The very first thing I do when I wake up, as I'm lying in bed half-awake, is to reach behind my head, grab my hair and pull my head to the right. Most of the time (but frustratingly not all the time) this results in a loud audible release from the left side of my neck, somewhere between the base of my neck and about halfway up.
I need to do this before I can function properly. The jolt of it galvanizes me from drowsiness into wakefulness. It's like flicking a switch to turn all my systems on.
The joint right under my skull will sometimes, occasionally, crack but it's hard to target precisely. It's great when you can feel the stiffness in the joint and have a go at it and it cracks, though! I crack my neck with my hands - one hand under the chin, the other grasping my hair on one side of the back of my skull - or sometimes just pushing my chin outwards and upwards with the palm of my hand (only really works for cracking a specific joint in the middle of my neck, though). I'd like to see how your cracking technique is done (I have tried, following your description, but can't get it to go myself). Self-cracking will always be more gentle than something delivered by a chiro/osteo; you'll always be a litle reluctant to push as far as it can go. But I'm convinced you can't always get the right angle/pressure doing it by yourself.
Well at the moment it is one of the vertebrae in my upper left neck. It is a very specific crack - it must be cracked by pushing the left corner of my chin upwards and to the right simultaneously - I do it with my chin tilted to the right slightly and pushing with the palm of my right hand in a motion that lifts up my elbow as though I was going to crack someone under the jaw with it. There must be a tendon that connects directly from my chin or jaw to that vertebra. When pulled tight in that specific direction, the joint releases - not loudly, more of a click than a crack. That is the most satisfying crack I can consistently achieve. I can, I think, flex that joint to the pint of cracking in other directions, but it just seems that the sensation when it goes off in that specific direction beats them all.
Sometimes pulling on it the other way - the opposite direction you wish to crack it in - helps "prime" the joint.
Nice one! I've tried it in an ordinary chair but my back won't go. It must be the extra resistance of the weights that does it.
My two sides are most certainly asymmetric. My right thumb cracks much harder and feels infinitely better when cracked than my left. When I twist my neck to the left different joints crack than when I do it to the right and so on. I can only crack my back twisting to the left. But I can't write with my left hand, so I don't expect both sides of me to be perfectly in sync.
F**k no, they think I'm a freak but I don't care :twisted:
NEEECK!! It's almost essential. I need the shock of it to jolt me into wakefulness. It's like starting the ignition on a twin-engined boat. Pull head to one side (normally the right side first). Crack. Left side activated. Pull to the left. Crack. Right side is on.
On days when I'm having a lie-in, I will also often, rather peculiarly, crack my toes repeatedly before getting up.
Some people just can't. I never could until after getting an osteopathic adjustment and even now it's just one section of my lower spine that will crack and only when I twist to the left. If you're one of these people it may be best to recruit a willing partner. Sometimes it's easier for another person to apply the required amount of pressure. I know for a fact the pressure required for the osteopath to crack my back was pretty startling, and he had already set me up for the adjustment by having me make a half-turn on my side so that most of the slack had already been taken out. The flip side to it is that of course you need to proceed gently and carefully.
Heck, I'd love a good back-crack right now.
Nowadays, it cracks where it needs to crack. I went through a stage where twisting it to the left would crack the right side and vice versa, which is still true to some extent but nowadays it depends on which joints are locked up. That's true of up and down, as well as left and right. Some spots in my neck are more predictable (around the middle, mostly) but once in a while the base of the neck will go off and sometimes it feels as though the joint right behind my skull is "activated". I've even cracked my left jaw while making the neck-cracking twist - on most of those occasions I thought it was just another upper neck crack until I moved my jaw and felt it hinge more smoothly (if anyone out there gets what I mean…).