I used to train a personal training client (old gym in Kitsilano) whose goal was hypertrophy. If you know a bit of training, reps, intensity and duration of resting matter for your specific needs.
Type of Training
There are 3 types of training. Endurance, Hypertrophy and Strength. As the name indicates, endurance training requires more repetitions. Then Hypertrophy and Strength have less repetitions and require longer recovery time during training as well as after training.
We started training for hypertrophy specifically, however, there was one complaint this client always had. He had a tight neck and some exercises gave him his tight neck even tighter and bothered him the next day or so.
Back Muscles Exercises
Back muscles exercises are believed to be good choices for shoulders. There are many ways to work on your back such as Lat pulldown, seated row, 3 points row, pullup and you name it.
And their target muscles are latissimus dorsi, posterior deltoid, and lower trap. Nothing to do with your upper trap and you may think they don’t make your neck muscle tight. But if you do them with high intensity, relatively heavy weight, they certainly make your tight neck even worse.
You are the expert of your body
I have been told that you get a tight neck because you were missing the shoulder packing. But you will know once you have a tight neck.
You have to ask if you really want to keep the pain and training or reduce the intensity unless you have been competing with others in sports.
Also good news is, according to the ACE book, although you choose to work with one of the training types (endurance, hypertrophy, strength), it doesn’t mean strength training doesn’t give you endurance effect at all or endurance training doesn’t give you hypertrophy effect.
You just need to have a plan for longer to achieve the muscle hypertrophy goal with less intensity to prevent injury.