One of the best exercises to strengthen some of your deep neck flexor muscles is neck retraction exercise or chin tuck exercise. By neck retraction what I mean is that you’re taking your chin and you’re literally sucking it back or pulling it back towards you, past neutral.

You’re holding that position for about two or three seconds, then you’d let that go slightly. What that looks like from the side is I’m going to go and pull my chin back, literally pulling it straight back. I’m trying to make double chins basically, pulling it back.

I’m holding that about two or three seconds and then I let that go. You want to ideally do that about twenty five repetitions so twenty five times ideally about twice a day.

Some people find it very difficult when they first start to actually isolate and feel this movement. To help with that process, it is sometimes easier to actually take our fingers and just feel what that movement feels like.

So using our actual fingers to push your head back, again holding that about two or three seconds then just letting that go slightly, and then just pushing your head back again. You don’t want to do that all the time, you just want to start doing that first because ideally we want to be recruiting these deep neck flexor muscles to actually do that job for us to strengthen them.

The other issue is that sometimes when people do this they tend to tilt their head back into hyperextension or they tend to tilt their head down into flexion. You want to avoid this. So when we’re doing this we want our chin staying relatively neutral, sometimes it tucks down just slightly, but it’s literally just going straight back like this.

Trying to make that double chin, holding it for two or three seconds, letting it go slightly, doing it again, holding it for two or three seconds.

The other issue that I sometimes see with patients is that when they come back from that retracted state, they tend to stick their head out past neutral, into that sort of chicken neck posture or position. We want to avoid that.

We don’t want to exaggerate that forward motion because we are trying to correct this posture, we do not want to be accentuating that movement with this exercise. This is a great exercise that you can literally do anywhere. You can do it on the subway, you can do it in your car you can do it at your computer, eating breakfast, anytime, it’s a very easy exercise to incorporate into your everyday.

Any questions about any of this, please ask.