Sports

No matter what sport you play, your head and neck will either move in all directions, on their own accord or because of an impact. Ensuring you train and strengthen the neck from all angles and all speeds, varying resistances and durations, you stand a very good chance of reducing your chance of getting a concussion from a direct or indirect impact. A good majority of concussions are caused by the head rotating at high speeds and stopping suddenly causing brain rattle. If you/we can increase the range of motion in the neck, increase the flexibility, we have more time to slow the head down, this added to an increase in strength, further improves your chances.

Not all sports you would consider neck strength being a requirement and example of this is Golf. It’s a leisurely sport, no impacts nor direction changes. How about the speed at which the body is being asked to rotate during tee-off, whilst keeping both eyes on the ball? This is no different to the head

rotating at speed, if anything there is more mass moving which can cause serious injuries. Try not to think of neck training as a filler exercise that you do at the end of the gym session if you have time. Infill your gym sessions with neck training. Perform your squats, then train neck in your rest period. Bench press, then neck train, what you will find is your sessions will become more focussed and you wont be wasting time doing nothing. Doing something is better than doing nothing when it comes to the neck. What’s more, the Iron Neck has a zero footprint, it takes up next to know floor space, can be attached to any rack, cables station or just to the railings/pillars.

Match Preparation

What do you do to warm up your neck before playing your sport? Sure a few stretches, isometric holds and that’s probably it. Warming the neck up from every angle will ensure it is ready to absorb any impact during the game/match.

Recovery/Regeneration

What do you do the day after a game for recovery? Running through 10 minutes of rotations, retractions and laterals can flood these muscles with fresh oxygenated blood to speed up recovery and reduce any inflammation and stiffness, its is no different to riding a bike to flush the legs.

In short, if you play sports, you should train the neck and make it part of everyday training, warming up and recovery.