Written by the Nuvirox Research Team
Key points
- In a randomised trial, three months of daily oropharyngeal exercises reduced snoring frequency and intensity in habitual snorers — and a separate randomised trial found the same exercises improved moderate obstructive sleep apnoea.
- The strangest supporting result is real: a randomised controlled trial in the BMJ found that learning the didgeridoo reduced daytime sleepiness and apnoea severity, apparently by training the same upper-airway muscles.
- The honest counterweight is a Cochrane review, which looked at the same body of work and concluded the certainty of the evidence was low. Promising is not the same as established.
Short answer: yes, modestly, for snoring — and the evidence is better than you would expect for something this odd-sounding, while still being weaker than its advocates claim. Snoring happens because the muscles that hold your upper airway open lose tone during sleep, letting soft tissue narrow and vibrate. Oropharyngeal or myofunctional therapy is a set of daily tongue, soft palate and throat exercises designed to build tone in exactly those muscles. Randomised trials have found it reduces snoring, and meta-analyses report improvements in apnoea severity too. The fair reading is that this is a real, free, low-risk intervention with a plausible mechanism and a genuine but modest effect — and that the most rigorous synthesis available still rates the underlying evidence as low-certainty.
Why would exercising your throat change your snoring?
Because snoring is fundamentally a muscle-tone problem layered on top of an anatomy problem.
While you are awake, the pharyngeal dilator muscles — including the genioglossus, which drives the tongue forward — actively hold the upper airway open. As you fall asleep, tone in these muscles falls, and it falls further in REM sleep. In someone whose airway is already narrow, that drop lets the soft palate and pharyngeal walls flutter in the airstream. That flutter is the sound.
The premise of myofunctional therapy is that these muscles respond to training the way other skeletal muscles do, and that a better-conditioned airway resists collapse for longer once tone falls. The exercises themselves are unglamorous: pushing the tongue tip against the hard palate and sliding it backwards, pressing the tongue against the floor of the mouth, elevating the soft palate on an intermittent vowel sound, drawing the cheek muscles in, and chewing and swallowing with specific tongue placement. Protocols typically run three sets a day for three months.
What do the trials actually show?
The dedicated snoring trial found a real reduction. A randomised trial published in Chest assigned adults with primary snoring or mild obstructive sleep apnoea to three months of daily oropharyngeal exercises or to a control condition of nasal dilator strips plus respiratory exercises. The exercise group showed significant reductions in both snoring frequency and snoring intensity, measured objectively as well as by partner report.
Study snapshot
- Design: Randomised controlled trial
- Population: Adults with primary snoring or mild obstructive sleep apnoea
- Intervention: Daily oropharyngeal exercises for 3 months
- Comparator: Nasal dilator strips plus deep-breathing exercises
- Result: Significant reduction in objectively measured snoring frequency and intensity
The apnoea trial came first and is the reason anyone took this seriously. A randomised study in American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine gave patients with moderate obstructive sleep apnoea three months of oropharyngeal exercises against a sham therapy of deep-breathing exercises. The exercise group improved on apnoea severity, snoring and sleepiness measures; the sham group did not. A later systematic review and meta-analysis pooling the available studies reported reductions in apnoea–hypopnoea index in both adults and children, and a further meta-analysis focused specifically on snoring concluded that myofunctional therapy reduced snoring on both questionnaires and objective sleep studies.
And then there is the didgeridoo. A randomised controlled trial published in the BMJ assigned patients with moderate obstructive sleep apnoea and snoring to four months of didgeridoo lessons and daily practice, or to a waiting list. The didgeridoo group improved significantly on daytime sleepiness and apnoea severity, and partners reported less sleep disturbance. The proposed explanation is circular breathing and sustained embouchure training the same upper-airway musculature. It sounds like a joke and it is a genuine randomised trial.
The honest counterweight is the most rigorous synthesis available. A Cochrane review of myofunctional therapy for obstructive sleep apnoea examined this same literature and concluded that the certainty of the evidence was low. The trials are small, many are unblinded or use weak comparators, outcome measures vary, and adherence to a three-times-daily exercise regimen for months is difficult to verify. None of that means the effect is absent. It means the effect size is not yet reliably known, and anyone quoting a precise percentage improvement is overstating what has been established.
What this won't do
It will not cure obstructive sleep apnoea, and it should not replace treatment that has been prescribed for it. Untreated apnoea carries cardiovascular and daytime-safety consequences that a set of tongue exercises does not address. If you have been diagnosed, this is at best an adjunct to discuss with your clinician — notably, one strand of the research has looked at whether myofunctional therapy improves tolerance of positive-airway-pressure therapy rather than replacing it, which is a more realistic framing. If you are struggling with a mask specifically, that is its own problem, covered in CPAP mask intolerance.
It also will not fix a nose. If your snoring is driven by nasal obstruction — chronic rhinitis, a deviated septum, persistent congestion — then the airflow problem sits upstream of the muscles you are training. Nasal patency is worth addressing on its own terms, and chronic sinus disease is a common unrecognised contributor.
Weight, alcohol and sleeping position all influence snoring more than most people want to hear. Alcohol in the evening relaxes exactly the muscles these exercises are trying to strengthen, and hours of tissue vibration is why heavy snorers often wake with a raw throat. And in children, snoring has a different differential entirely — see why children snore.
