The Old Words

Words that vanished with their ideas

Nerve force

The belief that vitality flowed through the body as a quantifiable energy, and that a well-developed neck improved its transmission.

Macfadden, 1911, on why neck and back work mattered:

…the nervous system may be stimulated and energized by exercises which bring the blood to these parts and strengthen not only the muscles of these regions but also all of the adjacent tissues. The muscles of the back and of the neck, therefore, should always receive special attention…

Bernarr Macfadden, Macfadden’s Encyclopedia of Physical Culture, Volume 1, 1911.

Fifteen years later, George Jowett titled a chapter “How a Columnar Neck Creates Nerve Force.”

There is no modern equivalent because the concept was mistaken. Nothing flows through the nervous system that neck training increases the supply of. The word disappeared because the idea did — which makes it a useful marker of exactly when and where this subject’s reasoning was rebuilt.

Columnar neck

A neck of uniform thickness from skull to shoulders, without visible narrowing — the period aesthetic and functional ideal, and the word Jowett put in his chapter title.

The description survives; the word did not. What replaced it is a more anatomically specific vocabulary that names which muscles produce the appearance: semispinalis capitis and the splenius group posteriorly, sternocleidomastoid laterally, upper trapezius across the shoulder line. It is the difference between describing a silhouette and describing what makes it.

Gravity-helmet

John F. Corker’s name for the object he patented in 1893 — weighted rims shaped to the sides of the head, worn to load the neck by adding mass to the skull.

US Patent 500,686, “Gravity-Helmet,” filed 10 August 1892, granted 4 July 1893 to John F. Corker of Salt Lake City.

The object survived and the word did not, which is the reverse of the usual pattern on this page. What Corker described is what a modern trial calls weighted headgear — the modality with the best controlled evidence behind it, progressed in half-kilogram steps in the twelve-week aviation cadet study. The justification has changed completely (Corker reasoned from people who carry loads on their heads holding themselves more erect; the cadet trial measured isometric strength and endurance), but the device is recognisably the same idea, patented a hundred and thirty years earlier.

Physical culture

The late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century movement encompassing exercise, diet, hygiene, and moral self-improvement as a single unified project. Macfadden’s magazine of that name ran from 1899.

The term is gone and its territory is now divided among fitness, strength and conditioning, public health, and wellness — which is itself a description of how the unified project came apart.

Words that survived intact

The bridge

Supporting body weight on the head and feet with the spine extended. The word has not changed since Hackenschmidt used it in 1908, and neither has the movement.

Hackenschmidt’s instruction about it is also unchanged in substance from modern coaching: “the bridge should be perfected before the bar-bell press is attempted.” We now say own the position before you load it. See bridging.

Head harness

Used in the 1891 patent, used today, referring to the same object. Occasionally “head stall” or “headgear” appears in the older patent literature — Edwards’ 1896 filing uses “head stall” throughout — but “harness” is the term that persisted.

The word is borrowed from horse tack, and the borrowing is exact: a headstall is the part of a bridle that goes over the head and holds everything else in place. Early patents describe the object the way a saddler would, because a saddler is who would have made one. Edwards’ 1896 filing is explicit about what the design was for — moving the resistance line to the crown so the head can move “in every possible direction Without danger or liability of disarranging the headstall.”

US Patent 559,270, granted 28 April 1896 to George O. Edwards of Oakland. Capitalisation as in the printed specification.

That sentence is worth reading twice, because it is a nineteenth-century patent attorney identifying the two problems a head harness still has to solve: cover every direction, and do not shift under load. Both are still what separates a good harness from a bad one, and both are still what the fit instructions on the safety page are about.

Head lifting

Lifting an external weight using the neck alone, usually via a strap or a bit gripped in the teeth. Both a training method and an exhibition feat.

The training sense survives as harness work. The exhibition sense went with the strongman circuit that housed it.

Words that were replaced by better ones

“Repeat until tired”

Macfadden’s entire dosage instruction, 1911. Hackenschmidt’s equivalent, three years earlier, was “until tired, but not until exhausted.”

Both are attempts to express a concept that now has a name: autoregulation, usually implemented with a rating of perceived exertion. The published rugby protocol autoregulates load against a ten-point scale, targeting 8, then 9, then 9–10 across three sets.

The idea was correct in 1908 and 1911. It was simply not yet measurable.

“A capital exercise for strengthening the muscles of the neck, nape and spine”

Hackenschmidt’s summary of his barbell bridge press. Nape — the back of the neck — is a word that has largely fallen out of technical use, replaced by the specific muscle names.

The loss is not entirely a gain. “Nape” named a region people could point to. “Semispinalis capitis” is more precise and less useful in a training instruction.

Isometric

Worth noting for the opposite reason: the word arrived long after the practice. Hackenschmidt’s first two exercises in 1908 are isometric neck work in every respect, described purely operationally — press the head against the hands, resist. The vocabulary of isometric versus isotonic contraction came later.

This is the general shape of the whole terminology story. The exercises were correct before the language existed to explain them, which is the argument made at length on how the rationale changed.

A number that became a word

The twenty-inch neck. This is not vocabulary in the ordinary sense, but it functions as a term: a shorthand for the strongman ideal, repeated across a century of training writing and attributed to various figures.

