The Machine Archive: A Recovered Decade of Neck Training

What was lost, and what survives

Three sites carried his writing. The first mikethemachine.com (2008–2010) was a static site with his welcome letter, bio and early neck material; from 2010 it became a WordPress blog that ran to hundreds of posts — training logs, feats, essays on his mentors, reader Q&As, the world-record documentation — before going dark in the mid-2010s. Its successor, mikethemachinebruce.com (2016–2022), rebuilt the neck library from scratch and added the Neck Flex workout series and his MMB Pro collaboration. The Wayback Machine holds roughly 1,500 captured URLs from the first domain and 1,100 from the second, alongside a 2020 capture of his machinelandtv YouTube channel — 5,150 subscribers at the time — whose video titles survive even though the videos themselves are gone.

Everything below was read from those captures directly, and each item links to the capture it came from. He has since started again at mikethemachinebruce.us and a new channel — the recovered material here is the record of what came before.

The method: the 3×100 ladder

Bruce’s method predates every neck gadget on the market, and he has told its origin the same way for years. In 1987, a bullied young wrestler who was tired of being — his words — “manhandled, rag-dolled and folded up like dirty laundry on the wrestling mat” saw a photograph of Mike Tyson’s neck on a boxing magazine and read that Tyson bridged, ran and worked the bag; from Marvin Hagler’s three-minute rounds he took the structure, and from an arbitrary liking for the number he took 100 reps — three sets of it.¹

The recovered instruction is specific. Three exercises — he calls them the Big 3:

• Neck curls — lying face-up, plate held to the forehead, or standing in a harness
• Side neck raises — lying on the side, plate against the head
• Harness neck extensions — the “neck lift”

The ladder: start with a 5 lb plate and one set, break the hundred into twenties until it is one unbroken set, add a second set of 100, then a third — and only when all three sets of 100 are complete does the weight go up. “I never raised my weight until I was able to get all 3 sets of 100 repetitions.”¹ For readers who are not grapplers, his own scaling from the TNT program is one set of 20 per exercise, progressing in weight at 20 clean reps.² Traps, in his system, are the foundation under the neck — built with deadlifts and explosive shrugs.³ Every session starts with stretching.⁴

A note on how this sits with the research: it is a practitioner method, reported here as taught — no control group, self-measured, and its 300-rep volumes sit far above anything tested in the published literature, where measurable strength gains have come from a few sets, two or three days a week; see programming for those protocols. It is also a fact that the man teaching it produced a documented 20-inch neck at under 200 lb and the most extreme recorded neck feats in history, that he names other strongmen who trained the same way,² and that high-volume neck work is the oldest thread in this discipline — the early-1900s wrestlers in the history section trained the same instinct. The evidence neither confirms nor refutes dosages it has never tested.

In his own recovered words

On volume critics: “While all these negative pencil necks run their mouths I have been able to build my neck to 20″ of tree trunk size awesomeness.”²

On overthinking: “Stop overthinking and do the work first.”⁵

On why the neck mattered to him at all: “Build a neck so thick and strong that I would not get manhandled, rag-dolled and folded up like dirty laundry on the wrestling mat anymore.”¹

On what a trained neck means, from The Neckzilla: “His neck thickness makes it almost impossible for him to look down at his feet, all he can do is look up and forward.”⁶ The same image closes his origin essay: “With a neck this big I can only look up.”¹

And on equipment, coaching a reader whose elbow tendonitis had ended plate-on-head curls: get a harness and do the standing neck curl — “There are many neck Harnesses to choose from. Some are good while many are crap and will break under the lightest load. I suggest you order The Neck Flex. It is a proven product, super durable, heavily stitched… start with a 5-10 pound plate for 20 repetitions to see how the movement feels.”⁷

The recovered library, indexed

A reading list from the excavation — each link goes to the archived capture, with the Wayback timestamp preserved in the URL.

2008–2010 — the first site

• Welcome to The Machine (2008) — the original site introduction: Marine, bodyguard, five-time MMA champion, “I claim to have the strongest neck in the world.”
• Bio (2008) — the full origin story, from “The Human Pipe-Cleaner” to the record list.
• Trapezius and Neck Training (2011) — traps as the foundation; the Big 3; wrestling bridges in three angles; stretching first.

