if you want to be stronger and make more gains you need to understand how a chicken Works our bodies are always trying to balance the head and eyes and chickens are Masters At This understanding this immediately increase the weight I could do on several lifts so how does your jaw and teeth improve your strength and balance the vestibular system keeps track of your orientation in space and allows you to maintain balance thanks to our vestibular system our eyes can stay pretty well locked onto something even as our heads and bodies move a chicken cannot move
it eyes very much so their vestibular system keeps their entire head in Balance so well that it can stay locked onto one position even as you move its body around so balance is important in the gym because obviously if your stance is out of balance you're not going to say deadlift as well not just because you might topple over but because you won't engage your muscles in an optimally balanced way but what is balance let's say I'm doing a standing bicep curl and I'd want to be as balanced as possible to put maximum power into
the lift so we'll want want both feet flat on the floor we don't want to rotate the hips to one side we shouldn't have one shoulder higher than the other and you shouldn't tilt your head to one side all of these parts of the body would slightly affect our posture and power okay but what about your jaws and teeth this paper explains that the alignment of your bite your teeth will affect your posture they even say that if your mullers touch such that one side is higher than the other that this will tilt the head
to one side and over time this can in some situations even lead to scoliosis a condition where the spine is bent out of its natural position teeth messing up the spine might sound hard to believe but this review paper looking at multiple papers from 1970 to 2010 concluding that their investigation indeed revealed plausible evidence for bite alignment affecting spinal alignment in fact the way I immediately increased the weight on my dumbbell press was by simply biting on a popsicle stick on my left side to compensate for the fact that my jaw hangs slightly lower on
the left further I used to have pretty bad balance but it significantly improved after I did some things to improve my overall jaw alignment now I was exposed to a lot of these Concepts from Neil henin who is an expert in posture Restoration in this video of his he presents three more studies that show that the teeth alignment affects the posture and balance as evidenced by how the weight is distributed across the feet the reason Neil henin's video blew my mind was because it explained perfectly why I had such a weird experience at the dentist
a cap on my Muller had gotten cracked so I had to get new one it wasn't until I got back home that I noticed that it felt like the cap made my right Muller too high which affected my bite alignment and my left mullers weren't touching as much as before for the couple days right after that I consistently woke up in the morning with my neck really stiff and tense on one side this stiffness went all the way down into my right shoulder and trap I even suspected that my hips might be a little tighter
because I noticed that I had less range of motion when I was doing kicks in multiple videos of Neil hin he's discriminated how he can get patients tight hips to relax and improve range of motion just by having them bite on a tongue depressor I'm manipulating their sensory input in their mouth the gentleman with the mouth with the tongue depressor he lost his molar sense now the tongue depressor isn't perfectly aligning the bite but it is restoring the felt sense of contact of the teeth there are tons of nerves that travel from the Jaws to
the brain and the brain is keenly aware of whether the teeth are touching and which teeth are touching the brain seems to respond to how the teeth simply touch together and then signals to tense or relax certain muscles to shift the body's balance in response this 2003 paper found specifically that if you can't sense your teeth touching on one side then your body weight shifts to the other side they concluding that when you can't sense your teeth touching on one side this can affect the posture and can cause shoulder or neck pain this is exactly
what happened to me I couldn't feel my left mullers properly and I kept waking up with a bunch of stiffness in the right side of my neck and shoulder another paper found that messing up people's bite by putting a mere 6 mm thick tin foil on their teeth affected the position of their lower back a week after getting the new Muller cap I went back to the dentist and he made some slight adjustments to the cap until I could feel my left mullers make better contact it wasn't even 20 minutes after leaving his office that
I started to feel a lot of that tension in my neck slowly dissolve and as I stepped off the train and walked home my hips seem to feel a bit looser Brian Shaw who has won the title of the world's strongest man on multiple occasions had this to say when he was asked for a strength tip that one big tip that you can give to our viewers honestly I would say the first thing is to shut your mouth when you're lifting if you close your mouth and you're wearing something like the new age performance mouth
