Iron Neck

Long hours on your computer or phone can wreak havoc on your neck, often leading to tension headaches. But why? If you're not strengthening the muscles that are getting exhausted throughout the day, you're setting yourself up for more than just headaches—deteriorating posture and chronic neck conditions are likely to follow. A big part of this comes from the suboccipital muscles, those small but essential muscles at the base of your skull. They’re constantly working to hold up your head, especially when you're hunched over a screen…you’re working them this very moment as you’re reading this! Over time, they tighten and fatigue, which can trigger tension headaches, among other conditions. The key to relief? Strengthening the 1) subocciptals directly as well as the 2) larger neck muscles to take the pressure off the suboccipitals. I’ve seen firsthand how effective targeted neck training can be in reducing tension headaches and improving posture. As a marketer, I’ve long been a poster child for spending too much time on devices. Awareness—catching myself in poor posture—has made a big difference. Years of consistent Iron Neck usage has all but eliminated what my wife calls becoming a “FRANKEN-NECK MONSTER.” For tension headaches, or any neck related issues, it’s all about building strength where it matters most. If tension headaches have crept onto your radar, it would be as good a time as any to focus on your neck. #neckpain #tensionheadaches #posture #wellness

"You should sell to F1!" It’s a recommendation I often hear when people first see Iron Neck. And it’s validating – we’ve already sold to F1 teams! Through a mutual connection, we even sent one to Max Verstappen a few years back, and he’s posted a few times training with it. Some of our earliest customers a decade ago were strength and conditioning coaches for IndyCar drivers like Scott Dixon, Tony Kanaan, Charlie Kimball, and Josef Newgarden—All these guys still use it. ?? But here’s the real challenge: how big is the market for neck strengthening in motorsports? Let’s take a look. First, unlike typical motorsport sponsors, the overlap between what these athletes need and what the general consumer seeks isn’t always obvious. Drivers train their necks to withstand extreme forces at high speeds – a need that doesn’t translate directly to most consumers. This makes it harder to turn motorsport success into widespread consumer demand. At the professional level, there are roughly 200 drivers across F1, IndyCar, NASCAR, and other pro circuits, with around 100 teams. Below that, thousands of drivers (5-10k) in lower-tier series, karting, and amateur racing events could benefit from the same value props as the top drivers. This is the meat of this market, and one that we have (somewhat passively) realized dozens of Iron Neck customers. Motorsport enthusiasts, including a growing niche of SIM racers—who don’t experience G-forces on the neck—present a much larger global market. The value proposition however doesn’t align as strongly. Maybe Max Verstappen saying, "If it’s good enough for my neck, it’ll obliterate your unresolved neck pain!" could change that! The last bucket includes a couple hundred motorsport focused training facilities globally. Modest penetration into these markets may yield sales of 300+ Iron Necks, maybe a six-figure venture. Thankfully, we’ve kept busy (and focused) with other markets where product-market fit is more broadly aligned—BJJ, unresolved neck pain, youth sports concussion prevention. Two questions for you… 1. With this lens on the ‘F1 market’ would you push into motorsports? 2. How have you handled high level buy-in in a niche market, that struggled to translate to a broader consumer base?

Five years ago, minutes before delivering my younger brother’s best man speech, my phone—which I had my speech notes on—started blowing up. I mean really blowing up. Joe Rogan had just posted an Iron Neck selfie on Instagram. A real mean, grizzly mug. By that point, Joe had already mentioned Iron Neck a few times on his podcast, when MMA legends like Jean Jacques Machado, Henry Cejudo, and John McCarthy, or even Metallica frontman James Hetfield, talked about neck injuries or surgeries. But this was a big moment, with a whole new wave of followers and eyeballs coming our way! Notifications silenced, notes app open, I forgot about Joe Rogan for the next six minutes, and shared (embarrassing, but uplifting) stories about my brother with a room of friends and family. The next day is when things got even crazier. Less than 24 hours later, on the other side of the world, a graffiti artist named Lush Sux painted Joe Rogan’s Iron Neck selfie on a building in Melbourne, Australia. It didn’t seem real. It was truly a testament to the power of social media and creativity. Two days later, Dana White, beer in hand, was added to the mural, and various outlets were sharing it. This sparked an idea—we asked our community to share their own Iron Neck selfies, and what happened next was even better than we imagined. A comedic photoshop account, PhotoshopSteve, got involved, posting a series of edits, which we turned into a giveaway contest for our followers to vote on the best one…any guesses which won? It might not always be as wild or random as this series of events, but this experience showed us that even when you get lucky, there should be opportunities for you to lean into your community and deepen your connection. You never know who is listening.

