Keep it up! Neck pain reduced by long-term strengthening

• Jun 18, 2015 • by Paul Ingraham
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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.

Strengthening works, but you don’t have to be quite this badass. Unless you just want to be. This is the Iron Edge neck harness.

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.)