Why don’t our tongues grow like other muscles since we’re always moving them?
In: Biology
Muscles grow because they need to. If you work your muscles hard and often, they will grow bigger, as long as nutrition is adequate.
Your tongue is a muscle. It is a very specialized muscle. We use it all the time (often), but we never use it harder than we did the day before. Therefore, the muscle of the tongue never needs to get bigger than it is because we will never require it to work harder than it needs to.
It kind of does. My son has hypotonia (low muscle tone). It affects all his muscles, including those in his mouth. His speech therapist works with him to do exercises to helps build his mouth and tongue muscles.
It would be cool if people who talk too much got bigger and bigger tongues until they couldn’t talk anymore for a while…
I’ve heard that the tongue is the strongest muscle of the body. Is this true?
I learned something interesting about my tongue after my stroke that I had a few years back. The stroke damaged my right thalamus, which affected all of the muscles on the left side of my body. Every one takes effort to move now, so I can feel every muscle on that side, because I have to work to move them. I can feel all of them, from my toes all the way to the muscles on my forehead. The weird thing is, my tongue isn’t affected at all. It doesn’t take any extra effort to move it. I don’t know what part of the brain controls the tongue, but I don’t think it’s the same part that moves your other muscles.
Different kinds of exercise create different changes in muscles.
Straining past your limits creates muscle growth, while constant repeated use within your limits improves endurance.
If you pushed your tongue past it’s limits in the way other muscles are trained, you could see growth, but there aren’t many common activities that would cause that kind of strain naturally.
Muscles grow through a process of progressive overload. E.g. If you perform a bicep curl one week with a 20-pound dumbbell, and then a 30-pound dumbbell next week, so on so on, that muscle will eventually grow.
The tongue is not generally progressively overloaded, because the pattern of muscle use is mostly the same day to day. No change in activity = no change in muscle growth.
Can’t believe I’m gonna share this, but here goes. My first girlfriend in college loved me going down on her. The first time I did it, I could barely move my tongue after a few minutes. After a few weeks of very regular foreplay I going I could go as long as she needed / wanted. So, yes, the tongue definitely can get stronger.
Dentist here! This is purely anecdotal but I’ve found that people missing a lot/all of their teeth have much larger tongues to compensate for the lack of chewing. So in a sense, yes, tongues can grow.
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