Sol Brah demonstrates neck exercises that protect your brain from impact, improve posture, and boost athletic performance. The routine uses bodyweight, resistance bands, and household items like plates and bags of rocks. He emphasizes starting light, padding with towels, and keeping your core engaged to avoid injury.
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Hello everyone, today we're going to be talking about neck training, why we want to train the neck, my favorite neck exercises that you can do at home with no equipment and with some equipment, some very cheap equipment, so that you can develop the neck in order to have a healthier body and look better as well. So let's get into it. Firstly, the neck, the primary purpose of training the neck is because the neck carries the skull. And what is inside the skull? The brain. The stronger that your neck is, the stronger that we can withhold any force that comes into hitting our brain, hitting our skull and moving the brain around. Getting knocked out, brain damage occurs when the brain rattles inside the skull. If you've got a strong neck, you can withstand forces and your brain won't rattle as much. That's— so that's the primary focus of neck training. This has carry-on effects to all kinds of sporting endeavors and also just day-to-day life. If you have a, uh, pain— neck pain, it's because you have a weak neck. You can't withhold the forces of holding your neck upright all day, especially into older age or with poor posture as we're leaning forward on computers, as so many of us are. These days. Additionally, there is a massive aesthetic bonus to having a thick neck compared to a pencil neck, which is obviously a, uh, an insult that we give to people that are nerdy or have low testosterone. So you don't want to have a pencil neck. Let's get into the exercises in no particular order. Obviously, if you're just starting out with these exercises, you can usually start with just body weight or very lightweight and get used to the movements first. It's likely you'll be pretty sore after starting these neck exercises if you've never done them before, so just keep that in mind. And let's look at the exercises. So our exercise here, you want to find a bench, or you can use a bed or any kind of surface to hang your neck off like this, and then you're going to let gravity hang your head back And then pull yourself up. So this is a bodyweight neck curl. Very, very simple. Fully relax and extend at the bottom like this. You don't want to compress yourself or kind of collapse inwards. You want to have length and strength all throughout the neck as you're doing it. So really kind of pushing up and out. As you're getting to the bottom of the rep, but still letting gravity kind of carry you down as well. And then up again as high as you can and down. And then just do as many reps as you can. Get to your point of failure, and that's one set. Once you've progressed a bit, you can just use a light plate placed on top of the head, usually with a— if you want to get a small towel to put in between, then that is a good way to kind of soften the weight. But just kind of place it on your forehead You can hold it in place with your arm. However, you don't want to take any of the weight off your head with your hands. You're just holding it in place so it doesn't slip off and doing the same. Then when you get to your limit with the weight, take the weight off, pump out some more reps just with body weight or head weight until you're done that set as well. So then you're gonna do the same exercise pretty much but on the side. So you're going to be letting your neck hang off, but off to the left, and then bringing it up like that. Same principles, you want length and strength, and right up as high as you can. Until you can't do any more, and repeat for the other side. Obviously, in continuing that theme, we can face down, and we're going to be bringing our head backwards, as so. And if we want to make it a little harder, we're Once we've progressed in strength, weight on the back of the head, like this. Easy. All of those pretty straightforward. We're just taking a direction that we move the head in— forward, back, side to side. And adding weight and adding a bit of extra resistance by going against gravity across those planes of motion. Other exercises that we can do using the bench include, uh, various bridges. So again, the neck moves in various ways. We can do the neck bridge against the bench in various directions, but I'll show you this one first. So we can make it easier or harder depending on how much weight is going actually onto the neck, how much weight is kind of on the body here. So if you want to make it just starting a little easier, we can come up onto our neck, but we're still bracing. There's weight on my feet and my hands, but the neck then, as we push up against the bench, is taking a lot of the weight as well. And we just hold that This is obviously harder when I take my hands away. You can even take one foot away to make it even harder, and holding that position with the neck for as long as possible, it is quite tough. So if you're just starting, you may even just want to be seated on your butt and then slowly lean back and push off against the bench. Okay, very good. I'll show you the side now. Do