ORIGINAL ARTICLE The effects of neck flexion

Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleBackground Humans are capable of maintaining a variety of postures, from which the most suitable preparatory posture is selected for intended exercise. Howorth [1] has surveyed various exercise postures using motion pictures and has observed that a basic dynamic posture in which the ankle, knee, hip and neck joints, and trunk are all slightly flexed is common for different sudden initiation of motions and when pursuing a rapidly moving visual target. A flexed neck position leads to non-specific activa-tion of the brain, resulting in shortened saccadic reaction time [2,3], increased amplitude of the late component of the contingent negative variation (event-related potential) [4], and increased amplitude and shortened latency of motor evoked potentials evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation [5]. The non-specific activation is presumably due to ascending activation associated with muscular-sensory information from the neck extensors, and/or des-cending activation from the cerebral cortex, whic