Keep it up! Neck pain reduced by long-term strengthening
Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.
A little strength training will propbably help a little bit, if you have unexplained chronic neck pain, but not much, not all cases, and not for long. But a lot of strength training? If you keep it up for several months? Now we’re talking!
The evidence we have for longer term training is nothing but good news: lasting improvements in strength, pain, and disability. It still hasn’t been replicated, but it’s excellent preliminary data. For more information, see Ylinen et al, or a much more detailed new discussion in my neck pain book.
(By the way, this is yet another in a series of many updates about exercise efficacy. They just keep happening.)