Jeff Cavaliere

Just touching the back of your head,

And what you're getting there also is a little extra weight.

The way your arms back there is going to provide a little bit of extra resistance on a basic crunch.

But it's also leaving the neck unsupported because so often people are used to holding the entire weight of their head.

And then what happens is they start to fatigue and they're at, here we go again, what is the body's natural compensation?

They know that the eyes have to get up

When they're doing a crunch, the eyes have to raise up.

So what do they do?

They just pull on the head and the eyes come up and they're not doing any more work for their abs, but they've gotten to where they thought they were supposed to be.

Natural compensation gone wrong.

That's not what we want to do.

So when women are encouraged to do it, quote unquote, right, and don't pull on your neck, they don't have the strength in their anterior neck to do that.

So doing this neck series that you're referring to is a great way to strengthen the neck.

And again, depending on how much weight you use, you could just use a 5 or a 10-pound plate and have plenty of overload there to create a stronger neck without a lot of hypertrophy.

And for those that...

aren't aware that the the series is simply taking a plate let's just say we start really light we take a five pound plate we wrap it in a towel nice cushy towel so it's not uncomfortable at all you lay on a bench and you're going to go basically in four different directions you're going to rotate your body's position on that bench in four different ways

to work the extensors, the flexors, and then the lateral neck muscles on both left and right sides.

So all you have to do is, let's say you're starting on your back, you lay on your back, head is off the edge of the bench, that nice cushy towel with the plate inside of it is put up on top of your forehead, you allow yourself to lean your head back,

but as you come up you want to also pull your chin down right because you're not just trying to like overextend or hyperextend your your neck at any point you want to you the stability we talked about before whether it be the hip screwing in or the shoulder the stability you get here is the retraction of the chin that provides the stability to the neck so you have the retraction of the chin which is just pulling it straight back

It's going to feel like it moves only about a half an inch or so.