Throat Exercises for Snoring and Sleep Apnoea (oropharyngeal exercises / myofunctional therapy)

Hello, my name is vic veer, I am an ENT specialist at the Royal National Ent Hospital in central London. My job in the NHS is to provide surgical help to people with

snoring

and

sleep

apnea so this video is about

oropharyngeal

exercises

for

snoring

and Sleep Apnea I made this video mainly for my NHS patients so they could better understand the

exercises

they I wanted them to do it at home. Now it's quite difficult to provide these exercises in letter format, which is why I made this video. firstly a bit of background snoring, I'm sure many people know these are noises that many people know and understand.

I'm not going to explain that any additional

sleep

apnea is slightly different, this is when instead of the tissues shaking. At night and making that noise they block your airway so much that it prevents you from breathing, they collapse and prevent you from breathing, this is usually quite difficult to see when you watch people sleep from time to time, you may see a pause and they are snoring . They snore and they pause for a short time and then they start snoring again when it gets more severe you will see them snoring and you can see that they are really having trouble breathing and then they will let out a big sigh and start snoring again.

That is, sleep apnea is a complete cessation of breathing during sleep due to collapse of the upper airways. Here the symptoms of sleep apnea include feeling quite tired during the day and often waking up unrested after a full night's rest. Additionally, these people have problems with weight gain. They also wake up with morning headaches, they have a headache first thing in the morning and wonder why they got a full night's rest and also at night they tend to wake up to go to the bathroom, which I think is because They just have a full bladder, but it's actually sleep apnea that causes them to have a full bladder.

Untreated sleep apnea leads to high blood pressure, infertility, diabetes and continues to cause heart attacks, strokes, etc., so it is a big problem, particularly in this country and other developed countries now. There are many very good treatments for sleep apnea and snoring, such as the Cpap mask or a mandibular advancement device. Mandibular advancement devices are like a splint or gum guard that fits in the mouth and advances the lower jaw, opening the airway. Also surgery, which is my specialty in the NHS, but there are things called

oropharyngeal

exercises and these exercises are meant to help you get better.

These exercises tighten the

throat

and prevent it from collapsing and causing sleep apnea and snoring. Things are tight in the back of the

throat

there is less chance of noises and collapses. The evidence on oropharyngeal exercises increases and grows every day. Camacho wrote an article in which he analyzed all the different studies that exist and found that, on average, my functional

therapy

improved. snoring and sleep apnea by about 50 percent, that's great, but my functional

therapy

is not entirely oropharyngeal exercises. Myofunctional therapy also looks at balance posture and a number of other things to do with the upper aerodigestive tract, oropharyngeal exercises is all I'm going to describe. today and the reason for this is because you still can't get my functional therapists on the nhs and I can only really give you information about the exercises so at the moment if you want the full treatment regimen of my functional therapy you should do that.

Go privately to see one of these therapists, but for my NHS patients all I can offer is oropharyngeal exercise and I will explain each of these exercises. What I have done is review all the studies and articles about my role. therapy and the exercises they use in those studies and I have tried to merge them all together and provided a list of exercises that I would like my patients to do on the NHS, things that I think can now be achieved without my functional therapist. Please note it's not the same as my functional therapy but it's the closest we can get because I simply don't have access to my functional therapist on the NHS so what I did was split the exercises into five separate parts. and what I have done is give you the most basic version but I will tell you different ways to make it more difficult so that you can exercise it even more if you find that these initial exercises over time become too easy for you.

You can make it harder and therefore hopefully strengthen your throat a little more, so the first exercise is probably the easiest. All you need to do is stick your tongue out as far as you can, as far as you can touch. your chin or touch your nose and you wanted to hold it there for about five seconds. Now I would like you to do this at least three times. You can do it up to ten times if you can pull it off, but I don't love you. to hurt yourself just stick your tongue out as far as you can hold it for five seconds go back relax and then do it again at least three times at first i wouldn't go too far up to ten because there are plenty of other exercises for what to do now some of you may have a little tongue tie, I have a tongue tie, if that's the case, there are things you can do to continue doing this exercise, for example, you can curl your tongue up like this and then push your tongue out or you can curve it down if you find it easier against your bottom teeth and then still stick your tongue out that way you won't hurt your frenulum at all and another way to do it is get a spoon and you can stick your tongue out and push the spoon in like this and You should feel it down here.

When you do that pressure, you should feel it in the middle of your tongue, so now that we've done the first exercise, let's move on to the second. one that is: you've come out, now you're going to push your tongue up, so what I want you to do is use the entire surface of the top half of your tongue and suck it up to the roof of your mouth as much as possible. the surface of your tongue to the roof of your mouth like this and suck it there for at least five seconds hold it there and then relax again.

