3 Isometric Exercises For Neck Pain

A strong neck is worth its weight in gold.

My name is Bryan. I've been in the health and wellness industry for about 20 years, and coaching pro metabolic health and fitness for close to 10.

Today, I'm going to show you some of my favorite tools for improving and releasing neck pain.

So when it comes to neck pain, we've got a lot of muscles around the neck.  Your neck is actually the most mobile part of your spine, which means there's a lot of room for movement. But there's a lot of room for hiccups as well.

So one of the best things I can do in improving my neck function, my neck strength, my neck stability, and my neck movement is actually isometric work.

You spend enough time around me I will drone on and on about the importance of isometric drills. They're that powerful. And when it comes to improving neck pain, they're tremendous.

What we want to look for is where do you have neck pain? Do you have it in rotating? Do you have in tilting? Do you have it in extension?  Do you have it in flexion. And wherever it is, we want to fix that position.  So here's what we're gonna do.

Let's assume it hurts when I look to my right but my left is okay. What I actually want to do, I want to do an isometric contraction against my hand, moving my head towards that direction. 

So if you're not familiar with an isometric contraction, what that means is the muscles are moving, but the joints are not. So if I'm doing an isometric contraction into my hand, it looks like I'm just standing here, but I'm actually generating a tremendous amount of tension in my neck. And the tension I'm generating is to act as if I'm trying to rotate my head to the right. But my hand is here, fighting against that. So I'm rotating into my right hand creating tension, and I will hold that for 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, relax. Now we check the neck.

If I have a problem with going into extension, I'm actually going to now resist looking up.  I'm trying to tilt my head up, but I'm not letting my neck actually move. Lots of muscle tension, no joint movement, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, then I recheck.  And if I have an issue with tilting, same kind of idea. I'm now instead of towards the front of my head, I'm not gonna go towards the middle of my head, and I'm gonna try and tilt into my hand and resist it for 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and then recheck that tilt, and that will help your neck.

Hopefully you found this helpful. Be sure to like the video, subscribe to the channel. Share this with somebody you know who's dealing with neck pain. I will see you soon.