Downward Facing Blog

A yoga perspective on one wonderful little neck bone

(Bangkok Post article)

I had been teaching yoga for years before I found out about it. None of my earlier teachers had even said the word. After I discovered my own hyoid bone, it was like a light turned on inside me. It’s a gem of an anatomical discovery, one small revelation that proceeded to change the way I did any posture, yoga or otherwise.

The hyoid is a U-shaped bone in your neck, which holds the distinction of floating – that is, it is the only bone in your body which does not directly articulate with other bones. Instead, it is held in place by ten muscles one of which is the tongue. By connecting to the tongue, it helps you to swallow, and gives you the ability to produce complex tones. This gives rise to another, odd hyoid fact; this bone is only present in modern humans. The Neanderthals apparently had one, but it was less developed. Perhaps they did more grunting than speaking, but who knows, it’s hard to remember.

Reader, meet your hyoid bone.
Wrap your fingers around your throat right under your chin and take a swallow. The hyoid is the one that does a little jump. Didn’t even know it was there, did you? What you are about to read will make you happy that the two of you just met, especially if you like to stretch.

Knowing how to use your hyoid will easily give you superior backbends, added energy, and improved posture.

The first step is to pull the hyoid back and upwards for good postural alignment. I like visualizing a giant puppeteer standing above and behind me, holding strings which attach to either side of the U-shape bone. When the master pulls back and up on your reigns, observe how your neck lifts, and the chest expands slightly. For me, it also gives a liberating sense of openness in the back of my mouth.

In yoga, the use of the hyoid is even more important, without which, sloppy teaching and practicing often leads to lower back and neck injury. Most average people coming to yoga as a beginner have poor body IQ. Some may have trouble articulating the difference between the lower, middle, and upper spine. So a simple instruction to “move the lower back first then the head” may be difficult for some bodies to understand. What happens is people move the torso as if it was a single block, but really you need to treat each part of your spine differently. A common instruction to bend backwards gets translated to ‘look backwards’, i.e.; crank the neck back and push the belly forward. Because the lower back is relatively flexible, and most abdomens in need of toning, people tend to collapse into their lower backs and then under stretch the upper spine. If you ever hurt your lower back or neck in yoga, it may have been due to not using the hyoid properly. Learning this simple function of hyoid awareness will grant you pain-free backbends which stretch further.

Feel for yourself:

Slouch your body a bit, going soft in the belly and round your shoulders a touch. Lift your chin up as high as possible towards the sky, then, attempt to lift your chest and pull the navel inwards. What you’ll notice is that the belly sags and it is impossible to lift the chest completely.

(Lame cobra)

Notice the general way the energy collapses forwards towards the belly. The same girl, with an equal level of experience could do a much better backbend, if she knows how to use the hyoid. 

The reason why sticking the chin up in a slouch makes it impossible to extend the chest is that connecting the bottom of your hyoid to the sternum is the sterno-hyoid muscle. When contracted, it depresses the hyoid downward. If you raise the chin high before lifting the chest, the hyoid is already moving maximally downward and the sterno-hyoid muscle has no leverage to lift the sternum. The solution is to first lift the sternum while moving the hyoid up and backwards, like the puppeteer standing behind you. You may decide to look downwards towards the floor instead of looking up, and still you will get a deeper backbend.

Try it this way:

Lift your sternum (chest) upwards; expanding the space between each rib so the chest not only lifts, it pulls back inwards a touch. Once the extension is as high as possible, THEN lift your head back. Notice how free your neck feels and how engaged your abdomen feels.

Additionally, pull your hyoid back and up, which creates length in the neck and freedom in the back of the mouth. Be careful to distinguish between the hyoid and the jaw, the jaw stays relatively in the same position and relaxed.

I’m fond of instructing my students to move the head last, always. So as you roll into backward bends like cobra or upward dog, or even standing and dropping into a backbend, look downwards with your hyoid back until you know you have lifted the chest as much as possible first.

-Adrian Cox