With Tua Tagovailoa’s latest concussion, there will (again) be talk about what’s being done to make football safer. Protocols, rule changes, and helmet innovations will all get their airtime. What likely won’t get talked about is neck strength. When you watch an impact like this—or Tua’s multiple concussions in 2022, where his head snaps backward and hits the ground—shouldn’t it be more obvious? In these moments, the neck muscles are the body’s last line of defense, absorbing and reducing the impact forces that ultimately reach the brain. A weak, stiff neck can’t effectively absorb or dissipate these forces, making concussions more likely. This is even more of a problem at the youth level, where kids with weaker necks and heavier helmets (LIGHT Helmets is innovating here) are at greater risk of whiplash and head injuries. Iron Neck was created a decade ago by Mike Jolly for exactly this reason, and we found ourselves the only ones championing the value and importance of neck strengthening for all athletes—not just football! Keep your ears perked to hear if neck training gets any mentions in the concussion discussion. Now that you're aware of the connection, maybe you'll be the one to mention it!

???? Georgia Tech’s upset over Florida State might have surprised many, but we saw it coming... This summer, we visited Georgia Tech after they upgraded their 2013 (??) Iron Necks to the 3.0 Pro. What we saw wasn’t just a team preparing for a season—it was a team building the resilience and grit needed to push through tough games. We spent time with AJ Artis, Georgia Tech's Director of Football Performance, who shared his approach to building a championship mindset: "The program is set with a standard. Everybody has to rise to the standard every single day." For Artis, who previously coached under Craig Fitzgerald at the University of Tennessee, neck training is a non-negotiable part of that standard. This was instilled by Fitzgerald who was an early adopter with the Houston Texans (thanks to LB Brian Cushing) and later at Tennessee. "Every day, you've got to harp on the details—the little things, the discipline, the toughness, execution, and commitment of your whole program." Georgia Tech was one of our first-ever customers in 2013 when strength and conditioning coach John Sisk took a risk. It feels like a full-circle moment to see, ten years later, under a different regime, that there’s still trust in Iron Neck. If you want to succeed on or off the field, it starts with building grit and resilience. In the weight room, every strength and conditioning coach knows that. ??

In 2017, just a year after relaunching Iron Neck, we were named one of three finalists in the NFL’s 1st & Future competition. It felt like our moment had finally arrived. The Shark Tank-style event, emceed by NFL RedZone host Scott Hanson, focused on innovations in athlete safety. We were up against LVL, a platform using optical sensors and machine learning to monitor athletes in real-time, and Mobile Virtual Player (MVP), a robotic tackle dummy designed to reduce player-to-player contact during practice. We believed Iron Neck could transform athlete safety across all sports—not just football. Strengthening the neck, we knew, was grossly overlooked and could have a massive impact. But on that day, the judges saw the Mobile Virtual Player as the MVP. Afterward, judge and former NFL quarterback Chad Pennington told us we finished just one point behind. He and fellow judge John Urschel, a former Ravens lineman, understood the value of neck strength from their own experience playing football. However, some judges had concerns about the design and safety. In the years that followed, both Iron Neck and MVP forged their own distinct paths forward. MVP pivoted to the military, securing DoD contracts with a new tactical robotic dummy. We shifted our focus to neck pain and posture improvement—a transformation driven by listening to our customers. Some of Iron Neck’s earliest customers were Air Force bases, where fighter pilots needed to train their necks to withstand high G-forces. This insight opened doors into motorsports, where drivers like Tony Kanaan, Scott Dixon, Jimmie Johnson, and Max Verstappen started using Iron Neck in their training. We began hearing more regularly from individuals with years of unresolved neck pain, seeking a solution after exhausting seemingly every other option. We frequently received questions like, 'I’m not a boxer—can this help me rehab a herniated disc?’ Word of mouth from early adopters drove most of our early sales—not influencers, just regular people whose necks we’d helped fix. Fixes like that people don’t often keep secret. Like MVP, reaching new customers has been a journey of adaptation and growth. Today, Iron Neck isn’t just about preventing injury—it’s about empowering people to take control of their health and transform their lives. The takeaway? Success in business goes beyond having a great idea. It’s about listening to your customers, embracing change, and relentlessly pursuing growth. When you genuinely improve people’s lives, they tend to like to tell others about it.

