What do the neck or tongue have to do with tooth grinding, jaw clenching or even snoring? Why do I recommend throat exercises for Temporomandibular Joint Syndrome (TMJ) and jaw exercises for snoring?
Doesn’t make any sense, does it?
Wouldn’t you focus entirely on the back if you were suffering from backache? Or the head if you had headache? And of course for high blood pressure, all you want to do is lower your blood pressure, right?
Well, I think that this kind of approach is ruining health care.
No muscle is an island, neither is a nerve, bone or a limb. Every cell in our body is connected to every other cell in our body. After all, every single cell (millions of them) in our body has the exact same DNA structure, but NO cell outside our body has that exact DNA structure.
Isn’t that amazing? (maybe I’m getting a little ahead of myself).
Our bodies work as a whole.
I took my 8 year old daughter to the chiropractor today. He said one of her legs appears to be a little shorter than the other. After he adjusted her, both legs were even. No problem at all.
Luckily, we caught this in time!
The chiropractor said this often happens in all kind of kids’ games. My daughter probably wouldn’t have noticed anything for years. But she wouldn’t have carried her body quite right. She would begin to put her weight on the wrong muscles and bones.
And then – maybe after 30, 40, or 50 years – she may experience knee, back or hip problems. She might even experience neck problems, headaches or TMJ.
It’s very likely that something similar happened to you when you were a kid. It probably happens to most of us. Something small puts our body out of balance. It might not be noticeable, but little by little it will affect us.
And one day, the pressure will be too much and something will give.
We don’t get sick all of a sudden – unless we have an accident. Often, there is an underlying cause wreaking gradual changes that has remained hidden, usually for years.
This brings me back to my original question of why I recommend exercising muscles that don’t seem connected with the problem area.
Lets take TMJ as a example. TMJ is a condition where the jaw joints are dislocated or out of position, causing tension in the jaw muscles. This can manifest in a horrible headache, drowsiness, blurry vision, the inability to eat or talk or hundreds of other symptoms. No case of TMJ is the same.
But the solution is always the same.
I recommend special jaw, tongue, throat and neck exercises.
Now it’s quite simple to explain why I recommend the jaw exercises. By loosening and then strengthening the jaws muscles, they will guide the jaw back into its natural position.
But why on earth do I recommend throat exercises?
Because the muscles around the throat are directly connected to the jaw muscles. So is the tongue muscle and of course the neck muscles. So if you do not first loosen and then strengthen these muscles, the tension will keep on pulling the jaw muscles and keep them from doing their proper job.
The TMJ exercises come directly from my stop snoring program. The reason the same exercises work for such different conditions is simply because they occur in the same area. So just as it is important to loosen the throat muscles to make the jaw muscles more functional, it is similarly important to loosen the jaw muscles to make the throat muscles more functional and to open up the throat, thereby curing snoring.
I always focus on the body as a whole, no matter what condition I’m dealing with. To cure migraine, you must train yourself to breathe deeply. You must also make sure the muscles controlling your breathing are strong and flexible.
You must always look at the big picture.
Just like people affect one another, every cell, every muscle, every bone and every nerve affects those next to it.
Warm regards,
Christian Goodman
You can find all the programs mentioned above on the right-hand side of this page.
