Your skull weighs about twelve pounds. When it is stacked over your shoulders, the muscles that hold it there do almost nothing. For every inch the head translates forward of the shoulders, the effective load on the back of your neck approximately doubles. A typical desk-worker head sits two to three inches forward.
That is thirty to fifty pounds of continuous load on tissues that evolved to do almost no work.
This is protraction. It is not a movement of the neck in the textbook sense — it is the skull translating forward in space, distinct from flexion or extension. And yet it is the most-used joint action of the cervical spine in modern life. Your office trains it for free, all day, with no awareness.
The consequences are predictable. Suboccipitals shorten and trigger headaches. Deep neck flexors switch off entirely. The upper traps and SCM run a continuous low-grade contraction to hold the head against gravity from the wrong angle. The cervical curve flattens or kyphoses. The disc loading shifts forward.
You bring all of this to the mat. The fix is not to stretch the traps. The fix is to learn that protraction is a discrete action you can perform deliberately — so that the brain finally registers it, and retraction becomes available. The protocol is over here.