I Trained My Jaw Every Day for 6 Weeks
A while ago, I was targeted on Instagram with an advert for a device called the Jawser size, which looked a little bit like this. It was about $80. You put it in the front of your mouth and you chew it like this for several sets every day. And it’s meant to give you a bigger face. So, God bless China. I went on to AliExpress and found this for about £2. Quality shipped from Russian Federation.
Six Weeks of Daily Use: The Results
Every day, I’ve been chewing on this for roughly three sets of 30 until I start to feel a burn in my jaw. And now, we have the reveal.
I’m not sure that there’s that much difference. You can see the photos here yourself. Make your own conclusions about whether there’s much difference. This is 6 weeks of consistent use. Probably 80% of days I’ve been doing three sets, mostly to failure with this. Someone’s probably going to be like, “Ah, but you didn’t do a clean shave, so we can’t tell.” Well, realistically, with this amount of stubble, you should be able to see some difference, and I’m not overly convinced that there’s been much change.
Now, the marketing material and the results for these shows some really crazy progress. And so, it raises the question: was there something I did that meant that I didn’t get the same results? Was my programming wrong?
Maybe I should have done some cardio with it as well. Maybe I should have done Monday and Thursday’s speed work, Tuesday and Wednesday working up to a max and then on the weekends doing every minute on the minute. But there are a few other questions as well. First of all, is it safe? Are the testimonials legit? And are there any other ways that you can change your face?
What an Implant Dentist Says About Jaw Training
I’m just a doctor and in med school they pretty much skipped out the mouth entirely. So I asked my friend Dr. Harry Gil, who is an implant dentist and expert in this field.
When I gave him a call, he pretty much fell off his seat when I said I was going to review one of these. He said, “You need to be very careful with what you say about this.”
The Risk of TMD
The first problem is that it runs the risk of causing TMD, temporomandibular dysfunction. This is a painful condition of tightness in the jaw where it can become misaligned and it’s very difficult to get rid of. There’s no definitive treatment for it. It’s not like an arthritic knee where you can just replace the joint. Once you’ve got it, you’re stuck with it.
Before and After Photo Tricks
He also said to be careful with looking at the before and after pictures. There’s a lot of photos where the lighting is different or the posture of the mouth is different.
When you close the mouth, you contract all of the submandibular muscles, the omo hyoid and the myo hyoid and things, and they bring this angle up underneath the chin. And you can see in some of them, people are actually holding their face in a different way. And you can see from the way that the skin on the neck is being folded to make the progress look more dramatic.
Creating Muscle Imbalances
While the principles of hypertrophy apply and there’s a lot of resistance with this that you can get, you’re using it to train the massitor muscles, the main biting muscles in the jaw. What you’re doing is you’re loading it anteriorly in a bit of an unnatural way. Usually, you don’t bite multiple times on food right at the front of your mouth.
What that can do is develop an imbalance in the way that you develop the chewing muscles, the muscles of mastication. By doing that, what you can do is affect the very delicate balance of your bite, which is the alignment of your upper and lower jaw. Equally, if you develop an imbalance, even if you manage to avoid TMD and pain and clicking in your jaw, you could end up with tightness in your jaw that manifests as grinding your teeth at night or as anxiety from the chronic tension.
So, in conclusion, it’s probably not a good idea to use one of these.
What Actually Changes Your Face
Dr. Gil said that the biggest thing is getting lean. In a lot of these before and after photos, people see the biggest progress when they just simply get leaner and they reveal the natural shape of their face. If you want to, you could maybe train your neck as well to accentuate that. But the key point is don’t mess up your jaw joint because you only have one and if you mess up the alignment, you can end up with some problems.
Dr. Gill’s recommendation for developing the muscles of mastication in a more proportionate way and not causing yourself imbalances and problems is simply to eat more broccoli. That way you’re getting more of these lateral excursive movements and it’s going to fill you up more and probably help you to get leaner as well. So added bonus.
If you have got prognathia or retrograia or sleep apneoa then there are splints that you can use but see a specialist because if you try and mess with your bite yourself and you mess it up then it’s going to be quite problematic to fix.
The Mewing Movement
His point is that alignment is precarious and doing anything in isolation is going to be a risk and actually managing occlusion which is your bite alignment is one of the most complex things in orthodontics. But is there anything else that you can do? Well, there is a semi-controversial movement spearheaded by Professor MW and his son and successor Mike MW. Both of which have very angular heads as well. So, that’s a good sign. Which is called mewing.
The idea is to do with your tongue posture and swallowing posture. The idea is that nowadays we’re all quite slack jawed and we eat soft foods and it results in kind of a low tone across the face. Without having that stimulus for bone growth and muscle tone, we all end up a little bit soft. By improving tongue posture over time, you can actually change the shape of your face morphologically. Their whole idea is that by improving your muscle tone and the way that your tongue sits in your mouth when you swallow, you can change your face.
It’s out of my area, so I don’t know if it’s legit or not. They seem to have some quite convincing results, particularly with pediatric patients. When I asked Dr. Gil, he said it’s probably less effective in adults or if you are seeing progress in adults, it’s more to do with the muscle tone than the bone itself because the bone plates have already developed. The other issue is that a lot of the improvements that you see in the before and afters come from general posture as well as just mouth posture.
Plus, aging is a big factor in this, too. If you take a photo of someone at the age of 16 and then 21, he’s had a few years of testosterone and he’s lost some body fat. That’s going to have a big effect on how his face looks. There’s also things like nighttime splints you can wear to open up your upper arch when you’re asleep and improve your airway, but again, these can mess with the alignment of your teeth, and that can cause you more problems further down the line.
Don’t mess up your jaw joint because you only have one and if you mess up the alignment, you can end up with some problems.
The Final Verdict
No. I thought it would make for an interesting video, particularly if it produced some crazy results, but it hasn’t. It’s also quite unpleasant to use and beyond spending two pounds and 6 weeks on this, I’m not particularly interested in changing the shape of my face, particularly when we’re all wearing masks now, too. So, for me, it’s not something that I would continue with.
But, if this is something that bothers you and something that you want to change, then follow Dr. Gil’s advice. Get leaner. Buy some broccoli. Speaking of which, if you want to get leaner, what a fortuitous event that you’ve landed on this channel. We have an entire playlist for you about exactly that. How to gain muscle and lose fat with the minimum effort.