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1.
Chin tucking while mewing or only as excercise? I went to an ''Alexander'' stance therapist. She told me I shouldnt tuck my chin.
I should aim to have my four curves, or my body is out of balance. She told me I should only use chin tucking as an excercise.
Obv i shouldnt have forward neck posture, but she said I should keep my ''neck muscles?'' loose, for head rotation and such.
So kind of like a golden spot.
2. I feel a lot of suction in my soft pallate when mewing at times, kind of like its coming downwards cause of a vacuum in my mouth. This is wrong, and not a feeling I should strive to maintain, right?
3. Adult pallet expander at night to keep progress? In a neutral position where its not strecthing, just holding.
4. I do facepulling with my thumbs, and that REALLY helped rapidly to make more room for my tongue. Can really recommend
that, if you guys don't know any issues with it. When I apply the pressure with my thumbs I usually do it for 5-10 ish min every 1-3 hours. I always try to make sure I do it without forcing my pallet too hard, and have some care. Sometimes I hold, sometimes I move, sometimes I press harder, soft or more consistent at one place. That is working well.
Thanks a lot for listening, and hope you might want to share some of your understandings on the subjects ^^
P.S. I also try to have balance, not to force myself too hard, or become too rigid. But treat my body with care and respect ! For my physical AND psychic well being.
1. Chin tucking as an exercise is useless, just maintain proper head posture. Exercises don't fix posture. To correct posture you need to fix the habit of posturing incorrectly, by posturing yourself correctly, it's that simple. Exercises can help you get a feel for muscles and maybe build some muscle tone if you're lacking, but correct posture doesn't require that much muscle, it's more about correcting a bad habit.
2. Suction hold is perfectly fine, when you do a correct swallow you get a suction hold.
3. Can't recommend you to self equip a palate expander without an orthodontist.
4. Thumb face pulling is questionable.
You have to be in a semi-chin-tuck permanently, and do full chin tucks as an exercise.
At least that sounds reasonable to me.
1. Chin tucking as an exercise is useless
Nobody is in a position to make a statement as bold as this, but plenty of people have reason to feel differently.
I'm lately of the opinion that we should chin tuck as hard as possible for as much time as possible. As part of CFD, our structures have developed in a way that some degree of forward head posture is the most comfortable for us. So you want to aggressively go the other way, chin tuck up to the ideal position, and then go even further back if possible. This is very conducive to proper tongue posture. In fact I find that I cannot completely relax into it unless I hard mew. I think this is because the down and back maxilla is blocking the tongue from going to it's primal position, so the tongue tries to push it out of the way (up and forward). Also, I find that I cannot chin tuck to the extreme for too long, since my posterior tongue blocking the airway becomes the limiting factor.
You cannot chin tuck without resistance and build any strength/muscle tone, is that not the goal of the chin tuck? Posture is a habit and exercises don't fix habits. If you're posturing yourself incorrectly for all your waking hours the only way to fix that is to start posturing yourself correctly for all your waking hours. Also, just because you manage to build some muscle from the postural exercises doesn't mean it'll serve you use in posture. How can an exercise which you do for probably like 10 mins at the most usually realistically help you in fixing something that takes place the whole day? It's like training a sprint to run a marathon. My point is in the chin tuck exercise you're not fixing the habit, nor are you giving the muscles a sort of resistance that will actually apply to what you're trying to achieve, how will exercising a muscle for 10 mins at high intensity help you hold the muscle isometrically the whole day? If you're severely lacking in some muscle tone and/or maybe you want to get a feel for that muscle exercises can help. Maybe I should have prefaced with saying it's my opinion before making a bold statement.
You cannot chin tuck without resistance and build any strength/muscle tone, is that not the goal of the chin tuck? Posture is a habit and exercises don't fix habits. If you're posturing yourself incorrectly for all your waking hours the only way to fix that is to start posturing yourself correctly for all your waking hours. Also, just because you manage to build some muscle from the postural exercises doesn't mean it'll serve you use in posture. How can an exercise which you do for probably like 10 mins at the most usually realistically help you in fixing something that takes place the whole day? It's like training a sprint to run a marathon. My point is in the chin tuck exercise you're not fixing the habit, nor are you giving the muscles a sort of resistance that will actually apply to what you're trying to achieve, how will exercising a muscle for 10 mins at high intensity help you hold the muscle isometrically the whole day? If you're severely lacking in some muscle tone and/or maybe you want to get a feel for that muscle exercises can help. Maybe I should have prefaced with saying it's my opinion before making a bold statement.
Exercises don't fix posture by themselves, but they help. And they help hugely depending on specifically what you're doing and what level of weakness or imbalance you have. I've seen that video before and I'm sure he would agree, and this is why he still gives exercises to people trying to fix posture.