2010–2016 — the WordPress years, mikethemachine.com

• How to Train Your Neck — the fullest statement of the TNT method: Natick boxing club origins, the Big 3, the volume ladder, and the users he names.
• Neck Training 101, Parts 1–4 (Dec 2010) — his four-part beginner series.
• Reader Q&A: sides of the neck — side plate raise over headstand work: “If the gymnast style makes you dizzy then don’t do it.”
• Neck Isometrics: My Thoughts — where isometrics fit around the loaded work.
• The Importance of Stretching the Neck — the warm-up he used before every session.
• The Machine Neck-Isms — forty jokes his friends wrote about his neck, started by Bud Jeffries and Ben Bergman — “Legend has it that behind Mike’s neck… is another neck.”
• The world-record account (Aug 2012) — the full first-person story of the seven bars.
• The Grandmaster of Oldtime Strongmen: Dennis Rogers — his tribute to his mentor and manager.
• Strongmen You Should Know: Bud Jeffries — how a hand-written letter inside a book order started his strongman career.
• The World’s Strongest Neck, by Iron Tamer — Dave Whitley’s guest account.
• After My Training Session with My Neck Flex (2013) — the earliest recovered Neck Flex session post.
• Taking the Wrestler Bridge to Another Level with the Neck Flex (2013) — bridging plus harness resistance.
• Neck Flex Workout / Standing Curl / Rear Raise (2014) — the exercise-by-exercise harness series.
• Neck Training article for DieselCrew.com — his method written for Jedd Johnson’s grip-strength community.
• TNT: Total Neck Training (DVD) — the program that named the method.

2016–2022 — mikethemachinebruce.com

• Build a 20 Inch Neck — the definitive method essay: Tyson, Hagler, the 3×100 ladder, and what it produced.
• The Best Neck Exercise — the neck curl, and his “best neck harness on the market” verdict on the two Neck Flex models.
• The #1 Best Neck Exercise Is the Neck Curl — progression: “this is how we progress, get stronger and keep moving forward.”
• Neck Training Simplified — “Stop overthinking and do the work first” — the same message since 2007.
• Stop Neck Curling — coaching an injured reader into the standing harness curl: start 5–10 lb for 20 reps; rounds for fighters.
• The Neckzilla — the manifesto: who trains a neck like this, and why.
• How My Neck Won a Fight — the honest answer about chokes, and the 1997 NAGA open-weight story.
• The Neck Flex Beginner / Advanced / Home Bodybuilding Workouts (2020–21) — his three-tier harness program series.
• Partner Neck Training (2022) — “for the combat sportsman only” — the no-equipment fallback, on video.
• Eating for a Big Neck — the diet side of the 20-inch neck.
• 13-Year Comparison — 2007 vs 2020: 202 lb to 198 lb, same 32-inch waist, “6 days per week in the strength dojo.”
• Old School Neck Training: Building the Tree Trunk (Oct 2022) — among the last posts before the site came down; the 90 lb × 87-rep video.

The recovered channel

The machinelandtv channel is gone, but the November 2020 capture preserves its shape: 5,150 subscribers, and a catalogue whose titles alone document the range — among them:⁸

• Wrestling Power
• Shootfighting Strength
• The Neck Flex Beginner Workout
• Wrestling Strength
• The Neck Flex Machine
• Mike The Machine Workout Details
• Pullover Machine For Fighters
• Wrestling Shape-Strength-Conditioning
• Grappler Curls
• 1 Arm 242 lbs Static Hold
• Twisting A Horseshoe
• 515 Pound One Hand Deadlift
• A Neck Flex Workout
• Be A Real Man: How To Win
• Neck Curling Is Easy In 2020/21
• RELAX! Neck Training Is Easy in 2020/21 (Parts 1–3)
• Being Humble

What is still missing

The Wayback Machine captured pages, not video files, so most of the video content is unrecoverable, and several hundred of the archived URLs remain unread. This page will grow as more of the record is excavated. Corrections and additions — especially from readers who saved copies of anything — are welcome at [email protected].

Sources: 1. Build a 20 Inch Neck (captured 30 Jul 2020) · 2. How to Train Your Neck (captured 19 Oct 2012) · 3. Trapezius and Neck Training (captured 11 May 2011) · 4. The Importance of Stretching the Neck (captured 20 Oct 2012) · 5. Neck Training Simplified (captured 4 Sep 2020) · 6. The Neckzilla (captured 13 Apr 2020) · 7. Stop Neck Curling (captured 21 Jul 2020) · 8. machinelandtv videos page (captured 11 Nov 2020). All quotations transcribed from the raw archived HTML of the captures linked.