If you have consulted a doctor for the treatment of your sleep apnea condition, chances are that you have been advised two immediate action steps:
1. Weight loss
2. Sleep apnea exercises
Sleep apnea and weight loss are inseparable. You cannot cure the distressing sleeping disorder without losing body weight. This correlation may appear strange to you but this is how and where sleep apnea and weight loss meet.
When you are overweight, you are not just carrying extra flab around your waist or thighs. There are extra fat tissues around your neck and throat too. When such fat tissues come in the way of normal breathing, you start to develop sleeping problems like snoring. When ignored or untreated, snoring gradually develops in to sleep apnea, a condition characterized by intermittent pauses in breathing. Such cessation could happen several times in a night, leaving the patient completely exhausted and fatigued the next morning.
Sleep apnea and weight loss are so closely linked that a doctor would not think of anything else, other than reducing body weight before he or she starts on any other therapy regimen. All curative or even preventive steps for sleep apnea begin with weight loss.
Sleep apnea exercises: what you need to know
Along with physical exercises that the doctor recommends for weight loss, you are also likely to be recommended various types of sleep apnea exercises. These exercises primarily focuses on the fat muscles and tissues located at sites directly involved with breathing. These include the nose, vocal cord, throat and tongue.
The best part about sleep apnea exercises is that they are not only simple, effective and result-oriented but no extra time or special effort is needed to do them! This means that most of the sleep apnea exercises can be smoothly integrated in the physical workout schedule. For instance, you could do some of these specially-designed apnea exercises as you walk, jog, do weight training, swim or cycle.
Sleep apnea exercises: some examples
• To facilitate muscle movement and for toning up the muscles of the soft palate, palatopharyngeal arch, tongue and nasopharynx one of the common sleep apnea exercises is to practice singing to different tunes and sounds.
• Regular and repeated yawning is yet another exercise that exercises the throat and jaw muscles.
• Using yoga to do visualization as well as practice deep breathing and relaxation can be part of the recommended sleep apnea exercises.
• Tongue twisting can tone up the tongue and soft palate muscles.
Sleep apnea exercises may not yield magical results, but within a couple of months, you can experience perceptive improvement in your snoring as well as sleep apnea condition.