Yes, at the end of the day, fixing posture requires mindfulness. But a lot of us don't even have consciousness of the muscles we need to engage in order to pose or move correctly. Because we practically haven't used them our whole lives. Exercises are a key to fixing that.
"You cannot chin tuck without resistance and build any strength/muscle tone, is that not the goal of the chin tuck?"
When you chin tuck, the resistance you are actively working against is the limitation of your structure. As you chin tuck, you are pulling your cervical spine upward and straight (if you chin tuck by looking more toward the ground), or you are bending the spine in the opposite direction of forward head posture (if you chin tuck by looking directly forward). Speaking from personal experience, both of these things help a lot with maintaining proper head posture, in only a few weeks/months.
By strengthening these muscles and practicing the movement, I can now (sporadically) sleep even in a chin tucked posture. If you can do that, then you really understand the spinal decompression that happens and why the chin tuck is such a key to fixing CFD.
Also, I do this for a lot more than 10 minutes per day. If you want fast results, it is necessary. It also shows you that exercise CAN be a huge key to fixing posture. I don't think I could be fixing my posture now if I weren't doing exercises. Practicing hard mewing as well has drastically improved my tongue strength, making good tongue posture much more natural and easy to maintain.
It should always be noted that "McKenzie chin tucks" were always meant to be an exercise to get the neck used to going back like that. They were never presented as a permanent posture, or something you should be doing "all the time." I have the Robin McKenzie book from which they originated, and they are presented as one of a series of daily exercises to fix your neck.
I think many here would benefit from McKenzie's little book - there's not a lot to it really, just some basic exercises and info on posture, but the exercises are very helpful for neck posture:
https://www.amazon.com/Treat-Your-Own-Neck-803-5/dp/0987650416
One of the most common things I hear about "chin tucking" in the mewing community is "do I have to look like this all the time? I look awful! My chin disappears and I look all recessed." Well of course you do, you're throwing your neck and chin into a totally unnatural position (like many exercises).
Recently though I've been working to correct my neck posture to its ideal position, and I think I've hit upon something that works for me, anyway. My goal has always been to have the line of my neck, from my upper back to the back of my head, as straight as possible. With most people (especially those with bad development and posture), there is a pronounced s-curve here. The neck curves inwards, then the back of the head curves outwards. It's not a good look, and it's certainly nowhere near "looking your best with what you've got" (which is really the bare minimum that anyone should be doing).
So in experimenting in the mirror (admittedly not ideal, since I don't have two mirrors and so my head is turned to the side a little so I can see what's happening), I saw that if I rotate my head downwards into a chin tuck (which lifts the back of the skull upwards), I can straighten the curve that's made by the back of my neck curving up around the back of my skull. So I've got a much straighter back of the neck, but the whole thing is angled downwards, obviously. Well, then, let's correct that. Which I do by rotating the whole thing, neck and skull, back to an upright position, whilst keeping the straight line that I made earlier. By "rotating the whole thing," I mean that you're rotating from a different pivot than earlier when you chin tucked. This new pivot is further down, incorporating the base of the neck and the upper back. I'm rotating that whole thing backwards.
The result is that I have a much straighter back of the neck, with less of the s-curve from before. The back of my skull is closer in line to the back of my neck, with less of my skull sticking out at the back as it was before. I feel a little tension at the bottom of the neck/upper back, as would be expected to keep my head and neck in a position that it's not used to. I get the feeling muscles have to stretch, things have to rearrange themselves for a while before it stops being an "effort" to keep my head this way. But I love how it looks - with a straight neck, with less of an s-curve and no forward head posture, I immediately look more confident and masculine. And in the process, I didn't lose any of my jawline, my chin didn't recess into my neck and I didn't get the turkey-gobbler look that walking around in an extreme chin tuck gives you.
One thing Mew said in his chin tuck video, and which I agree with, is that it's important to feel like the back of your skull is moving upwards. When you do that initial chin tuck to straighten the s-curve as above, you should definitely feel like the back of your skull is moving upwards, toward the sky.
I also sleep on my back with no pillow. I know others have had difficulty with this, but for whatever reason I just took to it straight away and found that I would sleep soundly all night without so much as shifting position. I wake up exactly where I fell asleep, on my back. But I also try my best to move my head and neck into the position described above as I'm lying down. For this, I just do a slight chin tuck (I'm not worried about how I look when I'm asleep, obviously). I feel a satisfying stretch on the back of my neck, and the gap between my neck and the bed closes up. Of course I have no idea whether any of this stuff is "correct," but it feels good and it makes me look a lot more confident and healthy.
