Training the Neck
Kaylee Gittleson ran hurdles for Ann Arbor Pioneer High School ...they won three out of four Division I State Championships during her four years.... she was told by her dad to write about training from her perspective on the Rogers Blog.....
FROM THE COACH'S DAUGHTER
My dad, Mike Gittleson, was a Strength Coach for 30 years. We literally live in a gym surrounded by furniture. I remember when my brother asked to play contact sports, my father agreed, but said you will have to train that little neck. Shortly afterwards, a neck machine appeared about 8 feet from our living room couch, which is 6 feet from the overhead press machine. As I began research in college I came to understand why the neck machine became a fixture in our home.
"TRAIN THAT NECK IF YOU ARE PLAYING CONTACT SPORTS".........he said
For decades it was thought that only the big hits to the head were causing long term damage to athletes. Kevin Guskiewicz, who runs the North Carolina University's Sports Concussion Research Program, is using a system called HITS to learn more about concussions during football.
HITS works by placing six sensors inside the helmet of every player on a football field, measuring the force and location of every blow he receives to the head. Guskiewicz ultimately discovered that a lot of the long term damage is coming from all of the small impacts players are receiving. When you get hit on your head "your skull reacts to (the) blow as much as a church bell responds to the impact of its chipper. When it is struck, the force of the blow spreads quickly across the entire surface of the bell." Head injuries are being linked to deaths and dementia in the brain of many former players.
Inside this helmet are accelerometers, spring-like devices that record data from head impacts.
The brain of an Alzheimer's patient looks different than a normal brain because of two proteins: beta-amyloid and tau. Malcom Gladwell, who wrote an article in The New Yorker magazine called "Annals of Medicine Offensive Play. How Different are Dogfighting and Football?" wrote that "Beta-amyloid is thought to lay out the ground work for dementia." Tau comes into play in the second stage of Alzheimer's. Tau is "the protein that steadily builds up in brain cells, shutting them down and ultimately killing them." 
Ann McKee, who runs the neuropathology laboratory of the Veterans Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts, noticed something very unusual about two of the dementia patients, they didn't have any beta-amyloid proteins on their brain like the Alzheimer's patients do, and it was all tau. There was one more thing similar between these two patients; they were both boxers in their youth
Dementia without beta-amyloid proteins in the brain is not Alzheimer's at all. In fact, it is a different type of dementia known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E). Someone with C.T.E. looks and acts like an Alzheimer's patient would, but C.T.E. and Alzheimer's are caused by different things. There really isn't a known cause for Alzheimer's, but C.T.E. is caused by the person suffering from brain trauma; C.T.E. is a result of injury. then they begin to lose their inhibitions and also get irritable. Because C.T.E. is caused by the nerve-cell breakdowns, it takes many years for the person's symptoms to show up.
There have been several cases of dementia patients being similar; they all played a contact sport. McKee examined sixteen brains with this particular case. Every single person's tau level was abnormally high. The most shocking case was one where she examined the brain of an eighteen-year-old boy who died from a cause not mentioned. The boy had been playing football for a few years. When Ann McKee looked at the tau levels in his brain she found that the levels were beyond above-average. "You don't see tau like this in an eighteen-year-old." she said, "You don't see tau like this in a fifty-year-old."
What ways are there to help prevent head injuries and get rid of long term effects? Originally that is why the helmet was invented; but in a sense, wearing a helmet has actually promoted the players to use their heads. Reed Albergotti and Shirely S. Wang wrote in The Wall Street Journal, "While these helmets reduced the chances of death on the field, they also created a sense of invulnerability that encouraged the players to collide more forcefully and more often." The only solution that the article could come up with for these head injuries was that football should not use helmets at all. Some think that the only way to get rid of the risk in contact sports is to take the contact, or most of the contact, out of the game. Ted Poe, Republican from Texas, said that if it had to come to that, "We'd all be playing touch football." In Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), they had to make it illegal to knee, kick, or stomp the opponent in the head because someone was seriously injured from a knee to the head; perhaps there are some rules that could be modified in football that would not change the excitement of the game.
In Malcom Gladwell's article, he talks about a college football game in 1997 between Arizona and Oregon. He describes two specific plays during the game. In the first sequence, an Arizona player tackles an Oregon player and sends the opponents helmet flying off of his head. In the other play, a defensive back from Arizona makes a great tackle on the opposing team his teammate congratulates him with a chest bump. The DB fell to the ground and hit his head. The DB ended up with a grade 2 concussion. The difference between the two situations is that the first player saw that tackle coming and was able to stiffen up his neck and body to prepare for impact; in the next case, the kid did not see that he was about to fall and took the entire blow to just his head, and it was right after a huge tackle, which added to the impact on the ground.
Our neck is shaped like a cylinder. If you were to take two cylinders of different diameters, let's say one is a pencil, and the other is a can. Which one would be easier to bend, the smaller or the wider cylinder? The pencil would be easier to bend because it is a much smaller cylinder. What if there was a way to make the neck a wider
cylinder in order to increase durability? Well there actually is, you just have to strength train it.
J. Michael Gittleson, former head Strength and Conditioning coach for the University of Michigan football team (my Dad), explained that lifting weights with your neck makes it stronger and wider. When a football player has a wider neck, it creates more surface area to absorb more of the shock from impact. "It is like putting bubble wrap around the cervical spine." Gittleson said. 
The added muscle increases stiffness in the neck too. Having more surface area will "dissipate and deflect" the force, or the impact to your head.
Timothy Gay, the author of The Physics of Football, wrote, "Helmets in the pro are often waxed to make them as slick as possible, making forces (hits) applied to the helmet by defenders more likely to glance off, minimizing the torque and, hence, twists to the neck and head." This method would also help distribute the force in case the player was hit in a way, whereas the neck wouldn't be able to absorb part of the blow.
"Although concussions previously were thought to be trivial brain injuries, recent scientific studies have demonstrated that even the most minor concussion can produce serious negative effects on an athlete's concentration, memory, reaction time and emotions, says Laurence Kleiner, MD, a pediatric neurosurgeon at The Children's Medical Center of Dayton." Only recently have researchers discovered that even minor concussions can cause negative effects but they have also found that even just multiple small hits to the head can cause serious negative effects. The head and the brain are very delicate, it is important to keep them safe.
"TRAIN THAT NECK IF YOU ARE PLAYING CONTACT SPORTS".........he said
