It seems like every GenZer I run into these days is doing some thumbpulling.
It’s crazy.
Before it was Mewing but now it’s as if everyone has decided that Mewing is kinda weak but thumbpulling is the real deal.
And so today I want to set the record straight from my perspective. So that I have an article that I can just send to these thumbpullers when they message me. LOL
What is thumbpulling (aka Intra Oral Face Pulling)?
Basically you open your mouth and put the thumbs up on the upper palate and put some pressure and pull a bit.
This is supposed to mobilize the sutures and help the palate get wider as well as promote the all elusive ‘forward growth’.
This is what the upper palate looks like. As you can see the lines that separate the various palatal bones are essentially sutures. So that is what you’re trying to pull apart a little bit.
It’s a good theory.
In reality i am very confident it doesn’t work that way.
Rather it’s working via the soft tissue and it’s the facial stretch that you are doing rather then anything that you are doing with the thumbs that is the true agent of change.
My context on thumbpulling
This intraoral face pulling has existed a long time in fact. I remember a myofunctional therapist i was seeing back in 2015 had me doing it for awhile.
Plus I was in the Starecta Facebook group back then, which had ‘Plato’ who was one of the very first to popularize face pulling masks, which is a very similar idea. Me & him were the first two outside of Italy to do Starecta.
He also talked a lot about facepulling and so me and others in the group were doing it quite a bit back in 2015-16. And sharing our learnings.
Also when I got an ALF appliance in mid-2016 I spent many hours doing this intraoral pulling as I thought it would accelerate the results of the ALF.
Many ALF dentists even tell you to do it I believe as ALF is all about loosening up the cranial sutures.
All-in-all i saw very little benefit and so eventually i gave up.
How did it get so popular?
Well there are various gurus online.
For example Oscar Patel (above video) has a community and creates a lot of content around this topic. But he is far from the only one.
There are numerous others that create content on this, which get tons of views. It’s kind of become the next version of Mewing that all the GenZers are jumping on.
Also, I should not leave out Mewing.world, who have a popular course on intraoral pulling. And also have a very popular Youtube and Tiktok channel.
My thoughts on whether it works
So it comes down to a very simple question in my view. Does it impact curve of spee?
Why is this important? Well I explain in this article here.
Basically curve of spee is a direct reflection of your skeleton and skull. When the curve improves your skull ‘inflates’, which is what these folks like to call ‘forward growth’.
When it flattens your skull and body collapse. Which I’m pretty confident they’re going to figure out is the reason why humans get disease and age.
I was doing many experiments back in the years of 2015-17 to check their impact on curve of spee.
How would i do it? I was using a tracking splint and would see if the curve improved or got worse. Or no effect. As I explain here:
Intraoral pulling is one of the things I was testing at the time and so naturally i’d test how it impacted curve of spee on the tracking splint.
And it did in fact improve curve of spee a little. So i understand why these looksmaxxers are doing it. It DOES create some effect.
But compared to many other things I was doing the effect was not nearly as powerful.
For example, when you figure out the jaw-body connection and learn how to stretch the various tight areas of the body… this is much much faster than intraoral facepulling. I explain why and how this works in this article:
Your profile and facial symmetry is a function of the flexibility in your body.
And my ‘fast approach’ essentially is just adding a few things on top of this body stretching that further accelerates it.
Oh and on a tracking splint… my fast approach BLEW AWAY intraoral pulling.
The yardstick on ‘fast’
So other than measuring curve of spee on a tracking splint how can i tell if someone is doing this biomechanical process fast?
Here are some of the key indicators:
Are they ripping through the soft tissue of the face and scalp as I talk about here:
Are they talking about remodeling of the mouth and teeth (it should be painful at various points)
Are they talking about flexibility improvements?
Are they talking about skeletal/postural improvements?
Are they talking about mood and cognitive improvements?
If you’re not experiencing these things… than in my book you are not doing it fast.
You are more likely perhaps building up some of the muscles in your jaw, which is not structural change, and probably also taking photos from different angles, with different light, etc.
Also it’s hamster wheel without a mouthguard like Reviv
This is the other key thing that these looksmaxxers all typically miss.
When you mew or you intraoral pull you are improving curve of spee slightly. Which by definition creates a small posterior open bite.
That posterior open bite than closes if you don’t sleep with a mouthguard in. Usually just in a day or so.
And when it does your progress reverts.
Which is probably what all of these intraoral pullers are figuring out. Except the ones who by chance happen to be wearing some type of mouthguard to sleep.
Closing thoughts
So there you have it.. that is my view on thumbpulling.
It works… a little bit. But so do tons of other things like yoga, exercise, mewing, etc.
And it’s not particularly fast. It is much faster if you focus on stretching the tight areas of your body with a mouthguard in. Because of the ‘jaw-body connection’.
And then all that effort intraoral pulling is for the most part right down the toilet if you don’t sleep with a mouthguard in.
So at the end of the day it is a question of speed and degree of change you can create.
Will any of these intraoral pullers be able to go from having a completely collapsed profile to having a good one?
Without a mouthguard.. zero chance.
With a mouthguard.. it’s gonna take many years.
With a mouthguard and instead methodically stretching all of the tight areas of the body.. the fastest option of all of them.
At some point these thumbpulling gurus are gonna realize i’m right on this. And they’re gonna have to backpeddle.
Because knowing how the full puzzle works… i can tell you that they’re missing some major pieces of the puzzle.
And when they come to that realization my prediction is they’re all of a sudden going to be telling their fans to use mouthguards and stretch their body with them.
Who wants to bet? :)
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HAHAHAH. I agree. Even me as someone who promoted thumbpulling, I always looked to increase dental height, prescribed stretches, concoctions of different things all just to keep the bite from locking again and retaining change, I was looking for something exactly like your appliance. It keeps change and is easy for the layman, not some 10 step daily plan to retain results. AND it can work on results, Bravo!
What is special about your appliance that other open mouthguards miss?