Mouth taping, spinal rotation, and moving for everyday tasks

Supercharged Sundays #1

Welcome to Supercharged Sundays, a super short weekly newsletter sharing three hyperpractical health, fitness, and wellness practices for your week ahead.

Here are this week’s experiments. Feel free to adopt what works for you and discard the rest.

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Mouth taping for sleep

Despite being a religious nasal breather throughout my waking hours and during Zone 2 aerobic exercise, I still snore enough at night to blow all three little pigs' houses down.

From what I’ve read in Breath by James Nestor, and despite widely held beliefs, NO amount of snoring is normal or healthy.

To correct course, over the past month, I’ve been taping my mouth shut while I sleep.

Mouth breathing contributes to both snoring and sleep apnea, and has serious side effects ranging from increased heart rate and blood pressure to lowered heart rate variability. 

Breathing through your mouth may seem like a benign crime, but it has major side effects from zapping your energy to increasing your risk of heart disease, gum (periodontal) disease, and more.

Reserve mouth breathing for high-intensity exercise and make sure that you are nasal breathing the rest of the time—that includes at work, during Zone 2 exercise, and yes, at sleep too.

Mouth-taping strategy: Place a postage-stamp-size piece of tape over the centre of your lips. 

More spinal rotation

Our exercise routines tend to cover pushing, pulling, squatting, and hip hinging, but often leave out the critically important rotation.

Rotation comes into play in almost all of our real world, outside the gym, movement.

Whether we’re reaching for something on a high shelf, putting groceries in our car, or cooking and cleaning, we are rotating our spines to some degree.

Because of the lack of attention we pay to rotation, many of us, myself at the top of that list, have become weaker and less mobile through rotating planes of motion.

To reawaken my spine, I’ve been spending a lot of time in these two stretches.