Neck Training for Soccer and Lacrosse

The evidence came from here

Neck training gets marketed to football players and wrestlers. The study everybody cites when they market it was not run on either.

Collins et al. measured pre-season neck strength in 6,704 high school athletes across 51 schools in 25 states — in boys’ and girls’ soccer, basketball and lacrosse — then tracked concussions across the season.

Smaller mean neck circumference, smaller mean neck to head circumference ratio, and weaker mean overall neck strength were significantly associated with concussion… After adjusting for gender and sport, overall neck strength remained a significant predictor of concussion (p = 0.004). For every one pound increase in neck strength, odds of concussion decreased by 5 % (OR = 0.95, 95 % CI 0.92-0.98).

Collins CL, Fletcher EN, Fields SK, Kluchurosky L, Rohrkemper MK, Comstock RD, Cantu RC. Neck strength: a protective factor reducing risk for concussion in high school sports. Journal of Primary Prevention, 2014 Oct;35(5):309–19. PMID 24930131.

If you play or coach one of these sports, the headline finding in this whole field was measured on people doing exactly what you do. That is a stronger evidential position than football is in, and almost nobody in those sports knows it.

The population with the most to gain

Two findings sit on top of each other here.

Female players sustain greater head accelerations than male players. A 2025 systematic review in Sports Medicine examining what influences head acceleration during a purposeful header found this to be one of its most consistent results, alongside the finding that head and neck size and neck strength predict both linear and rotational acceleration during heading.

Blyth R, Farrell G, Zoellner A, Ahmed OH, Bussey M, Galea O, Sole G. What Factors Influence Head Acceleration During a Purposeful Header in Soccer Players? A Systematic Review. Sports Medicine, 2025;55(7):1677–1741. DOI 10.1007/s40279-025-02209-2.

Female athletes typically have less neck strength, and worse concussion outcomes. The 2019 Rutgers review in the Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy identified neck strength, neck size and neutral posture as protective characteristics, and specifically noted that female athletes experience higher concussion rates, more severe symptoms and longer recovery.

Brown A, Esopenko C, et al. Cervical Spine Characteristics and Concussion Risk. Journal of Orthopaedic and Sports Physical Therapy, 2019. Rutgers School of Health Professions.

Put those together. The variable that predicts head acceleration is one girls have less of. The outcome is one girls suffer more of. And the variable is modifiable — unlike sex, sport, position, or the trajectory of an incoming ball.

Girls’ soccer and girls’ lacrosse are, on the published evidence, the highest-value population for neck training in organised sport. They are also the population it is almost never sold to. The equipment ends up in the football weight room.

Where the evidence is genuinely mixed

This site does not get to cite the good finding and skip the awkward one.

Neck strengthening has not reliably reduced measured heading kinematics. The same 2025 systematic review concluded that traditional neck strengthening was not effective at reducing head acceleration, while noting that programmes adding neuromuscular exercise appeared to be.

A 2022 randomised controlled trial in collegiate soccer players — 20 athletes, six weeks, twice weekly on a cervical resistance apparatus — found no significant change in peak linear acceleration, peak rotational acceleration, impact duration or Gadd Severity Index during headers. What it did find was that the control group’s visual memory score declined across the study period while the training group’s held.

Waring K, Smith E, Austin G, Bowman TG. Exploring the Effects of a Neck Strengthening Program on Purposeful Soccer Heading Biomechanics and Neurocognition. International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy, 2022;17(1). Six weeks, 2×/week, resisted cervical flexion, extension and lateral flexion.

Twenty participants over six weeks is a small, short study, and the reviewers who pooled the heading literature said outright that inconsistent reference frames prevented meta-analysis and may have masked real effects. It is not evidence of absence. But it is a null, and it is on this page because leaving it off would make everything else here less believable.

What that pattern most plausibly means. Head acceleration during a deliberate, anticipated header may be the wrong outcome to test. A player who knows the ball is coming is already braced — co-contraction is doing the work — and adding strength to an already-braced neck may not move the number much. The impacts that produce concussions are disproportionately the ones nobody saw coming: an elbow, a collision, a head-to-head in a challenge, the ground. Neck strength plausibly matters most exactly where it is hardest to measure.

That is a hypothesis, and this page labels it as one.

What this means practically

The case for training is the association plus the mechanism, not the heading kinematics. Neck strength is associated with lower concussion odds in this exact population, resistance training reliably raises neck strength (SMD 0.85, rated high quality), and neck strength is one of the very few risk factors a player can change. That is the argument. See neck strength and concussion risk.

No product prevents concussion, this site will not say one does, and nobody has run the trial that trains one group of soccer players, leaves another untrained, and counts concussions.

Ball and rule variables are real too. The heading review found consistent evidence that greater ball speed, mass and inflation pressure increase head acceleration. Reducing inflation pressure and limiting long-range headers in training are cheap interventions that sit alongside neck work rather than competing with it.

Programming

Start from the general programming guidance and shift the emphasis:

Use a loadable head harness. Field-sport athletes rarely have access to a four-way neck machine, and rarely have a facility to visit out of season. A harness loads flexion, extension and lateral flexion, costs less than a season’s registration fee, fits in a kit bag, and progresses in whatever increment you own. Every published protocol that produced measurable neck strength gains used equipment with a known load; none used hand pressure, which cannot be measured or incremented. See what to buy and why.

Two to three sessions a week, 15–20 minutes. Field sports already carry a large conditioning load. This fits in the gaps.

Train lateral flexion and rotation as hard as flexion and extension. Contact in these sports is lateral and rotational far more often than sagittal. Rotation is the direction almost no equipment loads and almost every programme skips — see cervical rotation.

Include bracing, not just strength. Short, sharp contractions and reaction drills that rehearse stiffening on cue. The neuromuscular component is the part the heading review singled out as promising, and it is the part a pure strength programme leaves out.

Do it in pre-season and keep it in-season. Untrained control groups in the published trials measurably lost cervical strength across a season. The comparison is not between training and standing still.

Youth players need smaller increments and supervision — a young cervical spine tolerates substantially less force than an adult’s. See neck training for youth athletes.

For a coach with limited time

If you can only add one thing to a girls’ soccer or lacrosse programme, add fifteen minutes of loaded neck work twice a week. The evidence linking neck strength to concussion odds in your sport is better than the evidence for most of what is already in your session plan, the equipment is a harness and some light plates, and the athletes it helps most are the ones this industry has spent twenty years ignoring.

Shop Neck Flex → — the harness this site’s publisher makes, and the only one named by brand in a peer-reviewed randomised controlled trial. What that does and does not establish: Neck Flex in the published research.