The Exercises Stayed. The Reasons Were Rebuilt Three Times.
For 130 years people have trained the neck with nearly identical movements and completely different explanations — and two of the wrong explanations can be traced spreading, publisher to publisher.
Between 1891 and today the prescribed neck exercises barely changed: resisted flexion, resisted extension, resisted side bending, and loaded bridging. The stated reason for doing them was rebuilt from scratch three times — postural carriage, then vitality and nerve force, then measured tissue loading. Two of the discarded rationales can be traced moving from one commercial publisher to the next, thirteen and fifteen years apart, which is the same mechanism by which bad fitness claims still spread today.
Four explanations for the same four movements
1893 — gravity and carriage. John Corker patents a weighted helmet and explains it by observation of load-bearing populations:
People who in early years have carried burdens upon their heads, have a more erect carriage than those who have not done so, the law of gravity causing them to hold the body in such a position that the weight shall be supported directly above the feet.
US Patent 500,686, “Gravity-Helmet,” filed 10 August 1892, granted 4 July 1893.
1911 — vitality, blood, and the nervous system. Bernarr Macfadden gives the neck a dedicated section in his Encyclopedia of Physical Culture:
Of all undeveloped parts, this is the most painfully conspicuous, and furthermore offers to the beholder a sort of index of the vitality and general physical condition of the individual… whereas a full throat indicates a large open thorax, with good breathing possibilities, and large arteries supplying blood to the brain, with plenty of room for them. All this, as one will perceive at a glance, means vigor and vitality.
Bernarr Macfadden, Macfadden’s Encyclopedia of Physical Culture, Volume 1, 1911. oflFers in the scan; read “offers.”
1924 — fall resistance. Earle Liederman devotes a chapter to the neck and argues that a strong one is less likely to break in a fall. He also repeats Macfadden’s claim about blood supply to the brain. The available scan of Liederman is too degraded to quote responsibly; this is paraphrase, and the reason is explained in the editorial standards.
1926 — nerve force. George Jowett titles a chapter “How a Columnar Neck Creates Nerve Force.”
2004 — measured tissue loading. The US Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine measures what a neck actually does under load: peak lateral muscle force from 50% to 257% of maximum voluntary contraction, and joint reaction forces at C7–T1 rising sharply beyond roughly 15° of flexion, 30° of extension, and 35° of rotation.
Postural carriage. Vitality and cerebral circulation. Fall resistance. Nerve force. Measured force and angle.
Four of those five are wrong, unfalsifiable, or both. And in every era, the prescribed movements are close to identical.
The movements that did not change
| Era | Flexion | Extension | Lateral flexion | Loaded bridging |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hackenschmidt 1908 | Clasped hands, press head to chest | Reverse, against hand | (via head rolling) | Barbell press from head bridge |
| Macfadden 1911 | Fingers on forehead, resist forward | Clasped hands behind head, resist backward | Hands over head, pull to shoulder against resistance | — |
| Modern isometric protocol | Palm on forehead, press forward | Palm behind head, press back | Palm above ear, press sideways | — |
Macfadden’s sixth exercise, verbatim:
Placing fingers on forehead, with head far back, bring head far forward until chin rests upon the chest, resisting the movement with the fingers.
And his seventh and eighth:
First placing the clasped hands back of the head, the latter bent far forward, bring head far back as in Illustration No. 8, against the resistance of the hands.
Macfadden, 1911, as above.
Set that beside a rehabilitation handout printed this year and the instruction is the same sentence. A hundred and fifteen years of physiological reasoning has been demolished and replaced, and the exercise survived every demolition unchanged.
Why that is the interesting part
A practice that outlives its own justification three times over is telling you something.
It means the practice was never actually derived from the theory. People trained necks because trained necks visibly worked — wrestlers survived holds, pilots flew without pain, people looked and felt better — and then reached for whatever explanatory vocabulary their era had available. Gravity and carriage in the 1890s. Vitality and circulation in the 1910s. Nerve force in the 1920s. Newton-metres today.
The modern explanation is the first one that is actually testable, and it is very likely also incomplete. Nothing about the current framing should be held with more confidence than the evidence supports, and the history on this page is the reason to say so.
Two false claims, caught in transit
The more useful thing this record shows is how wrong explanations travelled.
The cerebral blood supply claim
Macfadden, 1911: a full throat indicates “large arteries supplying blood to the brain, with plenty of room for them.”
Liederman, 1924: the same claim, thirteen years later, in substance.
Both men ran mail-order physical culture publishing businesses. Both were selling courses. Neither offered any evidence, because none existed — neck circumference does not govern cerebral perfusion, and the claim was never testable in the form either man stated it.
The nerve force claim
Macfadden, 1911, explaining why neck and back work matters:
…the nervous system may be stimulated and energized by exercises which bring the blood to these parts and strengthen not only the muscles of these regions but also all of the adjacent tissues. The muscles of the back and of the neck, therefore, should always receive special attention…
Macfadden, 1911, as above. stdce in the scan; read “sake.”
Jowett, 1926: “How a Columnar Neck Creates Nerve Force.”
Jowett’s chapter title is routinely quoted as a curiosity of period eccentricity. It is not eccentric. It is downstream of Macfadden by fifteen years, restating an idea that was already established in the literature he grew up on.
Why this matters now
Two unfounded physiological claims, originating with the largest fitness publisher of the era, picked up by the next publisher a decade later, and repeated as established fact — with no evidence produced at any point, by men with a commercial interest in the conclusion.
That is not a historical curiosity. It is a working description of how fitness claims propagate today. The mechanism has not changed; only the distribution channel has. Substitute “large arteries supplying blood to the brain” with any confident physiological claim currently circulating about neck training and the structure is identical: an authority asserts it, a second authority repeats it because the first one said it, and within a decade it is something everybody knows.
This site is published by a company that sells neck-training equipment. That is precisely the position Macfadden and Liederman were in, and it is the reason the editorial standards page exists and is specific about verification rather than general about good intentions.
What survived the demolitions
Strip out everything that turned out to be wrong and a small residue remains, asserted in every era and still supported:
The neck responds quickly to training. Liederman said it in 1924. Modern MRI puts numbers on it — 6.6% to 8.3% muscle volume over twelve weeks — smaller than he implied, and real.
A strong neck resists injury better than a weak one. Liederman’s version was fall resistance, stated as intuition. The modern version is narrower and better evidenced: neck strength is one modifiable factor among several in head-impact risk. Not prevention. A factor.
The exercises work. Resisted flexion, extension, and side bending produce measurable strength gains. Everyone from 1908 onward was right about that, for reasons none of them had.
A note on how this page was assembled
Every quotation here was taken from a scan retrieved and read as raw text, with the source and character position recorded, because an earlier version of this project published a quotation that had been silently reconstructed by an automated retrieval tool and was not real. That error, and what was done about it, is documented on the editorial standards page.
The Liederman material is paraphrased rather than quoted because the available scan is too degraded to quote honestly. A cleaner copy would improve this page.