We’re going to cover the background of mewing, how to do it, what sort of results you can expect and common mewing mistakes people often make.
Ready to start looking better today? Let’s go.
What is Mewing?
Mewing is a term typically referring to a series of exercises focused on tongue placement inside your mouth to improve your overall jaw posture and according to some claims reshape your face.
We’ll get into the history of mewing and how to do it specifically, but in short – think of mewing as posture exercises for your face. It’s an oversimplified explanation, but it’s a good place to start.
The History & Background of Mewing
Mewing the term comes from the doctor that invented the techniques. The term mewing is based of the Dr. John Mew – a British orthodontist who posited that jaw posture is the cause of several facial-related maladies.
He’s not without controversy though. According to the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, he “was recently stripped of his dental license by the General Dental Council. The dismissal was on grounds of misconduct for publicly denigrating the traditional practices of orthodontic tooth movement.”
However, his dismissal was also the source of controversy as Bret Weinstein and other have advocated that mew makes a great observation that potentially removes the need for an entire field of othordontia. However, this is still contentious – but this has not deterred the popularity of mewing. It’s becoming increasingly more popular over the past few years and Dr. Mew has a popular YouTube channel with nearly 200,000 subscribers.
How to do Mewing (The Technique)
One of the interesting things about mewing is that it doesn’t require any elaborate gear or actually cost anything at all. The opportunity cost on mewing is basically “looking stupid” for a little bit why you try to mew during your work day.
If you want to get started mewing, here’s a quick primer:
- Keep your mouth closed and your teeth gently touching.
- Move your tongue to the roof of your mouth and lightly press it
- You should feel a little pressure throughout your jaw
- Be sure to not block your airway as you breathe
- Maintain this whenever you possibly can
It’s best to try and practice this on your own when you’re not doing other things. This is similar to improving your posture and some consider this proper tongue posture. In other words – you may need help with either an additional tool or focus to start, but if you practice it enough – over time, you’ll find that you just do it automatically.
How to Mew (Visual Illustrated Guide)
We put together a custom illustrated guide to mewing right here – just for MoveWell Readers. Take a look and enjoy.
Reacting to Mewing on the Joe Rogan Podcast
Joe Rogan actually featured our mewing guide on the episode of the JRE Experience with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying – talking about the theory behind mewing. Check out the clip of our founder -Joel Runyon – reacting to this.
The Benefits of Mewing
So why would you jump in and start doing these weird tongue exercises. The proponents seem to love. In addition to improving facial structure, proponents claim mewing will help with
- speech disorders
- seep apnea
- breathing problems
- swallowing problems
- sinus inflammation
The health reasons seem to be tougher to nail down, but the primary reason for people to take up mewing seems to be the increased focus in improving your jawline.
Mewing Before + After (What To Expect)
So what does mewing actually do for your face and jawline? Here’s some before & after experiments we found online that we’ll break down just what results they claim they got and what we think.
Connor Murphy’s Mewing Before & After
Connor’s ‘transformation’ is probably the best pure before + after we’ve seen. That said, there are some problems with it – and the improvements he’s showing off are not all directly attributable to solely mewing.
First of all, you can definitely tell the difference between his before + after shot. That said, you can also tell he’s trying to make his face look a certain way. That’s no crime – tons of people inflate before + after photos, but as he mentioned in his video – he’s also doing this while fasting. So, the improved jawline look can attribute a decent amount to pure fat loss on his face – which helps aesthetics a lot. Derek does a great takedown on what really happened behind the scenes.
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Tina Tomato’s Mewing Before & After
Tina is a vlogger and did a 4 month mewing experiments. She has a pretty honest review of what she did before and after and what changes she’s seeing. In our opinion, in addition to Derek at MPMD, she has one of the more honest reviews out there. While these aren’t groundbreaking changes, you can definitely see some small changes that have come because of mewing and Tina seems to be updating on a regular basis, so we’ll be checking back in the future.
Cam Jones’ Mewing Before & After
Cam Jones is a vlogger at Goal Guys. He did a 30 day experiment and these are his results. While initially they seem slightly different, 30 days is not nearly enough time to change your facial structure (especially permanently) and the changes here seem to be more due to posture changing than permanent facial structure changes.
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There seem to be some cosmetic benefits from mewing, but if you really want to see results, simply eating healthy, losing fat around your face and experimenting with intermittent fasting may help you see faster results.
Common Mewing Mistakes
Mewing should let mean you feel pressure on your face, but it should not hurt or feel pain at all.
Don’t be a mouth breather – focus on trying to breathe through your nose as much as possible.
Don’t press just the tip of your tongue to your mouth. Rest the whole thing without blocking your airway.
Keep your mouth closed, not clenched.
The Best Mewing Tutorial Videos
Derek @ More Plates More Dates Did Mewing For a Year
Derek found that mewing:
- helped with his sleep apnea
- he also did not notice any visual changes
- required little to no additional time out of his day
- and he’s still going to do it despite minimal aesthetic changes
An overview on “doing Mewing” from Dr. Mew
This video by Dr. Mew may be the best 15 minute overview on mewing that is out there (especially since it’s from Dr. Mew himself). If you have any questions on this, you’re going to want to start here.
Mewing Summary & Findingsa
Mewing focuses on reshaping your jaw and improving facial posture through tongue placement exercises.
There are a lot of anecdotal stories about mewing success, but less studies on this. It’s a new area and there needs to be more studies.
There do not seem to be any major apparent downsides to mewing, so approach it as your own risk.
Other Mewing Resources
If you’re looking for additional resources on mewing from around the internet, here are some of the best overall ones we’ve found.
- https://www.healthline.com/health/mewing
- https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2019/mar/21/mewing-youtube-face-shaping-trend-what-is-it-technique-explained
- https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/d3medj/mewing-is-the-fringe-orthodontic-technique-taking-over-youtube
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6808091/Mewing-technique-coined-Dr-Mike-Mew-changes-face-shape.html
- https://old.reddit.com/r/Mewing/
