Jaw tension and pain can come in many forms including mental and physical stress to imbalances in biomechanics of the jaw to overuse with constant eating or chewing. Whatever the cause may be, if you have significant pain, we recommend that you consult with your doctor for further testing before beginning any preventative exercise programs.
Today, we will go over four tips that will help to relieve some tension in your jaw and regain some control over that pain or tension. We recommend to perform these approaches daily to see consistent relief.
Chew Less!
Resting Position
Symmetry
Isometrics
1. Chew Less! (Treat your jaw muscles just like the rest of your muscles)
Imagine you were having constant knee or quad muscle pain, but everyday you would continue to run 3 miles and do squats or lunges. Over time, you would start to see the correlation to why you have lingering pain, even though you may not identify the root cause. Most people would take a break from the running and exercise to give their joints and muscles a chance to recover and heal properly and then reintegrate at a slower rate.
Your jaw muscles should be treated no different if you are having lingering, daily pain. Take a look at your daily habits with chewing. Do you eat beef jerky, steak and other foods that require intense and repetitive chewing? Do you chew bubble gum throughout the day? Are you talking a lot throughout the day? If so, try to give your jaw muscles a break by limiting the amount of times you are opening and closing your jaw.
2. Resting Position (Space is grace)
Stress = tension. Tension = clenching of the jaw. This formula may be what’s leading to your jaw tension and pain. Of course, stress would be the root cause, but luckily, we can prevent the effects of the stress which is the clenching. The way we do this is by understanding what our jaw resting position is.
The first thing you should know is your teeth should not be clamped together, or touching. You should have space between your teeth when your jaw is at rest throughout the day and night. This can be challenging to do if you aren’t used to it, so we will show you a great technique to reassess your jaw position daily.
First, say the letter “N”. What you will notice is your mouth is slightly opened, your lips are slightly opened and your tongue is on the roof of your mouth. Let’s keep the tongue there and the mouth opened just slightly, but go ahead and pull the lips closed. If you are not used to a proper resting jaw position, this can feel very awkward to you at first. As with any new behavioral changes, comfort can take time.
3. Symmetrical Opening
One of the main reasons our jaws get aggravated from too much chewing or talking, like described in tip 1 is because we aren’t opening our jaw symmetrically, resulting in us putting unwanted stress to both jaw joints and mandible muscles.
So step 3, after taking a step back, is to identify if you have any imbalances when opening your jaw. In the video you will be able to notice some asymmetrical openings to both sides and then a corrected opening movement. Use a mirror or your phone camera to practice symmetry.
4. Jaw Isometrics
This is our last tip to effectively restrengthen the jaw muscles to work in all ranges of motion and not be so isolated to one side or movement pattern. The way we are executing this is through jaw isometric holds.
With isometrics, we are attempting to hold a contraction of the jaw muscles in a certain range of motion, very similar to holding a wall sit.
We want to open the jaw about 80% open and then use resistance with our knuckles to try to drive the jaw open the other 20%. However, with the resistance of our knuckles, we won’t open the jaw any more, instead holding an isometric contraction.
We want to shift the jaw to the left and hold the isometric contraction.
We want to shift the jaw to the right and hold the isometric contraction.
We want to open our jaw to its resting position and attempt to open the jaw more. But, with the resistance of our knuckles, we won’t open the jaw any more, instead holding an isometric contraction.
We want to perform 2-3 rounds of these isometrics, holding each one for five seconds.