Ryan Crouser’s pursuit of a third Olympic gold was at risk due to a neck impingement. Three months before the Olympics, he reached out to us for help… “I had elbow issues this spring stemming from an impingement in my neck,” Crouser shared. “A former shot putter had a similar issue and said your product had a huge impact on his recovery.” Some influencer partnerships you plan for. Sometimes they have plans for you. Most customers find Iron Neck in pain, in search of a solution. Setting customers up for success is what every business should strive to achieve. For Iron Neck users, that could mean winning Olympic gold or being able to lift your grandkids. Crouser surprisingly revealed a customer insight that we recognized when we launched Iron Neck nearly a decade ago: ??Nearly everyone overlooks their neck until it becomes a problem. ?? “Throughout my career, I’ve trained almost all of my body, but I’ve relatively neglected my neck, which led to my impingement.” Watching Ryan perform at the level he’s capable of, uninhibited by injury, was incredibly rewarding. Knowing that you play a part in supporting that success is one of the many wins you get to relish when you connect deeply with your customers. A bit of neck strengthening can go a long way. Maybe even as long as a Ryan Crouser shot put.

Don't call it Break-Dancing! The new Olympic sport is called Breaking. But Why? As a CMO of a health and wellness brand, we are often sharing the unique and relatable stories of our customers to convey legitimacy of a product that, well, raises eyebrows. With the Summer Olympics upon us, I'm reminded of an unexpected side-story we uncovered two years ago, related to one of this year's new Olympic sports: Breaking. You’ll naturally think of it as break-dancing, but we learned the etymology of the proper term, breaking, in a most unexpected way: during a content marketing shoot with an Iron Neck customer who has been a professional dancer most of his career. "The word breakdancing was never what we called it," says Jerry “Flo Master” Rudolph. "That's what the media gave it." At the time of the shoot, we weren't aware breaking would be in the '24 Olympics, and we certainly weren't aware of the pivotal moment in hip hop culture brought to life by the legendary DJ Kool Herc, that Randolph describes in this video. But our interview and conversation with Randolph brought out a really interesting story that he was personally knowledgeable of. And the result of that was a cool, distinctive video that may not be all too relevant to our brand and our customers, but it was some good storytelling on a very unique topic. Fast forward two years to the Olympics and people are talking about breaking, and we've got this nice little video that gets a second chance at life! Sometimes, the best stories find a second chance to shine, and this one certainly has. Check out the video below to dive into the rich history of breaking and see how Iron Neck continues to embrace and share powerful narratives. ???? ...and be the expert on breaking! #Olympics #Breaking #Storytelling

Good solid review of the Iron Neck 3.0 Pro. Stronger Neck - Safer Game!

Iron Neck has been a big part of training Indy Car, NASCAR and Formula One drivers for several years now. Good to see their counter parts training with Iron Neck in Europe! #neckpain #neckstrength #necktraining #strengthandconditioning #strengthtraining #physiotherapy #physicaltherapy #concussion