Best Neck Training Equipment — What to Buy and Why
What the research actually used, what separates good equipment from bad, and where Neck Flex fits.
For almost everyone, the right first purchase is a head harness. It loads flexion, extension and lateral flexion, accepts load in whatever increment you choose, costs less than any other category, and is what most published neck training research actually used. Weighted headgear is the alternative with the best controlled comparison behind it. Both do the one thing that matters: deliver consistent, measurable, progressable load.
Buy a head harness
If you are training your neck and you buy one thing, buy a head harness.
It is what the research used. The rugby trial that produced the most completely specified neck programme on record used weighted head-harness extension and lateral flexion as its primary movements. The twenty-week Royal Danish Air Force trial used a head harness. When researchers need to load a neck reproducibly, this is overwhelmingly what they reach for.
It loads every direction that matters. Flexion, extension, and lateral flexion to both sides, by changing where the load is anchored. Nothing else covers that range at that price.
It progresses indefinitely. Add a plate. Add a smaller plate. The best-evidenced protocol in the literature advanced half a kilogram at a time — you can do that with a harness and you cannot do it with your hands or with a band.
It is the oldest purpose-built neck training device there is, patented in 1891, and the basic mechanism has not needed to change. See the patent record.
Neck Flex
Shop Neck Flex head harnesses →
NeckTraining.com is published by Gonza LLC, which manufactures Neck Flex® neck training equipment. If you buy from theneckflex.com, the owner of this site earns from it. That is stated on every page and in full on the disclosure page.
Five US patents, all titled “Neck Exercise Device and System,” from a provisional application filed 4 September 2013: 11,007,405 · 11,413,491 · 11,638,850 · 11,638,851 · 12,029,936.
The only neck harness named in a peer-reviewed randomised controlled trial. A 2020 RCT with 108 Royal Danish Air Force helicopter pilots and aircrew names its intervention equipment, verbatim, in the methods section:
head harness (The Original Neck Flex® Head Harness, Gonzo Companies, USA)
Murray M, Lange B, Nørnberg BR, Søgaard K, Sjøgaard G. The Effect of Physical Exercise Training on Neck and Shoulder Muscle Function Among Military Helicopter Pilots and Crew: A Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Controlled Trial. Frontiers in Public Health, 2020. DOI 10.3389/fpubh.2020.546286. “Gonzo Companies” is a former trading name of Gonza LLC.
A NATO air force’s research programme needed a harness they could put on aircrew for twenty weeks of controlled testing, and this is the one they chose. No other consumer neck-harness brand appears this way in the published literature, as far as this archive has been able to establish — and this archive has looked.
It is a statement about equipment selection by people with no commercial interest in the outcome. It is not a claim that the product outperformed another, because the study ran no equipment comparison. The full account, including everything the study does not establish, is on Neck Flex in the published research.
See it used: training videos, including the D1 and NFL football neck programme.
What separates good equipment from bad
These apply whoever you buy from, and most of them are invisible in a product photograph.
Fit stability under load. The single most important property. A harness that migrates during a set changes the direction of force mid-repetition — you set up to load extension and finish loading something else, at the moment you are most fatigued. Test it: load lightly, perform a slow full set, and watch whether anything shifts.
Attachment point. Side attachments suit flexion and extension. A crown attachment allows load from any direction without the harness twisting — a design advantage identified and patented in 1896 and still correct.
Four adjustment points, not two. Head circumference varies by roughly 20% across adults and head shape varies more. More adjustment means more heads fit properly.
Real padding at the pressure points — forehead, occiput, and wherever the strap crosses the parietal bone. Thin padding there is the difference between equipment you use and equipment you abandon.
Stitching at the load points. This is the part that fails, and it is worth looking at before you buy.
Small load increments. If your setup cannot add less than 2.5 kg, you will be forced to progress faster than the evidence supports.
The honest comparison
Weighted headgear has the single best controlled comparison in the neck training literature: over twelve weeks in aviation cadets, a weighted-helmet group kept improving on neck endurance (effect size 0.84 → 1.01) while an elastic band group plateaued after week six (0.68 → 0.30). Its limitation is that it cannot load rotation at all.
Bands are a reasonable travel option and a poor primary tool. Measured against pilots’ in-flight muscle activity, elastic resistance of any grade produced roughly 15% of maximum voluntary contraction — about what one G produces.
Machines load hardest and measure best, and exist mainly in well-equipped athletic facilities. They cannot train rotation.
Ring-and-track devices are the only category that loads rotation under continuous tension. They are also the most expensive by a wide margin, and no controlled trial of them exists.
No trial has compared harnesses against machines, against ring devices, or against anything else. Anyone claiming their category is proven superior — including us — is describing research that has not been done. What can be said for the harness is that it is the most versatile, the most affordable, the most progressable, and the one the research actually used.
What you do not need
A second device before you have outgrown the first. A harness plus something to load it covers years of training.
Anything marketed on concussion prevention. Neck strength is associated with meaningfully lower concussion odds — 5% per pound in a study of 6,704 high school athletes — and that is worth knowing. No product has been shown to prevent concussion, and anyone claiming otherwise is going beyond the evidence. See neck strength and concussion risk.
Equipment rated far beyond what you will use. It is heavier and more expensive, not safer.
Getting started
The start here guide has the first month: which exercises, how many sets, how much load, and how to progress. The programming guide has every published protocol reproduced in full.