When snoring needs a doctor rather than an exercise plan
Simple snoring is a noise. Obstructive sleep apnoea is a medical condition, and the two overlap heavily enough that self-sorting is unreliable. Seek assessment if any of the following apply: witnessed pauses in breathing; waking with a gasp or choking sensation; loud snoring with unrefreshing sleep; falling asleep unintentionally during the day, particularly while driving; morning headaches; or high blood pressure that is hard to control. In women the presentation is often less classic, which is why it gets missed — discussed in sleep apnoea symptoms in women.
How the exercises are actually done
- Tongue slide. Place the tongue tip against the ridge behind your upper front teeth and slide the tongue backwards along the palate. Repeat 20 times.
- Tongue press. Suction the whole tongue up against the palate and hold, then press the tongue tip down against the floor of the mouth behind the lower teeth.
- Soft palate elevation. Say an intermittent vowel sound, feeling the soft palate lift each time.
- Cheek work. Hook a finger inside the cheek and pull outward gently while resisting with the cheek muscle; also press the cheeks in against alternating sides of the tongue.
- Chewing and swallowing. Chew on alternating sides with the mouth closed, and swallow with the tongue positioned against the palate rather than pushing against the teeth.
Trial protocols ran roughly three months at multiple short sessions per day, which is the single biggest practical obstacle.
Frequently asked questions
How long before I notice anything?
The trials ran three months, with assessments at the end. That is the honest timeline. Nobody has demonstrated a meaningful benefit from two weeks of tongue exercises, and you should be sceptical of anything promising one.
Will this help if my partner is the one complaining?
Possibly — the snoring trial measured partner-reported disturbance alongside objective snoring, and both improved. But if your partner has witnessed you stop breathing, that report is more important than the noise and should go to a doctor.
Do these exercises help sleep apnoea enough to skip CPAP?
No, and this is the point worth being unambiguous about. Meta-analyses report reductions in apnoea severity, not resolution, and the Cochrane review rated the evidence low-certainty. Treatment decisions for diagnosed apnoea belong with your clinician.
Are there any downsides?
Few. Some people report jaw or tongue soreness early on, which usually settles. The main cost is time and adherence — three months of daily practice is a real ask.
Loud snoring with witnessed breathing pauses, gasping, or unrefreshing sleep should be assessed for obstructive sleep apnoea rather than managed with a supplement — and sedating products are generally the wrong direction in untreated apnoea. Sleep+ Restore contains 10 mg melatonin plus botanicals including St. John’s Wort (which induces CYP3A4 and P-glycoprotein and can reduce the effectiveness of hormonal contraceptives, immunosuppressants and many other drugs), 5-HTP (serotonin syndrome risk with SSRIs and SNRIs) and ashwagandha (documented thyroid effects). Speak to your doctor or pharmacist before starting it.
From Nuvirox
Why we formulated Sleep+ Restore
Exercises are free and worth trying before anything you can buy. Sleep+ Restore addresses a different problem entirely — not the noise your airway makes, but the nights when getting to sleep is the obstacle. It’s built around melatonin, a timing signal rather than a sedative.
Each serving pairs 10 mg of melatonin with a 905 mg Sleep Formula blend — L-tryptophan, lycium (goji), chamomile, lemon balm, passionflower, L-taurine, hops, St. John’s Wort, GABA, Chinese skullcap, L-theanine, ashwagandha, inositol and 5-HTP — alongside vitamin B6, calcium and magnesium, nutrients involved in the pathways that build the body’s own melatonin.
It comes with a 60-day money-back guarantee — long enough to actually evaluate it the way the research says you should, over weeks rather than a single night.
Learn more about Sleep+ Restore →The bottom line
Tongue and throat exercises for snoring are better supported than they sound and less established than they are sold. Randomised trials show reductions in snoring frequency and intensity and improvements in apnoea severity, meta-analyses agree on the direction, and there is even a BMJ trial in which learning the didgeridoo produced measurable benefit. Against that, a Cochrane review of the same literature rated the certainty of the evidence as low, and the protocols demand three months of daily practice. If your snoring is simple and you are willing to be consistent, this is a free intervention worth three months. If there is any suggestion of apnoea, that is a diagnosis to get rather than a habit to build.
References
- Ieto V, Kayamori F, Montes MI, et al. Effects of oropharyngeal exercises on snoring: a randomized trial. Chest. 2015;148(3):683–691. DOI: 10.1378/chest.14-2953.
- Guimarães KC, Drager LF, Genta PR, Marcondes BF, Lorenzi-Filho G. Effects of oropharyngeal exercises on patients with moderate obstructive sleep apnea syndrome. Am J Respir Crit Care Med. 2009;179(10):962–966. DOI: 10.1164/rccm.200806-981OC.
- Camacho M, Certal V, Abdullatif J, et al. Myofunctional therapy to treat obstructive sleep apnea: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Sleep. 2015;38(5):669–675. DOI: 10.5665/sleep.4652.
- Camacho M, Guilleminault C, Wei JM, et al. Oropharyngeal and tongue exercises (myofunctional therapy) for snoring: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Eur Arch Otorhinolaryngol. 2018;275(4):849–855. PMID: 29275425.
- Puhan MA, Suarez A, Lo Cascio C, Zahn A, Heitz M, Braendli O. Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome: randomised controlled trial. BMJ. 2006;332(7536):266–270. DOI: 10.1136/bmj.38705.470590.55.
- Rueda JR, Mugueta-Aguinaga I, Vilaró J, Rueda-Etxebarria M. Myofunctional therapy (oropharyngeal exercises) for obstructive sleep apnoea. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2020;11:CD013449. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD013449.pub2. PMID: 33141943.
*These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This article is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice.