Leading with Your Chin, and How to Stop
We've covered the shoulders. The chin is the next thing I notice, and it's usually tangled up with the first, so let's look at it.
Leading with your chin means your head gets out ahead of the rest of you. Chin pokes forward, neck cranes, and the body follows along behind trying to catch up. I see it most on people who walk with intention, which sounds backward. You'd think trying hard would mean good posture. Usually it means the opposite. You're pushing toward something, even if that something is just the end of the loop, and your head gets there first.
Try this test wherever you're reading. Stop, stand up like you're about to walk somewhere, and rest a finger under your chin. Is your chin sitting on that finger like it's a shelf? Then it's forward. It should be tucked back enough that your ear lines up over your shoulder, not out ahead of it.
Most people, checking this for the first time, are surprised by how far forward they've drifted. It's not dramatic from the outside. Nobody looks like a turtle. But an inch or two forward held for a mile and a half adds up in your neck and upper back by the end of the walk, and over months it adds up in ways that show up on my table, not yours, which is the only reason I know to look for it.
What it's actually doing
Your head weighs about ten, eleven pounds. Held right over your shoulders, your skeleton carries that weight and your muscles barely have to work. Move it forward, even a little, and the muscles at the base of your skull and down the back of your neck have to hold it up against gravity the whole way. That's the tension people feel by the time they get home and rub the back of their neck without knowing why.
It's not dangerous in the way ice on the trail is dangerous. Nobody's getting hurt on a Tuesday walk from a forward chin. But it's the kind of thing that quietly costs you, and I'd rather flag it now than have you asking me in a few years why your neck's been stiff since you can't remember when.
How to fix it, at home first
Don't try to fix this on the walk itself. Too much else going on, too many people to talk to, too easy to forget. Do it at home, standing still, a couple times a day for a week or two, until it's less something you're doing and more something your body just does.
Stand against a wall, heels a couple inches out from it. Back of your head, shoulder blades, and rear end should all touch the wall without straining. Now gently draw your chin back, like you're making a small double chin on purpose. It'll feel silly. It'll feel like you're pulling your head into your neck. You're not, you're just putting it where it's supposed to sit. Hold that for a few seconds, let go, do it again. Ten times, twice a day, that's plenty.
Once that starts to feel less foreign, try it walking around the house before you bring it to the loop. Chin tucked slightly, ears over shoulders, and see whether you can hold it for one length of your hallway without losing it.
The regular who taught me this whole approach
Let me tell you about the very first person who ever walked with me regularly, because this is really where I learned to slow everything down, posture included.
She was in her seventies, could flat out beat me on level ground, no contest, but she'd stop dead the second we hit any kind of incline. I used to think that was a fitness thing. It wasn't, not really. It was that she'd bank everything forward into a hill, chin and shoulders and all, and her body would just say no more, I'm not doing this leaned over like a shovel. So I stopped building the loop around what I could handle and started building it around what she was actually telling me, with her body, before she ever said a word.
She still shows up. And these days when I see somebody lead with their chin into a hill, I think of her stopping dead at the bottom of one, and I slow the whole group down before anybody has to say anything.
That's the opinion underneath all of this. Posture beats pace. I'll say it again because I mean it every time. How you carry yourself over a mile and a half tells me more than how fast you cover it, and it costs you less down the road too.
Before next time
Try the wall check once this week, just to see where your chin actually sits. No need to fix anything yet, just notice.