The key to a great sport performance might be as plain as the look on an athlete’s face.
The look of success isn’t the stereotypical grimace, with clenched teeth, Nova Scotia dentist Anil Makkar says. The best performances come when an athlete has a relaxed jaw.
Makkar’s theory, one that has spawned the creation of an innovative, custom-moulded mouthpiece, is that if an athlete’s lower jaw is in a relaxed position, slightly down and forward, it releases tension in the shoulders, neck and face. With the temporomandibular joint relaxed, posture is better, the windpipe is a little more opened up for oxygen and the athlete can actually recruit more strength and skills for the task at hand.
There are skeptics and believers, says Makkar, who has been visiting National Football League camps and came away with 30 orders from NFL veterans and training camp candidates for his Pure Power Mouthguard appliance.
The players include Carolina Panthers wide receiver Steve Smith, one of the top five salary-earners at his position, and Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Damon Huard.
Research linking a relaxed temporomandibular joint to improved sport performance has been around for at least 30 years, but Makkar has married the theory with the latest computerized technology to find the optimum position for the jaw of an individual athlete. He has a patent pending on the process for the custom appliances.
“Some athletes always seemed to do that naturally,” Makkar said in an interview. “Think of the great stone-faced Russian weightlifters. They weren’t stone-faced because they had no personality; they just knew how to use more of their strength.
“Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player ever, stuck his tongue out as he was driving for the basket. By sticking his tongue out, he was putting his jaw in that relaxed position. It probably wasn’t done consciously. It was something he just started doing at the age of 12 and it worked for him.”
Anecdotally, there are many other examples of athletes who keep their jaws in relaxed positions while achieving top performances.
Basketball star Kobe Bryant emulates Jordan’s stuck-out tongue. Tiger Woods, as he drives the golf ball, has a placid face, rather than a tense bite. In track and field, Olympic gold-medal sprinters Carl Lewis of the United States and Linford Christie of Britain had relaxed jaws and faces so still they looked as though they were running the 100 metres in a trance.
Makkar says conventional moulded mouthguards and off-the-shelf boil-and-bite mouthguards are designed to protect teeth and reduce the risk of concussion by absorbing some of the impact, while his is designed to enhance performance through better alignment.
The project evolved from Makkar’s work with patients who had headaches and ringing in their ears that was traced to problems with their temporomandibular joint.
“We were using orthotics to help them and we saw side effects,” he said. “A lobster fisherman from Yarmouth [N.S.] had really bad headaches that he said left him tired. It was taking all his energy just to toss the lobster trap into the water.
“We tried a mouthpiece and he reported not only that he could toss the trap, but he could hardly feel the effort.”
A year ago, Makkar was working on his own fitness with a trainer, Chuck Sproule, when he wondered aloud whether a fitness professional would experience and understand the phenomenon.
“To put the jaw in position without a mouthpiece, we just used a pen, side-to-side in the mouth, clenched lightly between the teeth,” Makkar said. “It was a gross-measurement test, but it showed improvement in strength and endurance.”
From May to September of 2006, Makkar and Sproule did their own research with a number of athletes across a range of sports. They said the increased strength with an aligned jaw ranged from 10 per cent to 50 per cent for some tasks.
Improved balance is another side effect that would be performance-enhancing in sports such as gymnastics, equestrian riding, skating and kayaking, Makkar believes.
“The trick is to find the best position,” he said. “Every person has a different baseline, like a jaw fingerprint. We have to find the position that gives them the most balance and endurance that they can use for their game.”
Creating the custom mouthpiece involves using a computer and a TENS (Transcutaneous electrical Nerve Stimulator) machine to track the jaw and the temporalis muscles to find the most comfortable and relaxed position for the mandible, Makkar said.
The procedure takes about 90 minutes, then the mouthpiece is moulded to the exact specifications. The cost is about $1,600.
For sports in which there is physical contact, such as hockey, football and basketball, a high-impact mouthguard is made.
There is a lower-impact version for sports such as golf.
“Not all athletes feel advantage with regular mouthguards, they say they’re bulky and not designed for proper jaw bite,” Makkar said. “It’s just a piece of plastic and half the time, an athlete is just trying to keep it in his mouth instead of giving full concentration to his sport.”