Why is it good to do some light exercise when wearing your flat mouthguard?

This helps accelerate the stretching of muscles back to their original length

If you’re wearing a rubber guard like a Reviv One or a Myobrace or something like it for awhile… than you have probably felt some things occurring in your body.

For example sometimes deep muscles in the stomach painfully release.

Or sometimes you’ll feel a muscle that has been in spasm for years in your leg or your arm let go. You didn’t even know it was in spasm till it painfully released.

This becomes the norm at some point and you get used to it.

And some ‘light exercise’ can help accelerate things a bit. Today i’ll explain what I mean.

Your body is in a compensation pattern

When you start your journey wearing a rubber guard like a Reviv One your body is in a compensation pattern.

Meaning muscles throughout the entire body are in spasm and the skeleton is mangled to some extent. Like in the pic above (credit to Starecta for this image).

What you are trying to do is reset it.

You’re resetting it by unwinding all of these screwed up muscles and soft tissue that are holding it out of position.

Your tool for doing this is your rubber appliance. It does this by stretching the soft tissue around your jaw, which ends up allowing the jaw to slowly move towards its correct anatomical position while also remodeling the skull.

The body than corrects and remodels underneath it. Because every change that occurs in the skull is mirrored in the body.

The compensation pattern begins to unwind

As you continue along the process you will feel muscles get longer and the shape of your body will evolve.

I like to think of it as many of the muscles in the body being shorter than they should be. And in time as you do this process they will lengthen.

One good example that I’ve always experienced as I recovered was the soles of the feet.

My experience is that when you’re screwed up they are flat and then they sort of restructure and you start to develop arches again.

But that process can often have your feet feeling a bit painful or tired. Particularly if you are walking a lot on them.

You might ‘look’ fatter for awhile

My experience is that the body kind of ‘inflates’ and might even make you look ‘fatter’ in the interim.

Particularly your face. My face has at times looked like someone plugged in an airpump and then just forgot to shut it off. LOL

But it is important to remember that this is part of the process and it is a good thing.

For example in this guy above… I bet he was actually a lot ‘healthier’ when he looked as he did on the left than he did on the right. Meaning neurologically (eg. he was happier), functionally, etc.

An analogy I like to use to explain to people is the aging process. What you will see with many obese people as they age is that they get less obese.

And they think that this is a good thing.

But from having paid attention to this pattern in many older people for a long time I can say confidently that it is NOT a good thing. Their spine is simply further compensating in a negative way, making it ‘look’ like they are skinnier.

What you often see, for example, is the person’s ass start to disappear till it is flat. This is a very bad thing for your spine.

The person was healthier from a spinal perspective when they had a bigger ass and ‘looked’ a bit fatter.

‘Function’ (eg. neurology, concentration, etc.) dictates whether you are getting healthier. Not whether you are getting skinnier. Remember that!

Doing light exercise accelerates this process

What i’ve found is that doing some light exercise can accelerate the process a bit.

Now before you jump all over me and say… “But Ken… you promised that you were gonna achieve a perfect body at age 47 with zero exercise and eating crap!”

It is important that I lay out my definition of exercise. My definition is if you go to the gym or something.

If you’re just walking to work or doing some light calf stretches, this to me is not really doing exercise for the sake of exercise.

And so I do find that some walking helps accelerate putting arches back in your feet as you use your Reviv One (or any other rubber appliance).

But I do not think you need hard exercise. ie. i do not go to a gym, i do not try to run, etc.