the same principle. We can have our neck up against the bench, elbow here to brace, and then hold. No hands, one leg, etc., etc. Hold as long as possible. Oh, and then down. Other side. And then forward as well. When you're doing the forward bridge, you can have your hands on the bench as so and slowly take your weight off. Like that. Next, getting nice and pumped now. So now I want to show you an exercise with a band. The band is placed at about my chest height, and you just want to wrap it around a bar, anything that you can attach it to. This is quite a thick band. I recommend getting a bunch of different ones so you can start light And again, just as the previous exercises, we had gravity forcing down on us. Now the band is providing the force so we can be upright while providing our neck that force to strengthen it. So this is, of course, bringing my neck forward, and the resistance— if I'm not resisting, my neck comes forward like this. So by resisting and coming up, we are putting tension on the neck, enhancing our postural muscles. And obviously, the further you step back, the stronger the force. And you can add in some relaxing and then exerting against that force. Take another step back. Sometimes the band can fly off your head, so if you want to just be sure of it, just place your fingers here to touch the band so you don't pull out any hairs, as I have done in the past. And just hold that for a while. Even if I'm not doing a focused neck training session, I like to do this at the start of the day to activate my posture and make sure I'm going to be standing tall, get blood flow up the spine into the brain as well. It's really great for that. And then hold that for as long as you can, maybe do some extra movements, and then come back in. Now we can do the same with the band on the side of the head. Stepping out, keeping that position, keeping tall, keeping long and strong. Bit more pressure. Hold that for a while. And so on. And now the other side. And not only do you want to resist the, the, uh, the band, but you want to actively push against it. So not just keeping in place, but really exerting yourself and pushing against the force So you activate everything and you're not just kind of letting it slip. And you can of course also do the forward neck with the band. Easy. So using the band, we've hit all the different ways of moving the neck with resistance. Something to note, your neck moves in 360 degrees. It obviously doesn't just move left, right, up, down, forward, back. So you want to make sure that throughout your neck training you're doing a lot of rolls, you're doing a lot of diagonal movements and so forth to make sure that you're activating things, decompressing things, and moving in a natural way not just these isolated pathways that we use to build strength in the specific actions that we do with the exercises. Just to show you with a bit heavier weight, bit of cardboard here against my forehead, and 10 kilo plate. And then the fun thing you can do, if you have the balance and strength, is to try to hold the plate up with no hands. Another thing you should realize is that your neck attaches to your abs. It all should be thought of as one core bracing system, not in isolation, especially when you're pushing forward and high with the neck like that. Oh, very good. If you're into combat sports and also just bracing your head and neck in a more athletic, uh, manner, you can do headbutts onto a heavy bag. As so, or even just kind of using your neck to push it off like that. So there's less of the actual headbutting and more using your head and neck as, uh, as a rhino would with their horn. Even simpler if you're just lying on the floor Like this. Bring your neck up and then down. Turn to your side. And then on your back. This motion, if you notice, is actually what babies are doing when they're first learning to move on their bellies and up, looking around, tummy time. It's a very quintessential fundamental human movement. Which everyone gets too little of these days. There you go. Movement that is a little more advanced, that's used in wrestling and boxing, is the bridge on the ground, wrestler's bridge, like this, and then up onto your head. As I said, I can't do that for too long. It's quite advanced, and you want to be— you want to make sure that you're really on top of your neck training to get into that, because you run the risk of compressing your neck quite hard unless you're really doing it properly. And the other exercises that I've listed are just a bit easier, a bit more straightforward with less risk of anything. So that's pretty much it for the neck training exercises that you can do at home. Fairly simple, and all you need is a resistance band or two. You don't even need that equipment to start with, using gravity in the ways that I showed you, or even, you know, any kind of weight. There's a couple of kilos, it doesn't even have to be fitness weight as such, a bag of rocks or whatever you have access to. You know, you can MacGyver a bit of equipment that way to get more weight for these kind of simple exercises for your neck. So go get a thicker neck, implement these into your routine, and let me know if there's any exercise things that you would like my guidance or tips on in the next video. Thank you and farewell.
