As a strength and conditioning coach, you want your athletes to remain on the field or court. One injury that can keep them off their playing surface for quite some time is a concussion. Research from Hrysomallis in 2016 showed a link between neck strength and lack of cervical injuries and concussions. Neck training should be a part of your training for every sport – not just the collision sports for American football, rugby, and lacrosse. All sports are contact sports in some nature. Basketball and soccer athletes make contact with one another. Volleyball, baseball, and softball athletes dive on the ground and need to control their heads and necks so they don’t slam it off the ground.

In this article, we are not going to dive into the research on concussions and neck training. What we will talk about are the different ways to train your athlete’s neck when you don’t have the space or budget for neck machines.

How does the neck move?

When looking at your athletes and neck training you should be concerned about the following movements

• Flexion
• Extension
• Lateral Flexion
• Rotation
• Protrusion
• Anti-Flexion
• Anti-Extension
• Anti-Lateral Flexion

Although this might seem a bit “overwhelming” at first, thinking you need to add all of this to your program and you don’t have enough time now. Fear not, adding these movements to your training is easier than you think, and it doesn’t require only you the coach to perform the work on the athletes.

Old school

The old school way to get neck work done is having your athletes lie down on a bench and provide manual resistance forward, backward, right, and left. This is a great way to strengthen someone’s neck without neck machines. The problem is scalability. You need to do every rep on the athletes in order to do this. Another option is to have the athletes do it on one another. In my experience, athletes don’t apply the right amount of pressure and the movement gets sloppy or they just go through the motions. The movements I will show you with a partner are designed to require little cognitive input by the partner.

One old school way of training the neck that requires no partner comes from Jailhouse Strong with their neck movement series Jailhouse Strong Neck Routine.

Here the routine calls for:

• Flexion x20
• Chin glued to chest + Left rotation x20
• Chin glued to chest + Right rotation x20
• Head off ground Left side bend x20
• Head off ground right side bend x20

In this series completing all 100 reps in a row without putting your head back on the ground is HARD. So my recommendation is to start at 10 reps of each and increase the reps according.

A final way to get some “old school” neck work done is to use the cable column machines you already have with straps. If you have a Keiser or similar column you can use the large strap, place it around your head and now your cable column is a neck machine with a weight you can load.

Scalability

Unless you use the Jailhouse neck protocol you aren’t able to get this done with lots of athletes. So, what do you do?

Personally, when I want to program weighted flexion, extension, lateral flexion, and rotation work I will program the Keiser version from above in different blocks for my athletes. For example, the foundation athletes have it in their A block, foundation plus have it in their B block, refined in C block, and refined plus in D block.

Another option that I have used is replacing the machine and strap with a 1” or 1 ½ “ band. This option is much more scaleable as I have as many bands as athletes. In addition to the variations above, we will use bands and rotate.

Partners for scalability

Using partners also makes things simple with large groups, especially when you are limited by bands and equipment. One of the easiest is having the athlete sit on the bench and have their partner push their head to get anti: flexion, extension, and lateral flexion work done



Next, having your partner go on their hands and knees will allow leverage for the partner to help push into for better manual resistance work, or to push into as an isometric hold for anti-work



Next, have your partner stand up. This will increase gravity and the difficultly for the anti-movement work. Here’s an example below:



Tip when performing lateral flexion with a partner and lots of reps:

When I want a lot of side neck work I use this variation that puts the partner on the ground with his/her arm extended overhead so the head doesn’t go too far down.

Protrusion

This movement is pushing your face away from the ground. This is not to be confused with pushing chin to chest. I think this is one of the most important ones to do especially for resisting head hitting the ground when being tackled or when falling. Having a partner push down while lying on your back is the easiest way to get this done.


This can also be done with a mini band under a bench to provide the resistance as seen below.



Combo movements

There are some movements that allow for combination with forward and backward tension with lateral flexion or with right and left tension and flexion and extension. These movements I learned from William Wayland and have been a staple in our program.

Flexion + Extension with lateral tension
Repeat facing the other way to get both sides

Lateral Flexion with FWD + BWD Tension
Putting it all together

Rather than giving you a set and rep scheme for each movement, try them yourself and see what works for you. I have no idea how your athletes are able to do these movements with each other, nor do I know how many bands you have access to. Additionally, you might only have your athletes for 1 day per week or 5 days per week. So, any design I give you wouldn’t work as well as it could.

What I would do is make sure you are rotating your exercises and hitting:

• Flexion
• Extension
• Lateral Flexion
• Rotation
• Protrusion
• Anti-Flexion
• Anti-Extension
• Anti-Lateral Flexion

Once you have done so, start thinking of your own tweaks and make sure you send it to me on SCN.