Is lingual strengthening aka, tongue strengthening in your exercise program? Exercises should be targeted to your specific problems with swallowing. Your therapist can give you the rationale of if and why tongue strengthening is necessary for you. Make sure to follow a customized exercise program prescribed by your healthcare providers.
This focus on oral-motor therapy lead industry to sell so many tools. Unfortunately, the research has still been lacking on whether many of these non-swallowing oral exercises actually improve swallowing.
The clinician must analyze the instrumental swallowing evaluations to pinpoint what parts of the swallow are abnormal or impaired. When the tongue and tongue base are impaired, the clinician may see issues such as:.
Therefore, one area of oral-motor therapy that has been of particular clinical interest for its potential to impact swallowing safety and efficiency has been lingual strengthening. Isometric exercises might also be called static strength training or muscle contraction without movement. Maximum isometric pressure is a measure of the most strength a person can put into the task, such as pushing as hard as you can. This lip and lingual strengthening device has an air filled bulb attached to an electronic device which gives a numeric measurement of pressure in kilopascals.
It displays a number of how hard or accurate the client is pushing with the tongue or lips. For examples, you can obtain the maximum pressure generated against the bulb, as well as check the endurance of maintaining a specific targeted pressure against the bulb over time.
