Bite Alignment for Performance Dogs?
10 Nov 2009
I saw some of the local news tonight and during the sports segment they showed a football player who demonstrated his range of motion twisting about his waist. He then put a mouth guard in his mouth and was able to twist significantly further. He also claimed improved balance and strength. I was surprised and skeptical. Google found this website: https://www.purepowermouthguard-ppm.com/ which makes some interesting claims.
I can imagine that these new mouth guards might improve an athlete’s performance compared to other types of mouth guards; since they don’t require the athlete to apply pressure to initially form the guard. But to improve range of motion compared to no mouth guard, that is a different idea.
But then I remembered that Meeker had an injury where he slipped going over a jump and landed on his chest and hit his head on the ground. After a month or so of rehab of his rear leg, which he had hyper extended as part of the crash, he still wasn’t moving quite right in his front end. The chiropractor found that his jaw was slightly out of alignment and once she manipulated it he started moving smoothly… I was surprised it had such a dramatic and immediate effect.
To demonstrate the effect the chiropractor had me stand up, relaxed and flat footed. She had me move my jaw forward and hold it. I could feel my weight shift forward. Moving my jaw backward brought my weight backward. I wouldn’t have thought the movement of my jaw a total of less than an inch from front to back would have so noticeable an effect. So there might be something to this for human athletes.
Maybe we should start working on mouth guards for performance dogs to improve their performance too :^)
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