NECK BRACES: THE RISE, THE RETREAT AND THE HONEST CASE

The Technique

1. Understand what a neck brace physically is before you argue about it. It is a rigid or semi-rigid collar that sits on your shoulders, upper chest and upper back, usually with a strut running down between the shoulder blades. It does not touch or grip your neck, and it is not a medical collar. The working idea is that in a crash your helmet contacts the brace before your cervical spine reaches the end of its natural travel, so the brace becomes the thing that stops the motion instead of your vertebrae. Some designs include a deliberate weak point so the brace fails and releases rather than transmitting an extreme load into your collarbone or sternum.
2. Know the claimed mechanism, because it is narrower than most riders think. Manufacturers describe two effects. The first is limiting extreme range of motion, mainly hyperextension backwards, hyperflexion forwards and lateral bending sideways. The second is transferring load away from the neck into the shoulders, chest and upper back, which are far better able to carry it. The injury patterns being targeted are upper cervical fractures and axial compression from landing on the crown of the helmet. Note what is not claimed: a brace is not designed to help with concussion, rotational brain injury, or the low speed twisting crashes that make up most of what riders actually experience.
3. Be honest about the state of the evidence, because it is genuinely contested. The largest body of favourable data comes from two places that both carry caveats. Manufacturers publish their own testing, which is legitimate engineering work but is funded by the people selling the product. Separately, Great Lakes EMS Inc, trading as Action Sports EMS, compiled roughly ten years of ambulance records from motocross events and reported markedly higher rates of critical cervical spine injury among riders not wearing a brace. That dataset was publicised through Cycle News in December 2018. It is large and it is real world, but it is retrospective, it is not peer reviewed, and it cannot separate the brace from everything else that differs between riders who choose to wear one and riders who do not, including skill, age, class, track and speed.
4. Read the independent modelling work carefully, because it does not give a clean answer either. Meyer and colleagues published "Protection from motorcycle neck-braces using FE modelling" in Sports Engineering in 2018. Their simulation reported reduced risk of serious neck injury at the lower impact speeds tested, and indicated an increased risk of neck injury above roughly six and a half metres per second. Their own stated conclusion was that this class of device needs further study and that assessing it properly requires the introduction of relevant evaluation standards. Related finite element work has been published in the International Journal of Crashworthiness, and an abstract from the Injury Biomechanics Research Centre at Ohio State University examined the same question using a validated motocross helmet model. The results do not line up neatly, and no one has run, or could ethically run, a randomised trial. The honest summary is that the evidence is mixed and unresolved, not that braces are proven either way.
5. Notice the missing piece: there is no agreed test standard. Your helmet is certified against something specific, such as ECE 22.06, Snell M2020 or AS/NZS 1698, and your body armour against EN 1621. There is no equivalent homologation standard for neck braces, which is exactly what the Sports Engineering authors called for. That matters practically, because it means two braces on the same shop wall may behave very differently and there is no common yardstick to compare them, and it means the word "tested" on a box does not carry the weight it carries on a helmet.
6. Take the mobility argument seriously, because unlike much of this it has been measured. Beauséjour, Bailly, Wei and colleagues published "Neck brace design and fit are linked to head mobility" in Sports Engineering in 2025, measuring twenty seated volunteers across six brace models with an optoelectronic system. Every brace tested reduced head mobility, with axial rotation the least restricted direction. A separate volunteer study in Promet - Traffic and Transportation tested four braces on two machine types and reported mobility significantly reduced in all degrees of freedom, with only flexion and extension reduced by every brace tested. So the mobility cost is real and quantified. What is not quantified is the next step in the argument: many experienced riders conclude that reduced head movement makes them more likely to crash in the first place, because in downhill mountain biking, freestyle and any jump where you have to get your head around and pick up the landing, spotting is survival. That inference is a rider judgement, not a research finding. Nobody has measured crashes caused by braces.
7. Watch where the trend has gone and where braces remain. Neck braces went from rare to near universal in motocross and downhill mountain biking through the late 2000s and 2010s, and use has visibly thinned since in both, at elite level and on local trails. As far as we can establish, the major sanctioning bodies do not compel them: they are not a compulsory item under the main international motocross or mountain bike rulebooks. Requirements do exist at the edges. Individual clubs, some junior and amateur classes, and a small number of regional federations have made them mandatory, and some rulebooks now address the interaction between a brace and an airbag vest, since the two are not necessarily compatible. Riders coming back from a neck injury frequently return to one. Check the specific rulebook for the event you are entering rather than assuming.
8. Get the fit right, because this part is not contested at all. A badly fitted brace is a worse object than no brace. It must be the correct size for your torso, not your t-shirt size, with the rear strut set to the length the maker specifies for your build. It should sit on the shoulders and upper chest, not perched on the collarbones. There must be no gap large enough for the helmet rim to slip inside the brace, because a brace the helmet gets underneath can load your neck rather than protect it. Check the clearance with the exact helmet you ride in, since rear rim shapes vary a lot between models. Your chest protector or body armour must be a design intended to work with a brace, layered in the order the manufacturers specify. Stacking a brace over armour it was never designed to sit on is one of the most common ways riders end up with a device that fouls, shifts and does nothing useful.
9. Land on a position and make it a decision, not a default. Ours is simple: this is the rider's call and both choices are respected. The owner does not wear one, on the reasoning above about mobility and crash avoidance, and he is clear that riders who want one because it is what they are used to and they see the benefit are making a legitimate choice. What is not acceptable is deciding in a car park five minutes before a session. Try the brace on with your own helmet and armour, ride with it on terrain you know well, and form a view before the trip. Then be consistent, because switching mid trip means your body is calibrated to one setup and wearing another.

Common Mistakes

Buying a brace online by guessing the size and pairing it with whatever chest protector you already own. Fix: size to the manufacturer's torso measurements, and confirm the brace and the armour are a combination the makers intend to be worn together.

• Wearing a brace for the first time on the biggest day of a trip. Fix: do at least a few full sessions in it at home, including hot laps and jumps, so the mobility change is familiar before it matters.
• Treating the brace as permission to ride harder or land flatter. Fix: ride exactly the terrain and speed you would ride without it, and treat any protective gear as margin against mistakes rather than an allowance to make more of them.
• Dismissing braces entirely because a fast rider you follow does not wear one. Fix: separate the argument from the personality, look at what the device is actually designed to prevent, and decide whether that injury pattern is one you are exposed to.
• Not checking helmet rim clearance after buying a new helmet. Fix: recheck the brace and helmet together every time either item changes, and look specifically for the helmet being able to tuck inside the brace.

The Drill

Do a fit and mobility audit in your full riding kit. Put on your actual helmet, goggles, chest protector and brace as you would ride. Standing, check three things and have someone film them: the helmet rim contacts the outside of the brace and cannot slip inside it at any head angle; the brace bears on your shoulders and upper chest rather than sitting on the collarbones; and nothing shifts when you shrug hard. Then run a mobility test twice, once with the brace and once without, and compare on video. Look over each shoulder to a fixed marker on the wall, look down at your front wheel, and look up and behind as if picking up a landing over a lip. Write down what you lose in each direction. If you cannot get your eyes onto a landing you would normally spot, that is your answer either way, and it is better learned in a shed than in the air.

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