Neck Strengthening: 8-Min Core & Muscle Routine

Hey guys, Joel Kreska, sport physiotherapist back here again. Today we're going to go over some strengthening of the neck muscles and it's super important in jiu-jitsu obviously to have strong neck muscles especially if you have a long neck like myself. Now it's not, I want to be very clear, we're not strengthening your neck here to try and fight off chokes that is maybe gonna buy you a second or two. What we're trying to do here is strengthen the neck muscles to help make sure that we protect our neck when we're basing out on our forehead pushing into people or even bridging or getting stacked or any of those kind of things.

It's also important for helping to direct our posture when we're trying to be nice and tall and have a nice column spine. So when we're looking at strengthening our necks I see a lot of academies doing it well maybe not the way that I would do it and I'm not gonna say incorrect but there's always a better way to do things and in my opinion it's really important that we focus on the core muscles that live right underneath the chin. They're called the short neck flexors as a group but it's longus capitis, longus coli, rectus capitis and longus cervicus and honestly the names don't matter. Their function though however is to kind of hold the chin right up against the Adam's apple if you obviously have an Adam's apple but what we're trying to do here is create almost like this activation of a double chin and that activates our core in our neck similar that we would use in core around our pelvic area and people don't even question that when it comes to doing some low back exercises and it's no different in the neck and so we want to make sure that we activate these short neck flexors before we move our neck to try and encourage a proper stabilization and then we're getting proper muscles doing the work okay and we typically see the injuries around the short neck flexors most commonly in a whiplash situation you might even see it say in like an uppercut if you get hit and your head gets whipped back but we as physios commonly see it say with car accidents and what we're trying to do here is offset that and make sure that we're not giving this inability to control where the chin goes so again if I get a whip back this way then these muscles in the front here get injured or strained and just like in jiu-jitsu we want to make sure that we have the ability to kind of stay out of this head forward poke position this is one of the worst things you could do in jiu-jitsu especially in someone's guard because you don't have any power behind it and if you're ever unsure go in someone's guard and ask them to pull down on your head when you're in this rounded posture you will never win but if we sit up nice and tall and tuck our chin back they can crank on you all they want and they're gonna go nowhere so having said that back what I was saying is that with in certain academies you know you do these warm-ups and what you end up seeing is people laying on their back which is great and they do these large movements of their neck which is really good for mobility of their neck but it's not working the short neck flexors so to work the short neck flexors specifically and you'll find it's way harder what we're gonna do is tuck your chin very gently as if and you're gonna keep the back of your head still on the mat so it's almost like you're lengthening the back of your head up the mat as you tuck your chin as we tuck the chin we're gonna lift about a millimeter and so in my case like my little short spiky hair still gonna touch the mat almost and that's my start and my end position so while I hold here I'm gonna lift about another centimeter and back down and I'm not resting it on the the mat I'm just doing these teeny tiny little flexions okay and the whole point of that is to again make sure that we stay as close to a neutral posture as we can as we strengthen this I don't want to be doing this and coming way the heck up here because then I'm gonna get other muscles like the sternocleidomastoid these other muscles that they're great but not what we're working on we're trying to create a foundation and a really strong core to then build off of so the first exercise is the short neck flexors with flexion so we do a little chin nod we hold it keep it compressed throughout the whole exercise and we lift about a millimeter off the mats we're gonna then lift our head about a centimeter up and down and you try to start with maybe you know five or so work your way up to ten after we've done that we can progress to doing the chin nod keeping it tucked throughout we're gonna lift a millimeter and then we're gonna rotate about 45 degrees each way again what people tend to do is as they rotate they either blow the chin out forward which is losing the core control or as they're doing it they're gonna lift their head as they're rotating and that's again kicking in the sternocleidomastoid okay so and then the third one we're gonna do is we're gonna do the chin nod hold it throughout we lift about a millimeter and then we're gonna sort of hover above the mats doing the side flexion so bringing your ear to your shoulder about 45 degrees again and we're just gonna hover back and forth making sure that you maintain that chin nod now you should feel that again right underneath the chin you may when you start feel it right in the back and that's likely because you've got a slouchy posture and those suboccipital muscles the ones that live right underneath the bump on the back of your head here they're really tight and so if that's the case make sure you start by gently stretching out those muscles and try to do it you know regularly so that we loosen up the back and we strengthen the front now there's some people where they have what's called the kyphosis in the thoracic spine and what that looks like is they're sort of rounded like this even though their heads are up tall they've got this roundedness up here and for those people just take a towel roll and set it underneath your the curvature of your neck and that sort of gives a little bit of a fulcrum to then be lifting off of so when you're doing these exercises start off quite gentle you don't realize how hard they actually are and when I say gentle I mean we're still lifting the weight of your head so we're not adding weight or anything like that but start off with relatively small amount of repetitions you know five to ten or so and you can even sequence into you know flexion into rotation into side flexion and then as you get good you can kind of flip around and make them longer repetition amounts and it really builds up your control through here once we've done that we've built a nice stable core base that's when we're safe now to start building and getting into some of the wrestler bridges and stuff like that the strength in the back and the sides of your neck which we'll get into but it's really really important to make sure that you've got a nice stable base and that creates a nice column of your spine and that's good for both rehab of any neck injuries that happen because these short neck flexors always get inhibited and shut off in any neck injury and it's also good for your jujitsu making sure that you've got either a nice tall column or that when I'm say inverting and I'm turning my head that my core is activated my head's not getting torqued into funny positions almost giving yourself a neck crank I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you on the mat soon have a good one