A 'tracking splint' is the compass for your TMJ journey

By measuring progress on your curve of spee, you see whether you are getting better and how fast.

I’ve talked a few times in other posts about a ‘tracking splint’ and I realized I’ve never properly explained it.

Also some folks have asked me about it in messages and a number of the folks in the Reviv community are using one.

More and more i’m realizing that I should make it a standard part of the Reviv journey because it is extremely important to measuring progress.

It’s like your compass.

You can walk for hours or even days but unless you’re walking in the right direction it is useless.

So what is a tracking splint?

Think of the tracking splint like your measuring stick for progress.

It's basically a hard acrylic dental splint that fits on your lower teeth in which you're regularly checking how your teeth make contact using articulating paper (that blue or red ‘ink’ paper dentists use).

You put the articulating paper in your mouth, bite down on the splint, and it leaves marks showing where your teeth are hitting.

Then you use a dental drill to make those contacts even. You do this by following this process:

• step 1: every hard contact you drill down with your drill

• step 2: you check the contacts again with the paper

• step 3: repeat from step 1 until all the contacts from each of the back four teeth on left and right side are visible and more or less of equal weight

The goal is to have nice even contacts across your back four teeth on both sides. When that happens you can assume that the slope of the splint accurately reflects your line of occlusion (ie. how your upper and lower teeth make contact).

How did I discover the tracking splint?

I stumbled onto this back in 2016 when I was seeing a TMJ dentist in the US.

He'd made me a splint and showed me how to adjust it myself using articulating paper and a drill. The only contact was on my last lower tooth on either side (my 2nd molar since I’d had my wisdoms extracted decades back).

The idea was to have even contact on the left and right side.

Also i realized early on just how quickly your dental contacts can change.

• Do 30 minutes of yoga… the contacts changed

• Do a session with an osteopath… the contacts changed

• etc.

Pretty soon I was going nuts with it - adjusting it multiple times a day instead of waiting weeks like he suggested. Why? Because i’m a fucking nut like that.. hahaha

Also i evolved the process a bit because I was accustomed from doing Starecta back then to wearing a splint with contact on each of the back four teeth.

So i changed the splint such that I had contact on the back four teeth on each side. And i’d adjust so that all 4 contacts on each side were even.

Then I noticed something interesting - I was almost always drilling more on the front of the splint than the back.

A nice curve was appearing on each side of the splint sloping up to its highest point on the back. The curve of spee! Which I explain here:

The Curve of Spee

As more of a curve developed, my body and function continued to improve.

The tracking splint allowed me to now measure my experiments

This turned out to be absolute gold for measuring progress. And I developed a method where I had two splints:

• Splint #1: This is the splint I wore on a regular basis and I’d run lots of experiments with it.

• Spint #2 (My tracking splint): I didn’t actually wear this splint but rather would just adjust it from time to time to track the curve of spee.

With this splint#1 I started experimenting like a mad man…

• What if I only have contact on one side?

• What if the splint only makes contact with my upper front teeth?

• What if I index it and lock a jaw position that is in protrusion? Retrusion? With the jaw to one side?

• What happens if I use more height?

• What is faster? A rubber guard or a flat plane splint?

I started documenting all of these experiments and how they impacted the curve of spee.

This is what allowed me to conclude what works vs. what is bad for you

Each time I was drilling mostly on the front of the splint this generally meant the curve was improving and this was good for me. I’d typically also feel and see this play out on my body and function as well.

Each time I was drilling mainly on the back of the splint this generally meant the curve was flattening and this was bad for me.

This is what taught me that indexing a splint tends to flatten a curve of spee. Or keeping an open posterior bite will also flatten the curve.

And i’d generally also see this worsening in how i functioned.

You see, these contact changes aren't random - they represent real structural changes happening in your skull and body.

When your dental arches are expanding, when your teeth are uprighting, when your skull is changing shape - all of this shows up in how your teeth contact the splint.

It's like having X-ray vision into what's actually happening with your structure.

I found that the development of what dentists call the "curve of spee" (where the back teeth are higher than the front) is a direct indicator that you're getting healthier.

Without a tracking splint you are flying blind

Here's why this matters - I see lots of folks saying they've plateaued with their rubber guard or other appliance. But when I dig deeper, they're usually just guessing based on how they feel or what they see in the mirror.

The reality is they probably haven't plateaued at all. The progress just gets more subtle over time, and without a way to measure it, they think nothing's happening. This is exactly why you need a tracking splint.

If your contacts on the tracking splint haven't changed in a week, then yeah - maybe you've plateaued. But this doesn’t usually happen for at least 1-2 years of wearing the rubber appliance.

Usually there's always some change happening, even if it's small.

The tracking splint takes the guesswork out of it. It's like having a scientific instrument to measure your progress. You can literally see your structure changing over time through how those contact points shift.

How to make one?

This is a question i get a lot so i figured i’d answer it here. And note that I do not help you make a dental splint because that would be illegal for me to do as i do not ‘treat’ patients.

I simply provide information on how.

There are four things you need:

1. A base splint: You can get one for about $150 off of Amazon by searching for ‘custom night guard’ (see link) and choosing a company like enCore or Kiry. They send you an impression kit and then after you give them the impression they send you your hard lower splint.

2. Acrylic resin: I like to use ‘cold cure acrylic resin’ that dentists use. This is a hard one to get as you often need a b2b dental supplier to sell it to you.

3. A dental drill: You can get one off of Amazon like this one (link) for ~$65.

4. Articulating paper: Something like this (link) on Amazon will run you ~$10.

Then it takes some time to get used to doing it.

Practice makes perfect. I did this so many times for years that I can do this shit in my sleep. lol

Closing thoughts

So yeah, if you're serious about making progress on this journey, get yourself a tracking splint. It is your compass.

Learn how to use articulating paper and a dental drill and follow the process I talked about.

Because without this kind of systematic measurement, you're just flying in the dark. And in my experience, that's a recipe for going in circles.