Neck Training for Tactical and Ground Military
Helmet, night vision, armour, and a load path that runs through the cervical spine for the entire duration of a patrol — the population with the most measured data and the least sport-science attention.
A dismounted soldier’s helmet configuration runs 1.4 to 3.5 kg, and the load that matters is not the mass but the moment it creates about the neck — US Army Aeromedical Research Laboratory work puts the 10% performance-decrement threshold at a weight moment of 134 N-cm, with neck pain and discomfort degrading at 131 N-cm. The bigger driver is movement: night vision cuts the visual field from roughly 140° to 40°, forcing more head movement to compensate, and every 30° of range used adds around 105 N of cervical compression in flexion-extension. USAARL’s own 2025 baseline of 60 soldiers found cervical range of motion and neck strength below published population norms, and recommended developing targeted strength-conditioning programmes.
Why this is a different problem from aviation
The aviation literature is the best-developed body of work on neck training anywhere, and it is about sustained G-loading in a seated pilot. A dismounted soldier or a tactical officer has a different problem with the same anatomy.
The load is constant rather than episodic. A pilot pulls G for seconds at a time. A soldier wears the head-supported mass for the entire patrol.
The mass is carried alongside a much larger total load. Deployed soldiers carry between roughly 48 and 125 pounds depending on role, which changes trunk posture and therefore where the head sits relative to the spine.
And the neck is doing search, not just resisting. This turns out to be the crux, and it is counterintuitive.
Head-supported mass: the number that matters is not weight
Current dismounted helmet configurations run 1.4 to 3.5 kg (3.1 to 7.7 lb) depending on shell, mount, and what is bolted to it.
Fjerstad MM, Robinette AM, Prusia ME, Stewart AS, Brozoski FT, Madison AM, Chancey VC. Head-Supported Mass and Cervical Spine Health: A Baseline Assessment of Non-Special Operation Forces Army Soldiers. USAARL-TECH-FR–2025-30, US Army Aeromedical Research Laboratory, 2025.
But mass alone does not determine the demand. What the neck resists is a moment — mass multiplied by how far forward of the neck’s axis that mass sits. A light device mounted well forward can be worse than a heavier one sitting close to the head.
US Army research quantifies this directly. Using a medium Advanced Combat Helmet with a monocular night vision device as the reference configuration — approximately 2 kg, 3.7 cm forward offset, 114 N-cm weight moment — the guidance thresholds are:
| Weight moment | Consequence |
|---|---|
| 114 N-cm | Reference configuration (ACH + monocular NVD) |
| 131 N-cm | 10% decrement threshold for neck pain and discomfort |
| 134 N-cm | 10% average performance decrement overall |
| 142 N-cm | 10% decrement threshold for neck fatigue |
| 164 N-cm | ~25% average performance decrement |
Madison AM, Holderfield MR, Olszko AV, Novotny B, McGovern SM, Brozoski FT, Shivers BL, Chancey VC. Preliminary Head-Supported Mass Performance Guidance for Dismounted Soldier Environments. Military Medicine, 2023;188(Suppl 6):520. Allowable helmet mass capped at 2.5 kg; longitudinal centre-of-mass offset boundaries −2 to 9.5 cm from the tragion notch.
Read the ordering in that table. Neck pain begins degrading at 131 N-cm — before overall performance does at 134, and before neck fatigue at 142. The neck is not a downstream casualty of a hard job. On these numbers it is among the first things to give.
The gap between the reference configuration at 114 and the pain threshold at 131 is seventeen newton-centimetres. That is a modest accessory, mounted forward.
The finding that changes the training answer
Here is the part almost nobody accounts for: the dominant driver of cervical load is how much the head has to move, not how much it has to hold.
A study of helicopter pilots modelled cervical spine loading against both mass properties and movement, and found movement magnitude dominated:
- Every 30° of range of motion used added roughly 105 N of compression in flexion-extension, and 57 N in axial rotation.
- Night vision restricts the visual field from about 140° to about 40°, so wearers compensate by moving the head far more to see the same scene.
- Reducing moment of inertia by 16% did not reduce compression — counterweighting addressed the wrong variable.
