Liederman's 1924 Neck Chapter

Why nothing here is in quotation marks

The only digitised copy of Muscle Building this archive has located is an OCR scan with systematic Cyrillic character substitution running through it. Chapter headings come out as Cuaprer ПІ. Hackenschmidt’s name comes out as Скокок HACKENSCHMIDT. A sentence that should read “A short time ago I was talking” reads А stowr time ago T was talking.

Text in that condition can be read — the substance is recoverable by anyone willing to work through it. It cannot be quoted, because turning it back into clean prose means an editor deciding what each corrupted word was supposed to be, and the result would be that editor’s sentence presented as Liederman’s.

This site published a fabricated quotation once, from a different degraded scan, and the editorial standards page exists because of it. So: everything below is paraphrase, sourced to a scan whose archive identifier and character offsets are recorded in the project files. A cleaner scan, or a physical copy, would upgrade this page substantially.

Earle E. Liederman, Muscle Building, 1924. Read as raw text from the archive.org scan muscle-building_202505; the neck chapter begins at character 45,422 of a 233,622-character document. 151 instances of “neck” in the full text. Retrieved and verified 31 July 2026.

The claim that turned out to matter

Liederman argues that a strong neck is less likely to break in a fall than a weak one.

That is the injury-resistance argument. It is the same structural claim now made with force plates, instrumented mouthguards and cadaveric tolerance data — that cervical musculature changes what happens to the neck and head when force arrives — and Liederman is making it in 1924, on nothing but intuition, in a book sold by mail order.

This is the earliest version of that argument located anywhere in this archive. Everything before it justified neck training on appearance, carriage, vitality, or circulation. Hackenschmidt trained the neck because wrestlers get choked; he did not argue it made you harder to injure. Macfadden argued the neck was an index of vitality. Corker’s 1893 patent argued from posture. Liederman is the first to say: train this and you will be harder to break.

He was, broadly, onto something. The modern evidence is narrower and better supported than his version — neck strength is associated with lower concussion odds, roughly 5% per pound in the largest study to measure it, and cervical strength contributes to how much force the head and neck absorb. See neck strength and concussion risk.

But he had no evidence, and neither did anyone else for another eighty years. He was right by luck, in the same book in which he was confidently wrong about something else. That is worth holding onto, because it is exactly how the current generation of neck-training claims will look to somebody reading them in 2100.

The claim that was inherited, and wrong

Liederman also states that developing the neck improves the blood supply to the brain.

That claim is not his. Bernarr Macfadden made it in the Encyclopedia of Physical Culture in 1911 — a full throat indicating “large arteries supplying blood to the brain, with plenty of room for them” — and Liederman repeats it, in substance, thirteen years later, to the same mail-order physical-culture audience.

Neck circumference does not govern cerebral perfusion. The claim was never testable in the form either man stated it, and neither offered evidence, because none existed.

Two publishers, thirteen years apart, both selling courses, both asserting a physiological mechanism neither had tested. This is one of the few places in fitness history where the transmission of a bad claim can actually be traced rather than assumed, and it is set out in full on how the rationale changed.

The first neck measurement in the record

Liederman describes watching a record-breaking lift and records the lifter’s neck as measuring about seventeen inches, remarking on the exceptional quality of the muscle.

That is the earliest specific neck circumference attached to a named individual found in any source in this archive. It corrects a negative finding from earlier in this project: neither Hackenschmidt nor Burns records a neck measurement for anyone. Sandow’s pupils were measuring their necks — his testimonial tables prove it — but Sandow never printed a figure for a named athlete and never told them how to train it.

Caveat, stated because it belongs here: the lifter’s name comes through the scan as “Vitole,” which is not a recognisable period strongman’s name and is almost certainly OCR corruption. It has not been resolved. Until a clean scan settles it, this page names no one.

The seventeen-inch figure is also worth setting against the folklore. The “twenty-inch neck” numbers that circulate online for early-century strongmen have no located primary source. The earliest figure this archive can actually document is seventeen inches, recorded by an observer who was impressed by it.

The claim that survived, at a smaller size

Liederman asserts that the neck responds very rapidly to exercise.

Modern measurement broadly agrees and shrinks it. Twelve weeks of training in military aviation personnel produced MRI-confirmed increases of 7.4% in sternocleidomastoid and 8.3% in trapezius volume, against 1.0–2.3% in untrained controls. Early gains in the first fortnight are real and largely neural — the contraction becomes organised before the muscle changes.

So: rapid, yes. Dramatic, no. Roughly 8% muscle volume over three months of consistent training is the honest expectation, and it is less than any mail-order course has ever implied. See strength and hypertrophy.

Where he sits in the history

Liederman belongs to the health-and-vitality branch of physical culture — mail-order courses sold on appearance, longevity and vigour — alongside Macfadden and against the wrestling branch that Hackenschmidt and Burns came from. Both branches trained the neck. Only the wrestling branch programmed it. See the three branches.

The pattern this site keeps finding in the health-publisher material holds here too. The movements are recognisable. The reasons are a mixture of durable insight and confident invention. And the thing conspicuously missing, in a chapter devoted to developing the neck, is a load and a progression — the two variables that decide whether anybody actually gets stronger.

What has not been verified. This page does not describe Liederman’s specific exercises or his prescribed dosage, because those have not yet been read carefully enough against a clean text to state accurately. Given the OCR condition, that would mean guessing, and guessing is the thing this page exists to avoid. A physical copy is the fix.

What the last century actually changed

Liederman’s readers had his intuition and nothing else. Anyone training a neck today has measured tolerance data, twenty years of aviation-medicine trials, MRI evidence of what changes and by how much, and — for the first time — equipment whose load is a number rather than a guess. The first month, with actual loads and progressions, is the thing he could not give anybody in 1924.