By Katy Bowman

Every day we make hundreds of choices about how to move our bodies. Will we walk or drive? Sit or stand? Slouch or sit up tall? Throughout the day, we make choices about the positions we place ourselves in, and how often we vary our body position.

An hour of daily exercise done purposely is great for the body, but so are minutes of mindful movement performed throughout the day. By learning to consider our body in all that it does, we’ll find ourselves getting way more movement than just exercise alone may offer.

As a biomechanist, I study how forces and motion affect living matter, and specifically human bodies. I have come to understand that the way our bodies feel each day—and the movements we’ll be able to make as we age—relate directly to how we’ve been moving and how our body lines up with gravity as we move.

Sure, we’re also impacted by the quality of food, rest, and love, but our mechanical environment—how often our body is feeling and dealing with loads created by its own weight—is constant. 

Ultimately, we have much more control than we realize—over how to move, how it feels when moving, and therefore how we feel each day.

Forward-Head Lifestyle

One doesn’t have to be a biomechanist to have noticed serious posture problems in today’s culture. Just take a quick glance around any public place and check out the number of heads looking down. Not only looking down with the eyes, but with the head. Not only a little nod of the head, but a big forward curve in the neck and upper back. 

Looking down for certain activities is nothing new. Reading, sewing, cooking—these are age-old activities humans have had to look down to do. And there’s nothing wrong with looking down. It’s an important movement and part of why our spine is made of separate hinges instead of one long, straight bone. 

These spinal hinges (vertebrae) curve into this shape quite easily. What is new and does pose a problem is the amount of time we now spend with our heads dropped forward, and how little we do any other movement of the head, upper back, and even upper body.

Here are a few exercises you can do virtually anytime, anywhere to strengthen the areas of the body commonly affected by prolonged tech use. 

Head Ramp Posture Adjustment

Start by touching the top of your head. Without lifting your chin or your chest, reach the top of your head up toward the ceiling while sliding your ears back over your shoulders (as shown in figure 1 on the right).

The head ramp movement is the opposite of the forward head posture (as shown on the left side of figure 1). It undoes the forward thrust by picking your head up away from the ground, moving it back over your shoulders and lengthening your neck.

Chicken Head Posture

I got chickens in the hope of being less of a biomechanist and more of an egg farmer. But true to nature, I couldn’t help but study how chickens move. What’s cool about chickens is that when you hold their bodies and gently move them—right and left, up and down, or in a small circle—their heads stay in place the entire time. Chicken necks are so flexible that chickens can keep their head still, like a gyroscope, while their body moves around it. Their neck mobility is for good reason: they depend on it for survival.

Even if we don’t depend on neck mobility for survival in the day-to-day, necks just feel better when they’re freed up from the shoulders. In the following chicken-head exercises, keep your ribcage and shoulders still while you move your head: 

Chicken head thrust: Slow, forward-back motion of the head (think pecking at the ground). 

Belly-dancing chicken: Slide your head to the right and left without tipping it. Here’s the real challenge: keep your head ramped while you attempt the right-left motion! (Can’t picture this move? Search “how to head slide” online for tutorials.) 

Curious chicken: Sitting up straight with the head ramped, slowly tilt the right ear toward the right shoulder, then the left to the left shoulder. 

“Is that a coyote?” head turner: Practice turning your head to the right and left, ramping it first.

Phone Scrolling Hand Soother

Raise your hand if you’re on your phone more than ever before. Is your raised hand holding a phone? Then these stretches are for you. Here are a few moves that will get your hands moving more and differently from the phone death-grip, index-finger swipe your upper body has grown accustomed to, and bonus: you have to put your phone down to do them.

Stretch your thumbs:  Make a loose fist with your right hand, thumb pointing up. Grasp the thumb as low as you can with your left hand and move it like it’s an old-fashioned Atari joystick, slowly moving it toward you and side-to-side at varying angles.

Stretch your wrists: Keeping your shoulders down and relaxed, touch the backs of your hands together, including the thumbs, then bring them down to waist level (figure 2). Hold there or move them slowly up and down in front of your torso, or right to left. Keep those thumbs touching! 

Stretch your shoulders and upper back: Place your hands on a wall, step back to bring your hips behind you, then lower your chest toward the ground to give your upper body an overhaul. This is one of my all-time favorite exercises (figure 3).

Stretch your nerves: Nerves need to move through their ranges of motion too! Reach your hands out sideways from your shoulders, making a T with your arms and a “STOP” motion with your hands. 

With fingers spread, slowly work your fingertips toward your head. Keep your middle fingers pointing up, thumbs forward, and elbows slightly bent toward the ground. Think of reaching the upper arm bones away from you as you work your fingers back toward your body’s midline.

Easy to Swallow Posture

“Tech neck” isn’t just a pain in the neck, it can also negatively impact swallowing. The esophagus, or “food pipe,” is the muscular tube that runs from your mouth to your stomach (and in the worst of times, from stomach to mouth). 

