced corset. 

The muscles of the inner corset include the deep intrinsic back muscles, the abdominis transversus, and the obliques. 

Gokhale Method teacher Eric Fernandez shows how engaging the inner corset draws the abdomen in and makes the torso slender.

This is one way of recruiting your “inner corset," which will help stabilize your spine as you walk and is key to swimming with a more streamlined, efficient stroke. We teach this technique and others in more detail in our in-person Foundations course, one-day Pop-up course, our online Elements course, plus our Gokhale Exercise program. You can read more about your inner corset here.

2. Headload to lengthen your neck and to find deep spinal support

In industrialized cultures we have an epidemic of forward head carriage, putting enormous strain on the neck and structures throughout the back. Finding healthy alignment through your neck, combined with the inner corset, helps your whole spine to support itself well. Resting even a modest additional weight on the head can help us to find our vertical axis and stand tall. This is the reason I developed the Gokhale™ Head Cushion. 

Headloading encourages recruitment of the deepest muscles of the inner corset and the neck, especially the longus colli at the front of the spine. 

In the pool I suggest you use what you have at hand—your hands! Rest them on your head and push up against them with your head. Keep your nose and chin angled downward. Proceed very gently if you have neck issues. You can gradually build up the intensity over a number of sessions. 

Gokhale Method teacher Clare Chapman headloading in the pool using the weight of hands and arms. Create space between your shoulders and your ears—keep your shoulders down as your neck grows tall. 

Establishing healthy length in your neck will help you to retain a straighter, more spacious alignment while swimming, especially in breaststroke where people tend to crane their necks to hold their heads above water. Consider training to swim with your head in the water, if you do not do this already, which will enable a much healthier alignment of your torso, neck, and head.

Especially when you raise your arms, you may need to use your rib anchor muscles to prevent your back from swaying.

3. Power up your walking using your feet and glutes

Many of us compromise our walking by overusing our quads and hip flexors (psoas muscle) and underusing our glutes. We predominantly reach our front leg forward in our strides, instead of generating propulsion from the rear leg with our glutes and foot muscles. 

Our ancestors and many people living in more traditional or nonindustrialized societies—where joint and back pain are rare—walk using their glute and foot muscles more than we typically do.

As you walk in the pool, make each step a rep. Each step wants to progress through a pose that includes a straight back leg and a bent front knee. As each leg goes back behind you in turn, squeeze your buttock muscles on that side. Engage the upper outer quadrant of your glute pack. This is not the kind of glute squeeze that clenches your lower butt cheeks together and tucks your pelvis. 

Gokhale Method Alumna Christine Andrew working hard to achieve healthy walking form in the buoyancy and resistance of water.

Grab the floor of the pool with the whole sole of your foot, and then push off from your toes. Focus on maintaining the convex foot shape as you do this. Propel to glide forward, not bounce upward.

Eric actively grabs the floor of the pool with each foot to pull the body forward and then push back.

Putting it all together: Aim to keep healthy form and walk as smoothly as you can through the water. This develops both healthy length and muscle power in the right places.

If you notice your back arches back as you walk, take smaller steps and lean more forward until you master the art of keeping your spine stable with the rib anchor and inner corset techniques. Enjoy!

Best next action steps for newcomers

If you would like to know which posture changes will help you be pain-free and functional, schedule an Initial Consultation, online, or in person.

You can sign up below to join one of our upcoming FREE Online Workshops. . .

I’ve been in Orissa for the past week, the last of my three-week stay in India. I'm observing village and tribal people in their everyday activities, learning what I can in a short stay, and looking for nuggets of body wisdom to bring home to my students. This visit has been a rich experience indeed! Orissa has more distinct tribes (62) than any other state in India; inland Orissa is off the tourist track and entirely new to me though I was raised and well-travelled in India. 

Sharing bananas with some pottery vendors at the Kakirigumma tribal / village market.

