Neuro Athletics, 29. May 2019

Crazy strength gains through correct TONGUE POSITION?

Immense power increase through correct TONGUE POSITION?

Today I’ll talk about a very interesting topic: the influence of our tongue position on our athletic performance and power output. Yes, you can call me crazy, but in fact, you can support your performance by paying attention to the correct position of your tongue.

You do not believe me?

Our tongue muscles are deeply connected with the muscles of the jaw and the throat. As a result, bad tongue position can lead to an unfavorable neck position and deteriorated neck stability. This has a negative impact on our balance and thanks to the latest findings also on our strength.

There is an interesting 2014 study on this subject that actually proved that keeping the right tongue position can increase the strength in training by up to 30%.

Study link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3940506/

A few months ago, another study showed that mouth position (mouth closed or closed) had an impact on the explosive power of athletes.

Exactly for this reason, it is important to worry about our tongue including mouth position.

Which tongue position is the right one?

To find the “perfect” tongue position, one exercise is well suited. I call the exercise – the big fake grin. The exercise looks silly but is very effective. In practice it looks like this: you pull your eyebrows up, put on a big grin, press the tongue up and try to swallow.

If you do this exercise 4-5x, you give your brain information about where the tongue should rest during the day.

The easiest way to integrate this exercise into your everyday life is to set an alarm clock every hour and practice 4-5 “grins” each. This is a great way to train your brain for the right tongue position. Another benefit of this exercise is to program you more for nasal breathing during the day, which is known to be the healthier type of breathing.

Try the exercise in training as follows:

The next time you work out, try pushing the tongue against the palate with force and observe your stability and strength. For my part, I have been practicing this little trick with my athletes and also myself for quite some time now and noticed immense effects. Especially when it comes to somehow “squeezing out” the last rep, paying close attention to correct tongue position can help dramatically with power output.

Have fun trying!

Markus