My official take on tongue posture

'Mewing' has made tongue posture all the rage. But i'm about to reveal the truth.

Tons of people these days talk about tongue posture.

Because the Mews made it famous with their ‘Mewing’.

You will find hundreds, if not thousands, of videos on youtube talking about it.

And so today I want to set the record straight.

Because I think it is mainly BS.

What is tongue posture?

Tongue posture is the way that your tongue rests in the mouth.

Unless you’ve already been exposed to the world of Mewing, you probably have never even heard about this. And likely assumed that everyone has the same tongue posture.

But this would not be accurate.

The tongue can be positioned in the bottom of the mouth, the middle of the mouth or the roof of the mouth on different people.

So does it matter?

Yes it does.

What is the right tongue posture?

It is actually very important the tongue is postured on the roof of the mouth like this person above.

It should actually sort of create a natural suction with the roof of the mouth if it is positioned correctly. And this suction is important in swallowing.

Why is this the correct posture?

Well because the tongue is very important to keep the teeth straight and having wide dental arches. Especially in your younger years when you are developing.

Because the teeth position themselves around the tongue since the tongue has more than enough power to move them.

You see the tongue exerts roughly 5 newtons of force whereas it only takes 1-2 newtons to move a tooth.

And so the tongue has more than 2x the needed force to move a tooth. Thus it pushes the teeth to it’s perimeter, which is key to forming nice, wide dental arches.

The Mews say to exercise your tongue posture

For people whose tongue does not naturally sit on the roof of the mouth, the Mews believe in exercising this.

They have all kinds of tongue exercises like ‘Mewing’ to force the tongue to stretch and move to the top of the mouth.

The assumption is that the tongue is a muscle that you just need to work and make strong. And so many thousands of people follow their advice and do exactly this.

I also did this quite a bit between the years of 2015-17. I would spend close to an hour a day doing various tongue exercises.

And it indeed helped make the tongue stronger and got it to sit higher and higher in the mouth.

But now I am firmly of the belief that this was a waste of time and that you do not need to do this.

Why do I think it is unnecessary to do this?

I have fixed tongue posture several times the past few years simply by sticking to my two rules:

1- Raise vertical height
2- Do not lock an occlusion

And so if you wear a Reviv One or a flat plane splint or put composite on your teeth, your tongue posture will start to fix without doing anything else.

Why? Because it is correcting the soft tissue and stretching it.

This same soft tissue is the culprit for why tongue posture was bad to begin with.

My son’s tongue posture has improved a ton the last few years despite the fact that he did not thing except have flat composite on his teeth.

Exercising to achieve good tongue posture is a hamster wheel

By this I mean that if you were to Mew for an extended period of time extensively than this would actually start to create an open posterior bite.

You have in fact changed your occlusion.

The problem, however, is that the teeth cusps were not shaped to support this occlusion.

And so every night when you go to bed, you will be reversing your progress in part.

And therefore you will make progress each time you do your tongue stretches and reverse it whenever you are not.

If, for example, you do not do any tongue stretches for a month… the occlusion reverts back to what it was formerly because that is the occlusion that is supported by the shape of the teeth.

And in doing so the tongue will begin to revert back to its lower position. All your hard work goes down the drain.

So what i am saying is that it is like a hamster wheel. You need to keep doing your tongue stretches in order not to lose all your progress.

Whereas if you just ensured that you wore a Reviv One (or Myobrace, etc) each night, you would make progress without ever losing your gains.

If you do both tongue stretches and wear a Reviv One, than this in fact will give you the fastest progress. And so this is the only situation where I view that exercising your tongue is actually useful.

Sorry all you ‘Mewers’ to bust your bubble ;)