Chin Tucks for Headaches: When They Help and When They Backfire
- Sam Kelokates
- Dec 31, 2025
- 8 min read
Chin tucks show up everywhere in headache and neck pain advice. Yet many people do them daily and still struggle with symptoms.
The problem usually isn’t the exercise itself—it’s how and why it’s being prescribed. Understanding that difference is where real progress starts.
At Kelos Physical Therapy, we help people pursue a path to more headache-free days by combining individualized physical therapy, targeted neck and exercise-based interventions, and structured programs like Active Headache Recovery.
👉 Learn more about your options: Your Path to More Headache-Free Days
Why Chin Tucks Are So Commonly Recommended for Headaches
Why chin tucks are often the first exercise prescribed
Chin tucks are commonly recommended because they’ve been used extensively in orthopedic and rehabilitation research related to neck pain and cervicogenic headache.
In many of these studies, chin tucks are paired with other exercises to address limitations in upper cervical spine movement, particularly flexion and extension.
When someone has restricted motion in the upper neck, that restriction can contribute to headache symptoms through musculoskeletal referral.
In those cases, chin tucks can be helpful because they act as a mobility-based exercise, restoring motion and reducing mechanical sensitivity in the neck. For people whose headaches are driven largely by movement restrictions, this approach can work quite well.
This is why chin tucks do help some people. They are addressing a real limitation in the musculoskeletal system.
Why chin tucks help some people but not others
Many people who say chin tucks helped them had a clear movement limitation in the neck. Once that motion improved, their headache symptoms improved as well.
But for others, the story is different. These are often people who say, “I’ve been doing chin tucks for weeks or months, and they’re not helping.” When you look closer, they’re usually performing cervical retraction repeatedly in sitting or standing, using chin tucks strictly as a mobility or posture exercise.
The issue isn’t that chin tucks are ineffective, it’s that mobility alone isn’t the limiting factor for everyone. For many people with headache disorders, the neck isn’t stiff due to joint restricton. It’s underprepared to tolerate load.
What’s usually missing when chin tucks don’t help
What’s most often missing is progression.
Many people never move beyond gentle retraction drills. They don’t transition from mobility into strengthening, and they don’t gradually increase the demands placed on the neck over time.
To truly change how the neck contributes to headaches, we often need to:
Establish motor control first
Build the ability to lift and control the head against gravity
Gradually increase strength and endurance of the deep cervical flexors
These deep neck muscles play a critical role in supporting the head, stabilizing the neck during movement, and tolerating daily physical demands. Without strengthening them, mobility improvements alone may not translate into fewer headache flares.
This idea of progression isn’t just clinical opinion—it’s supported by research. Studies on deep cervical flexor training show that starting with low-load motor control and gradually progressing to higher-load endurance and strength work leads to better improvements in neck function than low-level exercises alone. This helps explain why chin tucks often fail when they’re never progressed beyond gentle retraction.
You can read more about this progression here.
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The biggest misunderstanding about what chin tucks are supposed to do
The biggest misunderstanding is assuming that chin tucks serve the same purpose for everyone.
For some people, chin tucks are primarily a mobility exercise, helping improve upper cervical motion.
For others, including many people with headache disorders such as tension-type headache, some cases of cervicogenic headache, and migraine attacks with neck involvement chin tucks need to become a strengthening exercise.
That means lifting the head against gravity, holding positions with control, and eventually managing movement while maintaining stability.
This strengthening component is often where chin tucks have the greatest potential to improve headache tolerance but it’s also the part that’s most commonly skipped.
Understanding why you’re doing chin tucks is just as important as doing them at all. For some people neck pain isn't just a side effect of headaches. It's a meaningful contributor! If you're noticing that neck pain precedes your headaches, symptoms worsen with head movements, or long days of desk work or travel reliably trigger pain, this may point to neck-related component.
You can learn more about how physical therapy evaluates and treats neck pain and headache here: https://www.kelosphysicaltherapy.com/neck-pain-and-headache
What Does a Chin Tuck Help With?
The muscles chin tucks are actually targeting
Chin tucks are often thought of as a simple posture or mobility exercise, but they target several important deep muscles of the neck. Specifically, chin tucks activate the longus colli, longus capitis, rectus capitis anterior, and rectus capitis lateralis.
These muscles play a key role in stabilizing the head and neck and supporting the spine’s natural curvature. They are especially important during prolonged, low-load activities like sitting at a desk, driving, or traveling on a plane.
When these muscles are weak, people often develop increased forward head posture, neck pain, and difficulty holding their head up comfortably over time.
How chin tucks influence neck control and stability
The deep cervical flexors are essential for motor control of the upper cervical spine. The head needs to remain stable so the eyes can focus and track the environment accurately.
When these muscles lack endurance or control, the body often compensates by overusing larger, more superficial muscles like the upper trapezius and levator scapulae.
This compensation strategy can create excess tension in the neck and shoulders, making it harder to maintain upright posture and increasing strain during daily activities.
Improving deep neck muscle control allows the head and neck to stay supported without relying on these larger muscles to do a job they weren’t designed for.
