If you're buying into the nose-bridging-for-fitness-craze popularized recently by so-called "no-BS fitness" pundits - you're dangerously sticking your neck out while padding their wallet. Wrestler's nose-bridging is a grappling technique, not an fitness exercise - (anyone teaching it otherwise is negligent). As the former USA National Sambo Coach - the 3rd style of international wrestling, we deliberately sought to minimize the amount of time bridging due to the strain created in our young athletes when only competing. Can you imagine the cumulative effects of this on older folks?
Compression of the cervical vertebra directly promotes to cumulative joint degeneration. Your joints are lined with cartilage for protection of the joint and to absorb shock from the external world. As we age, this waxy substance in our joints degrades, as does pain-free full range of motion. After puberty, except for the mandible, your joints no longer receive nutritive blood supply. The only oxygen and nutrition that your joints receive comes from a fluid secretion called Synovial Fluid. Furthermore, over time, your joints accumulate various toxins and excess materials promoting degenerative disease and infection.
Add to aging, the compressive exercise suggestions like Nose-Bridging and by the above description, you accelerate joint deterioration! Mobility alone stimulates the release of the nutritive flow, oxygen delivery and contamination cleansing wash of Synovial fluid. Imagine your daily activities of neck tension compress out this Synovial fluid, as well as the age-related deterioration. Now add to it a heavily contorted exercise to squeeze out the remainder of this precious joint nectar. Think about this and remember some people are asking you to PAY them to teach you to do this to your neck. So why spend hours in a bridge straining to touch your beak to the mat?
Perhaps you are one of the few who have the vertebral structure which can sustain such angular sheer and compressive force over the years. Perhaps you are young enough that you won't see any adverse affects from this activity for awhile. However, most people will accumulate chronic conditions from such activity, and there are without doubt more efficient, safer, and greater results producing methods of accomplishing the goal than this family of "neck-bridging" exercises.
So What's The Alternative?
The last neck exercise you'll ever need is the Body-Flow? Neck Roll (a video clip of me performing it in the Maximology? video course, though the exercise is part of the Body-Flow? curriculum.)
| Begin Prone Crucifix style. |
| Turn your head to one side. Begin a horizontal version of "Screwing Arms" exercise, rolling the shoulder down which lay opposite of the direction you turned your head. This lifts your opposite shoulder. Tilt your head under the lifted armpit as if moving chin to chest. Continuing rotating the opposite arm, beginning with the shoulder, attempting to move from palm down to palm down 360 degrees later. |
| Tilt your pelvis upward and exhale hard with Performance Breathing. As per Performance Breathing, your core should be tight and compressed now - neither vacuum nor Valsalva. Contract your core musculature to drag your legs. Simultaneously continue Screwing Arms. Allow your hips to move in a crescent so that your feet drag directly towards your head. |
| Go ultra-slow so that you prevent roll-over and can transition to the Neck Roll. Keep moving chin to chest and when your head frees begin to turn your head back to center. You pass through the Spinal Rock position (AKA the "plough" in Yoga). |
| As your feet extend back into the Prone Crucifix, you complete the exercise. |
I do no other exercises than Body-Flow? Biomechanical Exercise? and Clubbells? for Circular Strength Training.
There's old Soviet footage of a teenage Sambo wrestler performing advanced neck-bridging exercises in the introduction of an old video of mine. Then alternative exercise suggestions are made using Biomechanical Exercise? from my system - a ROSS vs. SAMBO training demonstration in the introduction. I've experimented with just about every method out there as an international athlete and national coach. I needed to find the best methods promising the greatest results for the longest athletic careers. CST is the culmination of those 15 years, and for your neck, the last exercise you'll ever need is the Body-Flow? Neck Roll.