Working in Movement

Free neck, long legs From Robert Schleip's site, a summary of research about neck tension and hamstring length. It seems that suboccipital tensing relates to hamstrings that resist lengthening. It reminds me of the Feldenkrais demonstration of rapidly improving someone's ability to touch his/her toes in the standing orientation. The person first sees how far s/he can move the hands toward the toes. Then, with hands supported on a chair, the practitioner assists some differentiated spinal flexing and extending. When the person tries the test movement again, there is (usually) a big improvement. 

Stretching the hamstrings caused 9% increase in hip extension range of motion as measured with the passive 'straight leg raise' (SLR) manouver. Yet stretching the small suboccipital muscles(which connect the occiput with the upper two vertebrae) resulted in almost twice as much (13%) increase of hamstring length as measured with the same SLR test

This fits also with a verbal report I heard from Hubert Godard about an interesting research in Italy: runners on a treadmill would unconsciously increase their running speed when a bioelectrical device on their neck lowered the tonus of the upper neck muscles. Whereas increasing the tonus of these muscles made them slow down their speed, although they were not aware of this and perceived their speed as constant. So a stiff occiput-neck connection will tend to 'put a break' into the legs via shortening of the hamstrings, and a long and loose occiput-neck connection will take 'the break out' by lengthening the midrange of hamstring length and will make the legs swing much faster and easier.