piece you stabilize your jaw and you're actually stronger multiple lines of research have found that Biting Down on the mouthpiece improves muscular strength this study was taking a look at whether a bite aligning mouthpiece could increase strength and power they found that clenching on a mouthpiece that aligns their bite increased hand grip Force back row force and even how high they could jump this study found that clenching on a mouthpiece regardless of the type of mouthpiece increased Force for the isometric clean pull another study found that mouthpiece use may increase performance and decrease stress when
used during intense resistance exercise now one other reason this jaw clenching works is likely because of this phenomenon where you can get more power into a movement when you activate other muscles even if those muscles aren't directly used in the movement however this review paper here claims that the results show that jaw repositioning can enhance appendage muscular strength some papers dispute whether you can improve performance with a bite aligning mouthpiece but many support the idea this study specifically shows that when athletes put a splint in their mouth that aligns their jaw it gives them more
mobility in their cervical spine and more stability in their stance another stud on basketball players using a custom mouthpiece that stabilizes the jaw found that their balance was improved another study found an increase in lower body and upper body power as well as flexibility and stability just from changing the lower jaw position in Elite athletes now I've had issues with my lower jaw for almost 20 years thanks to either a bad fall that damaged my jaw joint when I was young or some dental work in high school that misaligned my bite I'm not entirely sure
of the cause but in any case my balance has always been pretty bad and one of my shoulders is higher than the other I also clench my jaw at night which is why my masser muscles are so big over the years dentists made various mouthpieces for me that didn't really do much but I recently had one made that has actually made a difference it relieved a lot of the tension that I typically feel in the right side of my neck and my right shoulder in the morning all it does is make my bite feel aligned
that is the mouthpiece is shaped to where all the teeth on my lower jaw can touch the mouthpiece at the same time so when I bite down it's very stable and aligned it hasn't entirely resolved my clenching but it does help a lot with that one-sided attension to my neck and shoulder in fact as I've worked to improve my jaw alignment it seems to have loosened my hips and I've been able to go deeper on my squats a study on 15 rats found that messing up their bite alignment by making one side higher than the
other resulted in a curve in the spine in all of the rats another study on rats found similar results another study in children found teeth misalignment and the lower jaw being in an abnormal position to be correlated with bad posture what's really interesting is that this seems to go both ways one study found that children with a dislocated hip were more likely than to develop misaligned teeth and Jaws a lot of people have lower or upper back pain shoulder pain neck pain and so on and they may try to pop or stretch their back and
neck but there's not too much discussion about how jaw position and clenching or grinding your teeth at night might be worsening your back and neck pain or how tight hips might actually be affecting your neck and shoulders and so on now my jaw is all kinds of screwed up so this probably isn't the solution for everyone but lately when my neck starts to get tight after staring at a computer screen all day I can usually relieve some of that tension by massaging or trying to gently reposition my jaw okay so at the end of the
day what can you do with this information well for starters it couldn't hurt to just get a cheap silicone mouthpiece and bite on that while you're doing your lifts at the gym just make sure it's big enough so that you're feeling pressure on your back mullers too if you feel that your hips or your shoulders or maybe your spine is not properly L you can look into postural restoration techniques this is what Neil henin practices further if your left and right side teeth particular your MERS aren't touching down with the same amount of force when
you bite down you might want to look into a bite aligning mouthpiece at one point I was using just a tiny chunk of a silicone mouthpiece to add height to my left back mullers that weren't touching as well as the right and this helped a lot with my power output in the gym this of course is a Band-Aid solution if you have problems with your teeth you may need to go to a good orthodontist who actually understands what proper bite alignment looks like that topic is a whole another can of worms because bad orthodontists can
really do a lot of damage the other thing that I use at the gym to increase performance isn't pre-workout or caffeine but electrolytes that's why this video sponsor element comes in since electrolytes and sodium are a big part of hydration and maintaining energy levels in general it can really help to replace the electrolyt you lose when you're fasting doing a low carb diet or when you're sweating a lot at the gym I often find my energy focus is generally better throughout the day if I stay hydrated with plenty of water and an element pack here
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so please click the second link in the description to share your thoughts on what you'd like to see as a thank you I'll be sending you my subse SEC for free where I tell you the five coolest things I found out each week
