Why Tongue Position Is So Important

clear physio - tongue position

When it comes to your overall health and wellbeing, you might not think that tongue posture and the position of the tongue in your mouth is particularly important. After all, how could something as simple as where your tongue rests when not eating or talking have any kind of relative impact elsewhere?

Well, in fact, the position of the tongue in the mouth is hugely important to health for all sorts of reasons. When not eating or talking, your tongue should sit gently in the roof of the mouth at all times, something that you may not even be aware that you’re not doing. 

This action will help encourage nasal breathing rather than mouth breathing, which is associated with poor health outcomes such as under-developed upper jaws in children, overcrowding of teeth and malocclusion when adult teeth come through.

Mouth breathing can also lead to difficulty sleeping and other conditions like anxiety and depression, not to mention potential medical procedures like dentistry, orthodontics and surgery to remove adenoids and tonsils.

Facial structure can also be impeded by improper tongue position because the jaw doesn’t develop in the upwards and forward trajectory. This in turn puts pressure on the airway and, as a result, forward head posture is adopted in order to compensate and help open the airway.

This forward head posture can then have an impact on how you move your lower body, creating even more physical dysfunctions and movement patterns that can affect your balance, stability and strength.

As such, making sure that children are prioritising nasal breathing and tongue posture is important so that they can avoid such issues during adulthood. 

It can be harder to address these compensation patterns in adults because these problems will have developed over the course of years, but there are different techniques that can be employed to address incorrect movement patterns that have arisen because of mouth breathing and restricted airways.

 

If you’d like to find out more or are looking for a physiotherapist in Maidenhead at the moment, get in touch with Clear Physio today to see how we can help.