Why chin tucks can help with neck-related headache triggers
For many people, headaches are influenced by muscle fatigue and sustained strain, especially in the neck. When the deep cervical muscles fatigue, tension often builds in surrounding muscles, and this can contribute to the development of myofascial trigger points.
Active trigger points in neck muscles are known to reproduce familiar headache patterns for many individuals. Strengthening the deep cervical flexors can improve endurance, reduce excessive muscle tension, and decrease the likelihood of these trigger points becoming irritated throughout the day.
In this way, chin tucks used appropriately can help reduce one of the musculoskeletal contributors to headache symptoms.
Chin Tucks for Mobility vs Strength: Why the Difference Matters
How chin tucks are commonly used as a mobility exercise
Chin tucks are most often prescribed in a seated or standing position, where someone gently pushes their chin forward and then pulls it straight back. In this context, the goal is usually to improve upper cervical spine mobility.
Many people with cervicogenic headache have limited range of motion in the upper neck, and chin tucks can be an effective way to restore that motion.
Used this way, chin tucks function as a mobility exercise, and for the right person, this can be very helpful. Restoring motion in stiff upper cervical joints can reduce musculoskeletal referral into the head and ease symptoms.
The problem isn’t that this approach is wrong it’s that it often becomes the only approach.
Why mobility alone doesn’t always reduce headache symptoms
Not all headaches are driven by loss of range of motion. Some headache disorders, including tension-type headache and migraine, involve neurological mechanisms that mobility work alone doesn’t address.
Even in cervicogenic headache, not all musculoskeletal contributors come from the joints.
Muscles themselves, particularly when fatigued or overloaded, can act as headache generators through myofascial trigger points.
If the primary issue is muscle endurance or strength, doing more mobility work won’t solve the problem. In those cases, repeatedly performing chin tucks as a mobility drill may temporarily change how the neck feels, but it won’t improve the neck’s ability to tolerate daily demands.
What changes when chin tucks are used as a strengthening exercise
When chin tucks are used for strengthening, the goal shifts from restoring motion to increasing load tolerance. This usually starts in a supine position, where the focus is on motor control or learning how to activate and hold upper cervical flexion without lifting the head.
From there, load is gradually introduced by lifting the head against gravity. This is no different than progressive strength training elsewhere in the body.
Just as you wouldn’t expect a few light leg presses to build lasting strength, neck strength also requires progressive loading over time. That might include longer holds, increased repetitions, or eventually added resistance.
Importantly, these adaptations take weeks, not days. Strengthening the neck is a process, not a quick fix.
Do Chin Tucks Help Headaches? (When They Work—and When They Don’t)
When chin tucks are most likely to help headaches
At a baseline level, chin tucks can be helpful for people with headaches — whether the diagnosis is cervicogenic headache, tension-type headache, or migraine — especially when they’re used as a strengthening exercise. Improving deep neck muscle control and endurance almost always supports better head and neck tolerance.
Chin tucks used specifically for mobility tend to be most appropriate when there is a clear pattern of joint restriction in the neck. This often shows up as a loss of range of motion in flexion, extension, or rotation, frequently more pronounced in one direction.
In those cases, repeatedly working into that restricted motion can help restore movement and reduce headache referral from the joints.
Sometimes, performing a chin tuck or moving into a restricted direction may actually reproduce a familiar headache. When that happens, part of reducing headache sensitivity can involve graded exposure — carefully and repeatedly introducing the movement that triggers symptoms so the musculoskeletal and nervous systems learn to tolerate it with less reactivity over time.
When chin tucks are unlikely to help—or may stall progress
Chin tucks are much less likely to help when they’re used purely as a mobility exercise in someone who doesn’t have a mobility restriction. If range of motion is already normal, repeatedly performing cervical retraction isn’t addressing the real limitation.
This is where many people get stuck. If mobility isn’t the issue, chin tucks need to transition into a strength-based exercise to be effective. Strengthening improves neck control and load tolerance — how well the head and neck handle sustained positions, movement, and daily demands.
For people who are hypermobile, mobility-based chin tucks can even backfire. Adding more motion to a system that already has plenty of movement can increase stress rather than reduce symptoms. In these cases, what’s usually needed is strength and motor control, not more upper cervical mobility.
This is especially true for many people with tension-type headache and migraine, where instability and fatigue often play a larger role than stiffness.
What needs to change for chin tucks to actually make a difference
For chin tucks to meaningfully improve headaches, they usually need to evolve beyond simple mobility work. Even when mobility is part of the plan, exercises should eventually progress into strength-based loading.
That progression typically moves from:
Motor control
To strength
To endurance under higher load
This shift is what changes outcomes for many people with headache disorders. It improves how the neck tolerates real-world demands, rather than just how it moves in isolation.
Closing Thought
Chin tucks — and neck exercises in general — aren’t about fixing posture or chasing stiffness away. They’re about improving how well your neck tolerates the demands of daily life. Knowing whether your neck is actually contributing to your headaches is the first step toward using these exercises in a way that truly helps.