Don’t Neglect Your Neck

I’m keeping the workouts pretty brief these days, doing sort of a “Big Three” plus a few exercises for the neck, grip, calves and abs. Reps are being performed in a modified, negative-emphasized style; a three second positive and six second negative with a brief pause at the top of pulling and simple movements, for between four and six repetitions or about forty to sixty seconds time under load. While the slower negatives were working very well, I wanted to increase the reps slightly while keeping the set duration short and compare results.

Yesterday’s workout was:

1. Neck Extension
2. Neck Flexion
3. Chin Up
4. Shoulder Press
5. Deadlift
6. Calf Raise

The total workout time including equipment set up was only twelve minutes. The previous workout, listed below, only took only nine minutes to complete; the time under load for each exercise was around sixty seconds and I rested less than a minute between the first four and not at all between the last three:

1. Leg Press
2. Chest Press
3. Row
4. Trunk Flexion
5. Gripping (Right)
6. Gripping (Left)

My total weekly workout time was less than twenty minutes. The time efficiency is improved significantly by the use of selectorized machines; it is much faster to switch pin positions on a weight stack or spring positions on the Ivanko Super Gripper than to load plates on a barbell or plate-loaded machine. Part of the reason yesterday’s workout was a few minutes longer was the time required to load plates on the Nautilus XPload deadlift. However, even when I performed similar workouts with mostly free weights I was able to keep the total workout time under twelve minutes by loading or changing plates between exercises and by using a more efficient plate-loading strategy. My total weekly training time then was still less than thirty minutes.

For example, in the workout where the standing press followed the barbell squat, I would load the bar with the weight for press first, then the additional plates required for the squat, so after the squat I only had to remove the additional plates rather than change any.

Bodyweight-only workouts could be done even more efficiently, since they require no set up beyond getting into the proper starting position.

Don’t let the brevity of these workouts fool you, though. When done correctly, the exercises are brutally hard and although the workouts are short the density of work performed is extremely high. The muscles are under a higher level of tension for a cumulative time under load comparable to typical bodybuilding workouts lasting over an hour.

It would be possible to cut the workouts down to just a “Big Three” – a hip and thigh movement, a push and a pull – and get similar results training less than ten minutes a week. The problem with this is although you can effectively train most of the major muscle groups with just a few movements, to hit some smaller but important muscle groups you need a few additional exercises. Of these, one of the most important but also the most often neglected are the muscles of the neck.

In addition to protecting the cervical spine the muscles of the neck affect your appearance more than you might think. A thick, well developed neck gives you a powerful appearance, while a thin, undermuscled “pencil neck” can make you appear weak and frail. Your neck is also one of the few trainable body parts visible when fully clothed, so while a business suit might conceal most of the results of your disciplined eating and hard work in the gym, you can still impress with a well developed set of sternocleidomastoids.

Whether you’re more concerned with reducing your risk of injury or developing an overall well-balanced physique don’t neglect your neck.

It takes very few exercises to effectively work all the muscles of the neck. Almost all the muscles of the neck are effectively worked during extension and flexion, and alternating with or occasionally substituting either left and right rotation or lateral flexion will work the few those miss (obliquus capitus inferior and rectus capitis lateralis).

Since cleaning up my diet I’ve leaned down from over 200 pounds with a 34″ waist to my current 185 and 32″, but since incorporating the negative emphasized reps and a lower time under load my neck actually appears to have gotten larger. I’m no Joel Waldman, whose 22 and 1/4 inch neck appears in the chapter on neck training in High Intensity Workouts, but thanks to hard training I’m no pencil neck either.

If you don’t already include direct neck exercise in your workouts, start now. If you don’t have access to a properly designed neck machine like the ones made by Nautilus, MedX and Pendulum Strength Systems, manual resistance can be effective when done correctly and head harnesses can be used with either weights or a cable machine for extension, flexion and lateral flexion.

Also, if you’re not getting the results you want from your workout, rather than following the typical advice to do more exercise more often, do the opposite and train with fewer exercises, less often, but do them much harder. If you’re not sure where to begin check out the High Intensity Workouts ebook to get you started.