Mouthguards That Move You

If you look reeeaaally closely, you can see my speed-enhancing, strength-boosting Pure Power Mouthguard. Do performance mouthguards really work? Hey, I caught her, didn't I? (Photo credit: Dobson Images)

Athletes will do almost anything to get an edge, and lately, performance mouthguards from companies such as Makkar and UnderArmour have become become a topic of conversation around the Gatorade cooler.

But are these companies just fast-talkin'? 

Recently, The New York Times published a piece on performance mouthguards, with athletes, dentists and exercise physiologists supporting claims that these bite-sized bits of plastic can indeed boost performance, if only marginally. These four paragraphs sum up the case nicely:

[I]t isn't clear how much of an edge [these mouthguards] actually confer. A study sponsored by Makkar in 2008 at Rutgers University found that athletes wearing Pure Power Mouthguards could jump higher and perform better at their peak, but it did not find that their endurance was any better.

"There wasn't a huge difference," said Shawn Arent, an assistant professor in the department of exercise science at Rutgers who led the study. "It's not the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's not magic. But for an elite athlete who has been training for a long time, even a 3, 4 or 5 percent increase in performance is a hard thing to come by."

Similar research by Under Armour and Bite Tech with athletes at the Citadel, a military college, showed that using the mouth guards helped improve endurance and air flow.

Dena Garner, an assistant professor at the Citadel who has studied athletes using Bite Tech devices since 2005, said she thought some of her original findings were "a fluke." But "every time I've done lactate studies with this mouthpiece, I'm finding there is a difference," she said.

The UnderArmour performance mouthpieces fit only over your lower teeth and are made to reduce jaw-clenching, thus reducing the release of hormones that cause stress, fatigue and distraction.

The Makkar-made Pure Performance Mouthguard, or PPM, on the other hand, fits over your upper teeth (more like a conventional mouthguard) and is based on the principles of neuromuscular dentistry. The idea is, if you align your jaw in its ideal setting, you'll release tension, open up your airway and position the facial joints to work optimally, allowing for the recruitment of more muscles, creating a domino effect in the body. (For more on how the PPM works, see this November 2009 article in USA Today.)

In October, I paid a visit to Chad Boger, DDS, a neuromuscular dentist in Plymouth, Minn., to see what the hype was about. (In the interest of full disclosure, I'll tell you he agreed to outfit me with a PPM for free. And in fact, he's the one who alerted me to the existence of performance mouthwear about two years before I finally made my way in to see him.)

The process took two to three hours and began with an hour of TENS to the face, neck and shoulders to loosen the muscles. Then, we tested numerous sets of my jaw to find what increased performance and what didn't, based on strength and flexibility tests he administered there in the office.