About This Site

Who writes this

Thomas Hunt co-founded Gonza LLC — originally trading as The Gonzo Companies — and began developing neck-training equipment in 2010. It took more than two years and nine prototypes before the first commercial product shipped in 2012. His co-founder, Z.W. Elam, is the designer, and a former US Army engineer.

He holds five United States patents, all titled “Neck Exercise Device and System,” from a provisional application filed on 4 September 2013:

• US 11,007,405
• US 11,413,491
• US 11,638,850
• US 11,638,851
• US 12,029,936

He is a graduate of West Virginia University, with degrees in business and public administration. He grew up in Sutton, in Braxton County, West Virginia, and is based in Leesburg, Virginia. The products are designed and engineered in the United States.

What fifteen years of this qualifies him to say

Designing equipment that loads the human neck teaches you things that are difficult to learn any other way. What fails, and how. Where a strap slips under load and what that does to the line of force. Why a device that works perfectly on one head geometry is unusable on another. Which movements people actually perform when unsupervised, as opposed to which ones the instructions describe. What customers report going wrong, over more than a decade of them reporting it.

That is real expertise and it is narrow. It is expertise in apparatus: how loads are applied to the cervical spine mechanically, what the design trade-offs are, and what the history of the category looks like from inside it.

What it does not qualify him to say

He is not a physician, physiotherapist, athletic trainer, chiropractor, or research scientist. He cannot diagnose anything, and nothing on this site attempts to.

Where this site makes claims about physiology, injury mechanism, clinical care, or research findings, those claims are not his opinion. They are sourced to named published work, cited so you can check them, and the editorial standards page explains exactly how that sourcing is verified. Where the evidence is weak or contested, the pages say so rather than resolving the question with authority the author does not have.

Why a manufacturer is writing an encyclopaedia

The honest answer is that it serves the business, and the disclosure page says so plainly. Gonza LLC sells neck-training equipment, and a well-informed public is good for a company whose product survives scrutiny.

But there is a second reason, which is that this material genuinely does not exist anywhere else. Nobody has catalogued the neck-device patent record. Nobody has transcribed Hackenschmidt’s 1908 neck programme. The military and crash-safety literature — by a wide margin the most rigorous work ever done on what the cervical spine can tolerate — is almost entirely uncited by the fitness world. Someone who has spent fifteen years inside this narrow subject is unusually well placed to assemble it, and unusually motivated to.

The obvious risk is that a manufacturer writes a reference work that quietly flatters its own products. The defence against that is method, not good intentions: sources named, claims traceable, competitors described accurately, negative findings published even when they are inconvenient, and corrections issued in public when something turns out to be wrong. Those commitments are written down on the editorial standards page so that you can hold this site to them.

Contact

Corrections, sources we have missed, and challenges to anything published here are welcome and will be acted on. Reach us at [email protected].

If you know of a neck-training patent, book, manual, or study that is not represented in this archive, we would like to hear about it. Several of the most valuable things on this site exist because somebody went looking in a place nobody had thought to check.