Swallowing often becomes more difficult with age. There are a few reasons for this, but one relates to the curves in the spine, which tend to change over time. Imagine taking a mouthful of water then tilting your head way back and swallowing in that position. This pinches the throat-tube, which makes moving that mouthful down the throat harder and often uncomfortable. 

Solid food is even harder to swallow in tight spaces. A common recommendation for older adults is to tip the head forward—to look down—when swallowing. The idea is that if your upper spine and throat are curved forward, dropping your head forward to line up with your throat reopens the swallowing space, which reduces one of the mechanical hurdles to swallowing. And yet, another hurdle remains: the neck isn’t aligned with gravity. Instead of the food dropping straight down, it has to move diagonally. 

Temporarily dropping your head position for better swallowing alignment is a handy hack, but why not work on improved swallowing with a head movement that opens and aligns the swallowing tubes at the same time? 

That’s where the head ramp exercise comes in handy: moving the head in three different planes all at once. After you’ve nodded the head forward a bit to open the throat, work to lift the head toward the sky as you also try to move it toward the wall behind you without lifting the chin. 

Keep in mind, not lifting the chin is important. If you do, you’ve just pinched the swallowing tube a bit. And not only do you not lift the chin, but you also try to sit up without lifting the chest.

This head ramping movement will be subtle, especially at first, but it helps straighten your upper back and neck a little in the moment, and of course, more and more over time. Good form is not only for golf swings.

Sleeping Moves Exercise

There is no ideal sleeping position in the same way there is no ideal “all day” position. For eons, humans have been sleeping on constantly varying natural surfaces—curling or opening their body for heat regulation, similar to animals. That being said, it is very uncomfortable to sleep on the ground when your body isn’t used to it. 

Body training is something we tend to associate with fitness or athletics. Say you run a few miles every day, slowly increasing your mileage until your body is used to running three miles, then five. In this case, the term used to suggests you’ve given your tissues and physiology adequate time to adapt. Saying “I’m used to it” really means “I’ve trained for this.”

For me personally, I’ve been playing with my sleeping environment over the last ten years to figure out “sleep moves” that leave my body feeling best. Ten years ago, four days of sleeping on the ground in a tent or even on a carpeted floor would have left me with a neck spasm that would last a couple weeks. Why? Because I wasn’t used to it. For thirty-five years I had trained my body to sleep on a bed with a pillow.

The reason sleeping without your mattress and pillow can hurt at first is the same reason it hurts to run for miles beyond your regular running distance. You’re placing greater loads on your body than it’s used to. Most of us feel very uncomfortable sleeping without a mattress or pillow because we were bestowed these comforts (ie, these loads) quite young. 

The cells of our body adapt to shoes and pillows, and they fail to develop the strength and mobility needed to minimize and withstand the pressure of our own bodyweight pressing into harder surfaces. 

It took me about a year to go completely pillow-free because I reduced my pillow height gradually. I progressed from a pillow to a towel to a wadded T-shirt, and eventually to nothing but the sleeping surface. If I woke up sore in the neck and shoulders after two or three nights spent at that height, I’d add back a little support.

I took a slow and stepwise approach, just as I did when training for my first half marathon. By progressing a little bit a time, gradually loading underused tissues in my upper body, I was participating in a “sleeping moves” workout.

Over the last six years I’ve trained myself to be able to sleep without a pillow (and without a mattress, for that matter). I’ve upped my sleeping game. Hotel mattresses no longer threaten me. Camping no longer worries me. I am more resilient now and am better suited physically to a wider variety of environments.

Right now, your pillow and mattress likely serve the same purpose as an orthotic or “supportive” footwear: they support you in positions your body can’t comfortably support on its own. Support devices are helpful in many scenarios, but they can eventually leave those supported parts weaker. 

Doing all our walking on flat and level terrain wearing stiff, conventionally shaped shoes leave us with stiff, weak feet; surrounding ourselves with cushions our entire sleeping-life has made our bodies unable to tolerate the movements created when our body adjusts to meet the floor or ground.

Remember, our bodies are different day to day. Even years into my sleeping-moves journey, there are times when I’m injured or just physically spent for some other reason, and I seek more cushion or support. The point is to learn to adapt physically to different scenarios (which is one measure of physical fitness) as opposed to tolerating only a narrow range of physical experiences.

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Bestselling author, speaker, and a leader of the Movement movement, biomechanist Katy Bowman is changing the way we move and think about our need for movement. Bowman teaches globally and has written nine books on the importance of a diverse movement diet, including Move Your DNA, Dynamic Aging, and Grow Wild. Her newest release, Rethink Your Position, is a much-needed guide to how our bodies move, why we need to move more, and the intentional steps anyone can take to feel, move, and even think better—one part at a time. Find her at nutritiousmovement.com and on the Move Your DNA podcast.

Well Being Journal adapted the above excerpt from a selection of passages from Rethink Your Position by Katy Bowman, copyright Katy Bowman 2023, and reprinted with permission.