How To Build A Huge Neck

What’s up, guys? Today we’re talking all about the neck and how to build a bigger one, safely.

We know there’re many choices out there when it comes to developing your neck, but only some are going to help you train them safely.

Maybe you’ve been told to do neck bridging on your back, maybe even to lean forward and do them like that. The idea here is, that this tutorial will do two things for you.

Number 1: it will help you to build a huge, thick neck.

Number 2: it’s going to help you build an enormous vertebra for the sides of your neck that’s left over when you’re done doing the exercises.

Compressions Throughout Your Neck

It’s not always about your muscles, guys. Especially. It’s about doing what you like to do and training properly so that you can have some longevity in the process. Take a look at the skeletal images below to show you exactly why, because when you look at those exercises that we’re going to show you, we’re not just talking about being able to build strength in the neck. What we’re talking about is the position you’re putting yourself in.

In the process of trying to do those exercises mentioned above, you are doing some major damage to the structural integrity of your spine. Remember this, you only get one neck in your lifetime. Only one.

So you’d better protect it. What we’re looking at is, that we get a lot of compressions throughout your neck because those are closed-chain exercises.

Normally, closed-chain exercises are fantastic. They’re exactly what you want to do. Exactly how you want to train. Especially if you want to train like an athlete, but when it comes to the neck you don’t want to train that way, because you’re introducing a lot of compression through the spine.

If you take a look at what’s going on, you can see the little yellow objects that are on the sides of the vertebrae are your nerve roots and they exit between the area of the two vertebrae that they’ve been named after.

For example; if you’re talking about a C5-6, it’s between the levels of C5 and C6. And if you’re looking at C6-7, it’s between the levels of C6 and C7.

Each one of these nerve roots controls the actions down particular dissemination of your arm. So if you look at your C6-7 region of the neck, which is being controlled more by the tricep strength down that arm, motor-wise.

You’re going to have receptive commands as well, but you’re going to get a C5-6 that’s going to come down the deltoid into the bicep.

The fact is, you won’t feel anything until you get compression on one of those nerves until that little nerve is compressed by your vertebrae or something in the area. You may feel a slight bit of grinding in your neck, but you’re not going to feel pain or weakness down the arm.

It’s in the instant that you get this encroachment in connection with one of those nerve roots. Just like that, you can go from 0 to 60 in terms of discomfort, and weakness.

Now, when you do those other exercises, you’re compressing the spine down, pushing your neck bones into each other. Then when doing those exercises, you either rotate side to side, do the gapping side to side, or you’re pushing down and moving your neck forward and back.

The idea is that your two neck bones are now pressing together and they’re grinding. When there’s bone-on-bone contact, your body is going to respond by trying to reinforce the area a little more than how it is currently. Unfortunately, what happens is it will normally lay down more bone called “osteophytes” or “bone spurs”.

Those bone spurs, all they’re doing is making it a higher likelihood that it’s going to impinge or touch upon your nerve. You’re leaving more or less room for the nerve to occupy itself. Meaning that it’s going to have a higher chance that it’s going to touch something.

Again, you might be building a great neck by doing these exercises on the bone, but the moment that new bone formation or that compression that’s going on inside the spine by doing these exercises is going to allow it to get to the nerve, and you’ll be in a lot of pain, my friend.

It may be the situation where you’re doing this for a long period and never feel anything until the day you wake up and realize “OWOWWCH! TTF was right. I should have been doing something else.”

Flexion, Extension, And Side Bending

What that something else should be is something that people talk about all the time, or you’ve probably seen it as well. It’s a plate series. What you do is wrap a plate in a towel, put it on your head, and go through the four major directions of movement.

Which would be flexion, extension, and side bending.

Now as you see in this pic of doing flexion, what you do is lay so your head is rested at the back of the bench, and laying backward over the end of the bench. So when you go through the motion here you have to flex your neck and bring it forward, to work the muscles on the front side. Then you flip over and put the plate on the back of your head, and do the same thing.

Now what you’re going to do is you’re going to bend your head backward.

You’re going to work the muscles on the backside of the neck. Then you turn on your side and drop your head down, and have to come up against the resistance of the plate, You’re now working one side of the neck. Then of course, when you go to the other side, you’re working on the other side of your neck. But that’s not even enough if you want to do this properly. To perform this the correct way and right way to add one more significant adjustment.

If you want to work the neck, you have to realize that posteriorly we’re usually all pretty messed up. We allow ourselves to have rounded shoulders throughout the day, then our head follows our shoulders. The only way that our head will compensate so that we can still see straight ahead of us, is to move up our chin and head back.

So when we move up our chin that way, what we’re doing is, we’re stretching out the muscles on the front side of our neck, and in the same process, weakening the back of the neck. So if we want to get the neck nice and strong, we can’t just train in those four major directions.

We have to do it in a way that allows our de-flexors of the neck to become activated and strong while we’re training our neck. So you need to tuck your chin and back it in. Not out to the front as it would normally sit. Pull it straight back. If you have to take your index finger, you put it right at the point of your chin, you push straight back in like that.

Once you’re strong in this area, the front area of your neck, now you can go through your motion. If you want to go side bend, you go side bend. When you go flexion, you go flexion in the same area on the front of your neck. If you’re going to go extension, you go extension there as well.

So if you take another look at the plate series, you can see that now, with this modification, pull the chin in, set it, and now do your reps.

We don’t care if we have to decrease the number of reps we can do to do them effectively with this combination of de-flexion, or if we have to just lighten the weight. But for anybody that tells you “Oh, you can’t build a really big neck that way. You need to get on the ground and do that bridging series”, that’s complete nonsense. The thing is, you can use any size weight plate and further progress it. It doesn’t even matter if you decide to use 100lbs on there, the main thing is that you can handle it.

The notion of gradual overload is definitely in place here and that’s going to assist you to build larger muscles irrespective of whether it’s in your legs, the triceps, your biceps, or your neck.

So the idea is, to allow yourself the chance to strengthen your neck safely because you only get one. If you mistreat it you’re going to be in a lot of trouble down the road. As we’ve said before, those complications that can happen from having all that compression, it’s not a matter of “Oh, I’m good. I’ve been doing this for an extended period.”

You don’t know what’s going on in your neck unless you’ve asked for an MRI to be done or shown some proof of the damage you’ve been going through because the day you wake up you absolutely will experience what we are covering here in this tutorial.

That 0 to 60. No pain, to all of a sudden “I can’t move my arm. There’s so much weakness. I have a lot of pain here.

What do I do? I’m not able to even move my neck now.” You probably would even assume that it’s because you slept on it wrong. Maybe not. It could be that there’s a lot more going on inside your neck, more than you ever bargained.

So let’s do this the right way, guys. This website is all about training and training for the right effect, but at the same time doing it safely. If you want workout programs that do the same thing, don’t ever compromise the gains that you can make, but just try to find the right guidance to do it the safest way, for the most longevity; then head to our physical fitness to learn from our other training programs and tutorials. In the meantime, if you’ve found this information helpful, leave your comments and thumbs up below.

If you want to make suggestions for other topics you’d want to learn about, let us know and we’ll continue to do these types of tutorials for you. All right, guys. We’ll be back again soon with more great lessons.