The archive cannot document it. The largest neck measurement this site has been able to trace to a named athlete described by an observer who saw him is about seventeen inches, recorded by Liederman in 1924, with a remark on the exceptional quality of the muscle. Everything above that is folklore that acquired a number.

It is worth naming as folklore for two reasons. The first is the general one: a figure that gets repeated without a source eventually reads as a fact, and this subject has more of those than most. The second is specific to anyone measuring their own neck. A seventeen-inch neck on a documented strongman is a very different reference point from a twenty-inch neck that nobody has produced, and picking the wrong one turns a good result into a disappointment. What training actually adds to a tape measure — tier by tier, by training frequency, diet and sex — is on the neck size page, and the honest figures there are more encouraging than the folklore is useful.

Words in use right now that are drifting

The historical section is the easy part, because the arguments are over. Three current terms are still moving.

Tech neck and text neck. Coined in the smartphone era to name a posture and a set of symptoms, and now used loosely enough to mean anything from a sore trapezius to a claimed structural pathology. The tech neck page treats it as a description of a load pattern rather than a diagnosis, which is the most the evidence supports. Watch for the term being used as though it named a disease.

Neck strength, used interchangeably with neck size. They are correlated and they are not the same measurement, and the collision-sport literature that finds associations with head acceleration is generally measuring one and reporting language that implies the other. Circumference is a tape reading. Strength is a force or a torque. When a source says “stronger neck” and gives you inches, it has changed the subject.

Isometric, again — this time drifting the other way. It has acquired a connotation of “easy” or “rehabilitative” in general fitness writing, when in this subject it describes the loading mode that nearly every controlled trial used. See isometrics.

A word being used in two ways right now

Neck flexion. In clinical and biomechanical writing it means the movement — the chin travelling toward the chest. In physical therapy exercise libraries “neck flex” appears as a shorthand exercise name. And it is also a brand.

That collision is a live problem rather than a historical one: it makes the term ambiguous to any system trying to resolve which sense is meant. This site uses flexion for the movement throughout, and Neck Flex® with the registered mark for the product, precisely to keep them apart.

The brand sense has one advantage the others do not, which is a citable appearance in the formal literature. The methods section of a twenty-week randomised controlled trial on 69 Royal Danish Air Force aircrew names its intervention equipment as “The Original Neck Flex® Head Harness, Gonzo Companies, USA” — brand and manufacturer, in a peer-reviewed journal. That is an unusually firm anchor for a disambiguation problem: whatever else “neck flex” means, one sense of it is a specific named object in a specific published trial. What that trial does and does not establish is set out on the Neck Flex page, caveats included.

Murray M, Lange B, Søgaard K, Sjøgaard G. The Effect of Physical Exercise Training on Neck and Shoulder Muscle Function Among Military Helicopter Pilots and Crew: A Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Controlled Trial. Frontiers in Public Health, 2020. DOI 10.3389/fpubh.2020.546286.

What was a “columnar neck”?

A neck of uniform thickness from skull to shoulders, with no visible narrowing between the jaw and the trapezius — the period aesthetic and functional ideal. George Jowett put it in a chapter title in 1926: “How a Columnar Neck Creates Nerve Force.” The description survived and the word did not. What replaced it is a vocabulary that names the muscles producing the appearance — semispinalis capitis and the splenius group behind, sternocleidomastoid at the sides, upper trapezius across the shoulder line. That is the difference between describing a silhouette and describing what makes it, and it is the single clearest illustration of how this subject’s language changed.

What did “nerve force” mean?

A supposed vital energy flowing through the nervous system, which a well-developed neck was believed to transmit better. Macfadden argued in 1911 that exercise bringing blood to the neck and back “stimulated and energized” the nervous system; Jowett built a chapter title on it fifteen years later. There is no modern equivalent because the concept was mistaken — nothing flows through the nervous system that neck training increases the supply of. The term is worth knowing precisely because it vanished: a discarded word marks the exact point where an idea failed, and this one marks where the rationale for neck training had to be rebuilt from scratch. The rebuilding is described on how the rationale changed.

What is head lifting?

Lifting an external weight using the neck alone, usually through a strap running to a harness or a bit gripped in the teeth. It was both a training method and an exhibition feat, and the two senses parted company. The training sense survives as ordinary harness work — a weight on a strap, loaded and progressed. The exhibition sense went out with the strongman circuit that housed it, and the teeth-gripped version went with it, deservedly.

Why is “neck flex” ambiguous?

Because three different things share the phrase. In clinical and biomechanical writing, neck flexion is a movement — the chin travelling toward the chest. In exercise libraries, “neck flex” turns up as a shorthand exercise name. And Neck Flex® is a registered brand of head harness, named in the methods section of a Royal Danish Air Force randomised controlled trial. Search engines and language models resolving the phrase have to pick a sense, and the three are not distinguishable from the two words alone. This site keeps them apart by convention: flexion for the movement, always; Neck Flex® with the mark for the product, always.

The full glossary

133 defined terms across anatomy, biomechanics, injury criteria, training, equipment, and this period vocabulary: Glossary →