I only want you to try it three times to start, but if you get better at this, you can continue. up to ten times and it should give you more exercise if you do it that way now, if even that is too easy for you, what you can do is when you are sucking your tongue to the roof of your mouth like this, you can try it. Open your mouth at the same time and you will see it stretch a little more, so you may have to start with your mouth closed, but as you get stronger you will notice that you will be able to open your mouth. mouth, if you look in the mirror you will see that the tongue is pushed up instead of staying in your mouth when you look in the mirror, so as you improve you will notice that everything starts to emerge as you can work on those muscles a little bit stronger and the idea is to try to lift your tongue and feel it stretch in the back of your throat if you can do it almost 10 times and you can open your mouth wide and still suck on the tongue. palate you can also look up at the same time, that stretches it too, so all of these things can make your exercise a little bit more difficult and therefore give you something else to aim for, so I'll continue with the el next exercise now we have moved forward we have gone up now we are going to go to the left and now one way is to put your tongue like this in your cheek here now that tends to stretch the tongue and sometimes it is No, you can't do it because you have a frenulum or your tongue, The delicate surface under the tongue touches some sharp teeth on the side, so another way to do this is to push your tongue toward your cheek, but push. against it with your fingers here so you're pushing your tongue that way and when you do that you'll notice that when you do it on this side you'll feel like your tongue has been exercised on this side and then I'd like to do that on the other side, push your fingers in. on this side and you will feel it on that side, so to start, all I want you to do is twice on one side, twice on the other side, if you can go five on each side or even more, that's great , what I'm trying to do is not make these exercises too onerous when you start.

I want you to be able to do them every day so it doesn't become something you have to do. They're pretty easy to do, shouldn't take much time, and will hopefully help with your snoring and sleep apnea as well. Now exercise number four is slightly different. We've moved forward, we've gone up when we suck the tongue to the roof of the mouth, we've gone to the left and right now, this time you're lowering the tongue, that's pretty hard to do normally. Sometimes it's worth starting in front of a mirror and watching your tongue go down the back of your throat so you can open your mouth and let it go down your throat and hold it there again for five seconds about three times if you can do more, that's great, so what you're doing is looking in the mirror and letting it drop, it's pretty hard to do. without raising your eyebrows at the same time, but it's like it almost feels like you're choking or choking on your own tongue.

You could try putting your fingers on your tongue so you can watch it go down, maybe even push it down to command. to feel what you're trying to achieve if you look in the mirror and you can see the back of your tongue, the uvula, the little thing that hangs down on the back of your tongue, some people call it the punching bag if you notice that the uvula goes up when you do this exercise you are on the right track what we want to do is try to strengthen those back muscles so that you don't snore or have sleep apnea, another way to encourage your tongue to go down and hold would be to say the word ah, just like a doctor sees you with the tongue depressor, lowers your tongue and makes you say ah, your tongue tends to fall out when you do that and again the uvula, the punching bag, the thing that hangs out. come up when you do that, so if you do ah, you're trying to lower your tongue and hold it there for five seconds, let go, do that at least three times again, you're trying to exercise your throat as much as possible if you can. and you want to progress a little bit more and you've done 10 words of this exercise, you can try some of the other vowel sounds as well as ee, all those kinds of uh and when you do that, I really want to exaggerate um tension in your neck when you do it like that. and not so much on your facial muscles, but what I want you to do is exercise the inside of your throat so that you really feel like you're exercising the inside of your throat when you do this. noises, I mean you don't actually have to make the noise, we are not trying to exercise the larynx, what I want you to do is try to exercise the muscles of the throat, you should feel it being exercised there and now we are on the fifth exercise the last exercise quick summary we have moved forward we have sucked the tongue up and to the left we lower the tongue and this time what I would like you to do is push your tongue against the front teeth so close your mouth and bring the tongue against the front teeth and hold it there and swallow so as you hold your tongue forward, you may now find it easier to push your head down and swallow; then sometimes you need water to do this as you go.

Better yet, you may find that you are able to look up and swallow at the same time. It's going to be a lot harder for you to start trying to swallow that way, and again, we're just trying to get those muscles working, so those are the five exercises. a quick summary, you're sticking your tongue out holding it there as long as you can, i should say five seconds and then letting it back out. I want you to do it three times at least, you can go up to 10 times if you find that sticking your tongue out hurts the bottom of your tongue or hurts your frenulum, you can curl it like this or curl it down and then keep sticking your tongue out so as not to damage the delicate surface of the tongue. also use the spoon and push against the spoon so you're actually causing some kind of pressure there, so that's forward, that's the first exercise where you're sucking your tongue all the way to the roof of your mouth, that's the second exercise that's stays there for the same amount of time. as possible open your mouth to make it more difficult to look up to make it even more difficult the third exercise is to push left and right doing it for five seconds holding it one two three four five that's not actually seconds a little slower than that, but at least twice on each side, if you can get to five times on each side, that's great, and what I want you to do is lower your tongue to the back of your throat as low as you can, no. as far as it makes you gang, but again.

You're trying to hold it there for five seconds, sometimes it helps to go "ah" and hold it there to really feel the tension and you also see the uvula rise when you make that noise, so the last exercise is to push your tongue out. against the front teeth closed like that and you're trying to swallow at the same time and you're just trying to get those muscles to work if you find it too easy or if you find it too difficult you look downand you will find it. easier if you find it too easy, look up and you will find it even more difficult, the more you look, the more difficult the exercise will be.

What I would like you to do is try to do these exercises at least once a day and possibly just before going to bed or during corona rice time, we all have masks, you could probably do them on public transport, no one will know that the What are you doing, apart from the r, I guess I'm using the spoon, but Try to do it at least once a day and just monitor how well your sleep apnea snoring is improved if you feel more refreshed in the morning if your snoring seems be decreasing, that is a great sign that you continue, continue exercising.

Hopefully, we can tighten your throat muscles and get good results without the need for masks, advanced mental devices, or even the ultimate outcome, which is surgery. Thank you very much for watching this video, I hope you found it useful. Like this video and subscribe to my channel. It really helps me with my YouTube content.