- Each newton of head-supported mass produced about 2.05 N of C5–C6 compression, because muscle activation amplifies the skeletal load well beyond the weight added.
Barrett JM, Healey LA, Fischer SL, Callaghan JP. Cervical Spine Motion Requirements From Night Vision Goggles May Play a Greater Role in Chronic Neck Pain than Helmet Mass Properties. Human Factors, 2024;66(2). Published online 26 April 2022.
Two consequences follow, and they point in opposite directions for equipment and training.
For equipment: shaving grams may be the wrong optimisation. If movement requirement drives load, then field of view is a neck-health variable, and a lighter device that still tunnels your vision has not solved the problem.
For training: rotation matters more here than almost anywhere else. The compensatory movement is scanning — axial rotation and combined rotation with flexion or extension. That is the direction most neck programmes skip entirely and most equipment loads badly. See cervical rotation.
What the Army’s own baseline found
USAARL measured 60 healthy, non-Special Operations Forces soldiers, average age 24.6 years, deliberately excluding anyone with a significant cervical injury history — so this is a best-case sample.
Cervical range of motion and neck strength both came out consistently below published population norms. The authors are appropriately careful that some of that gap may be methodological rather than real.
Their recommendation, in a report about soldiers who are not yet injured: standardise measurement, track people longitudinally across differing head-supported mass exposure, and develop targeted strength-conditioning programmes to prevent chronic cervical injuries.
That is a US Army laboratory, looking at its own healthy young population, concluding that the neck needs a programme. It is roughly the same conclusion aviation medicine reached twenty years earlier, arrived at independently.
Programming for this population
From the general programming guidance, with these shifts.
Train endurance more than maximal force. The demand is hours of low-level holding, not a single maximal effort. Bias toward longer holds and higher repetition ranges, and toward the extensors, which carry the forward-offset moment all day.
Train rotation deliberately. For most athletes rotation is a nice-to-have. For anyone wearing night vision it is the primary loaded movement, because the equipment forces the movement. A rotation-capable attachment or hand-resisted rotation covers it — rotation is the one thing hands genuinely do well.
Use a harness, for a practical reason as much as an evidential one. A head harness weighs little, packs flat, needs no facility, and loads three directions in whatever increment is available. Deployment and shift work destroy gym access, and the adherence finding from the military literature is unambiguous: in the twenty-week Royal Danish Air Force trial only 29% of participants trained regularly, and those who did roughly tripled the effect. Equipment that fits in a ruck gets used. Equipment in a gym you cannot reach does not. See what to buy and why.
Two to three sessions a week, 15–20 minutes. This has to survive alongside an existing physical training load, not compete with it.
Progress in small increments and expect connective tissue to lag. Half a kilogram at a time is the best-evidenced progression on record. The population most likely to ignore that advice is this one.
Do not train hard the day before a long patrol or a night operation. A fatigued neck under head-supported mass is a worse neck, and neck soreness degrades sleep.
First responders, and everyone else under a helmet
The same mechanics apply, with different numbers, to anyone carrying mass on the head for long periods: SWAT and tactical teams, firefighters under SCBA and helmet, EOD technicians in bomb suits, and law enforcement using night vision.
The variable to estimate is the same one: how much mass, how far forward of the neck’s axis, for how many hours, and how much scanning does the job require. Where the visual field is restricted, expect the movement component to dominate.
What is not established
No trial has tested whether neck training reduces neck pain incidence in dismounted soldiers. The USAARL work establishes the exposure, the thresholds and the baseline deficit, and recommends developing conditioning programmes — it does not report one having been run and evaluated for that outcome.
What is established is that resistance training reliably increases neck strength (SMD 0.85, rated high quality), that untrained groups measurably lose it, and that this population’s measured strength sits below population norms while carrying more head-supported mass than the population norms were measured under.
That is a strong practical case and a modest evidential one, and this site will not inflate the second into the first.
Shop Neck Flex → — the harness this site’s publisher makes, and the only one named by brand in a peer-reviewed randomised controlled trial, in a military aircrew population. What that does and does not establish: Neck Flex in the published research.