Only Lower Jaw Can Move. 2 Exercises to Test What Exactly Your Jaw Does.
You may be feeling tight in the jaw or cheeks?
Getting headaches often?
You may be using your jaw joints incorrectly when chewing and talking.
In fact, you may be using your neck muscles to try and open your mouth wider because of the lack of flexibility in the jaw joint, or poor neck-head posture is causing your neck muscles called sternocleidomastoid (SCM for short) to work too hard.
As a result of using your neck muscles, your upper jaw and upper teeth may tilt and that enables you to bite into a big and thick burger or baguette at the expense of over stressing your neck and neck muscles.
There are two tests to check if you do this,
1 place index and middle fingers between nose and upper lib and open and close your mouth. It should only move lower jaw without neck/head tilting.
2 place thumb under your chin and open and close your mouth. You should not be able to open your mouth in this way unless your neck muscles tilts your head backwards. So if you noticed you were using your jaw incorrectly, it is worth correcting by keeping your neck upright and still while using only lower jaw to chew or talk. It will help improve the quality of jaw and neck related symptoms.
Happy rehab!
Jawkers’ Physiotherapy powered by
Metro Physiotherapy and Injury Clinic
Post a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.