Ben Greenfield explains why your tongue should rest suctioned against the roof of your mouth most of the day, with lips closed and teeth apart. Poor tongue posture restricts your airway and can cause problems throughout your body. Myofunctional therapy and sometimes a frenectomy can fix it.
So a myotherapy session is basically, I'm training you to keep your tongue up on the roof of your mouth. So it's not enough to just keep the tongue up, the tip of the tongue up on the roof of the mouth. You actually want to put the tongue, the tip of the tongue, the middle of the tongue, and the back of the tongue up, suctioned lightly on the palate so that your teeth aren't touching, your lips need to be completely closed, and then that tongue is suctioned up. So there's actually like a vacuum sensation, a vacuum seal on the back of your. Your throat so that you can swallow properly, you can chew properly, you can eat properly. That's where your tongue should live all day and all night.
How many people don't live all day and all night like that? Because I. I never learned that until. And I've been in the health sector and everything. I didn't even learn that till maybe like, five months ago, that the tongue should be suctioned up against the roof of the mouth basically. A lot of the time.
Yeah, all the time. Like, unless you're eating or you're talking, then your tongue needs to stay up on your palate. Um, so many people do this. It breaks my heart that nobody teaches you this stuff. Like, the airway and is one of the most important aspects of the human body that we need to be evaluating at a very young age. So, I mean, if you think about it, we get our eyes checked, we get our nose checked, we get checked for scoliosis, but nobody's checking the airway.
Well, playing devil's advocate here, if so many people don't suction their tongue against the roof of their mouth from the base to the tip, why is it that we don't just naturally do it from birth? Like, you'd think it'd just be kind of like, built in for us to do it. And if it was a deficit for chewing or for airway obstruction or something, that we would naturally, from an ancestral or evolutionary standpoint, suction our tongue up against the roof of the mouth. But we don't.
We don't. And there's so many reasons for this. And that's also what we discover in the MYO evaluation is the root cause. Why is the tongue not able to get up into the palate? So we're talking about tonality, mobility, and space. So tonality, obviously, it's talking about strength. So the tongue isn't strong enough to get up there. So part of myofunctional therapy is to strengthen the tongue so that it can get up all the way. Suction on the palate, it could be mobility. If there's a frenum attachment that's too tight, too thick, or too short, it's restrictive.
Is the same thing that's called like the tongue tie, correct?
Yes. We've all heard the tongue. We've all heard the term tongue tie. Tongue tie is basically when the frenum is too thick or too tight, restricting the tongue to being able to get up on the palate. So if it's too tight, it might need to get a frenectomy is what we call. So Dr. Loud can actually do that and her husband can do it as well, where he just takes a little laser and we free up the tongue and increase the range of motion with the tongue so that it can reach the palate. It's very important. If you do the frenectomy, you have to learn the stretches and exercises. And part of my myofunctional therapy program is to guide the patient through every step of the way of the healing process with that wound that's under the tongue.
Yeah. And that affects the rest of the body, too. I just interviewed Dr. Neal, who I introduced you guys. That podcast might have come out by now, but he showed me how the tongue is actually because of embryology, in the way that we form via the oral cavity, then the diaphragm, and then the fascia that interconnects all the muscles. As soon as you start messing up the tongue and the jaw and the mouth, you can affect changes farther down the body.
Absolutely. I don't know if you've seen that picture of the entire cadaver. Somebody actually took fascia out of a human body in a cadaver, and you can actually find it online. I don't know what you would look up, but frontline, deep fascia. And it's connected from the tip of the tongue all the way down to the toes. So if you're having restriction in your knee or knee pain, joint pain, back pain, it could actually be stemming from your tongue hit.
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