A great vantage point for observing the comings and goings at the Kakirigumma market

One activity that strikes most new visitors coming to India, first in the cities, and then with greater frequency in the villages and tribal areas, is how impressively people carry things on their heads. The balance and elegance is arresting; the strength and health this practice imparts to the neck is a good reason to adopt it into a modern lifestyle.

People who routinely carry weights on their head usually have beautiful carriage

Why carry on the head?

1. It strengthens the longus colli muscle, which elongates the neck

In the torso, there are many muscles, including the three deeper abdominal muscle layers, that can contribute to elongating the torso and protecting the spinal nerves and discs. In the neck, which is also prone to wear and tear and injury, there are many fewer muscles that can do the equivalent job of elongating the neck to protect the cervical (neck) discs and nerves. Carrying weight on the head activates and strengthens one of the most important of these muscles, longus colli. 

Modern lifestyles often have us facing computer screens for many hours a day, which can result in the head projecting forward. Carrying weight on the head and strengthening the longus colli muscle counteracts the tendency for the head to protrude forward. This spares the neck and shoulder muscles a lot of unnecessary and painful tension. 

Carrying on the head results in an elongated, upright, and healthy neck

2. It strengthens and stretches numerous neck muscles

To balance a load on the head requires numerous mini-excursions of the head from side to side and from front to back. All of these movements serve to strengthen and stretch important groups of muscles in the neck. The result is more strength, flexibility, and relaxation in the neck.  


Balancing a load on the head involves shearing motions to the sides, front, and back - these motions strengthen and stretch neck muscles.

3. Your hunter gatherer ancestors did it for millennia - we may have some dependencies that have evolved around this action. 

Extrapolating from modern hunter gatherer societies, it is reasonable to conjecture that we have been carrying things on our heads for millions of years. It was logical for our hunter gatherer ancestors to carry weights on their heads. In the absence of vehicles, or carrying implements (if you go far back in time), the head presents a particularly efficient way to carry weight. It’s right on the weight bearing axis of the body - so carrying on the head causes no torque in the spine.  

Carrying weight on the head is a particularly efficient way to carry weight that causes no torque in the spine.

When an action has been part of our evolutionary history for long stretches of time, there’s usually a web-like interdependence between that action and other functions. For example, it may be that carrying weight on the head from time to time is necessary training to easily carry the weight of our own heads all day long. 
 

4. It gives you poise.

In my experience, there’s nothing quite like carrying weight on the head to help you find your central axis and a feeling of being “centered.” People who regularly carry weight on their heads tend to have wonderful poise and presence. 

Carrying weight on the head gives poise and balance

How to carry weight on your head?

1. Begin with a small weight and work your way up.
    
2. Locate the top of your head accurately (see our Gokhale Method Head Cushion FAQs)
    
3. Carry your head weight for brief periods (maybe 30 seconds at first) until you are strong enough to carry the weight for longer.
    
4. If you have the opportunity, get some bodywork to help you through any transition soreness.

Receiving a neck massage from the local healer in tribal Orissa

Practical tidbits

Our Gokhale Method head cushion is crafted to not slip off your head too easily while still challenging your neck muscles to do the desired balancing maneuvers. Having a cushion handy at strategic locations is a good way to ensure you develop a habit of using it. I like to use a head cushion when I'm at a keyboard or cooking. If you are able to take it out walking without causing negative repercussions for yourself, this is the best way to learn carrying on your head. Not only will you improve your neck strength and architecture, but the weight will probably help you find a healthier gait. To support your head carrying efforts, we have created a 3X head cushion bundle at a discounted rate - one for home, one for work, and one as a gift to a special person in your life to join in your primal posture revival.

Please share if you've had problems with your neck, if you've tried carrying a weight on your head yet, and what your experiences have been.

Join us in an upcoming Free Workshop (online or in person).  

Find a Foundations Course in your area to get the full training on the Gokhale Method!  

We also offer in person or online Initial Consultations with any of our qualified Gokhale Method teachers.