CerviFit Home Neck Conditioning System

How an idea became an evolution aka (How I came up with the CerviFit).

Having suffered from debilitating neck pain for years, after visiting an Orthopedic Surgeon, I learned three things. The first, of the patients that visit a Surgeon to resolve their musculoskeletal pain 85% are not a candidate for surgery. Second, at the time, there was a broad consensus that conservative care (home exercise and strengthening or Physical Therapy) was a better initial approach to deal with neck pain. The third point became evident when my surgeon prescribed home neck exercises replete with photos of people applying resistance by placing their hand against their head or literally placing a towel on the wall and leaning into it.

Going to my Physical Therapist didn’t provide any real answers as they provided me with rubber bands, which, while providing resistance did not provide the consistency I have come to appreciate with real weights. Having come from a fitness background, on a napkin while sitting at breakfast with my then 10 year-old daughter, I remember the old see-saws of my youth. I figured that if I took a weight and placed it at the edge of the leaver (fulcrum) then I can use a relatively light weight that can be increased exponentially by it’s positioning. With $100.00, I went t a local metal shop and a crude prototype was constructed. The device which still remains on my desk to this day worked better than I had anticipated.

While using it at the gym, I was approached by an Audiologist that was finishing his PHD at Nova Southeastern. Intrigued by it’s unique design, he asked what it was an I explained that I had been suffering from neck pain and fashioned the device as there was nothing like it. He asked if he could do some electromyographic studies to determine if it truly engaged the neck muscles as he had felt during use. Reluctantly agreeing, I loaned him the device. While at this moment, I had no expectation of mass production or any commercial endeavors this all changed when I received an excited phone call from him after testing the device in his laboratory. “Are you ready to hear the results” he excitedly exclaimed on the other end of the phone?. “Sure I responded” my young daughter resting her head on my shoulder as we watched tv together on the couch. “The results are truly impressive. The Sternocleido mastoid (muscle on the side of your neck that controls turning your head) and the Digastric (muscle in the front of your neck controlling bringing your head toward your chest) tested off the charts with the one pound of resistance... you need to patent this”! Still a bit skeptical, that evening after putting my daughter to bed, I went back online to look at what was currently available on the market. Aside from some head harnesses and what looked like mid-evil torture devices, there was nothing like what I designed.

After some additional market research I learned that neck and back pain was the third leading cost behind heart disease and diabetes in the US. 1 What I was seeing wasn’t a small segmented market where millions of products exist to address the issue (or competition) that lead me to design a more commercially appealing and uniformly adaptable product.

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