Just stretching the muscles will help from a whiplash injury. There is three plains of motion in the cervical spine, it’s the spine of the neck. What you want to do is you want to get to the end point of those ranges of motion and just stretch your muscles. The first one is rotation, so what the patient should do is take their range of motion all the way to the endpoint, and just feel it stretch. Of course you want to do it bilaterally. You want to go to both sides, and then what you want to do is hold that stretch at the endpoint for a count of ten.
The next plain of motion is flexion and extension. You want to take your range of motion to the end point and hold that at that point, and then back, and then feel all the muscles stretch in the front part of your neck for ten seconds. Each of those ranges of motion. The next one is lateral flexion. You want to stretch all of the muscles on the side of your neck on both sides. Get your head over the side. Hold it there for ten seconds. Obviously you want to do it both sides, or bilaterally.
One of the things that I see a lot of patients do that was popular in aerobics classes back years ago was to do the circumduction of the head. You do not want to do that because that is bad for the posterior joints of your neck.