Jaw Pain or Teeth Grinding at Night? Your Hips Might Be the Reason
Jaw Pain or Teeth Grinding at Night? Your Hips Might Be the Reason
Core - Edition Nº29
Teeth grinding is a habit I’ve had for as long as I can remember. It comes and goes. Ebbs and flows. But it’s been a thing for so long that it feels like a miracle to still have any teeth by this point. The pain has been up and down for the past decade, but over the last few months, it’s come close to unbearable. Something needed to be done before it’s too late.
This tightness and pain can be insufferable some mornings. You wake up feeling like you’ve been chewing on a rock all night. I’ve torn through three mouthguards in the past year, each one stronger than before. I’ve had regular face massages. I try to stretch and strengthen my jaw. I’m learning to breathe better. But it feels like, no matter what I try, I’m doomed until my teeth finally give up.
But there’s something I never put together when studying more about the human body and root cause: pain in one area can originate from somewhere completely different.
People often associate hip pain and poor mobility with ageing. “Everyone gets it eventually”, you may hear all the time. The problem with things like this is you rarely notice it slowly worsening over time until it’s too late. What starts as a slight loss of range of motion (ROM) or slight pain—or a combination—can lead to massive changes, compromise, and compensation in your quality of life.
I’d recommend seeing a health practitioner (and maybe you have already) first. But, if you’re like most people with this issue, you’ve probably seen several people already. You’ve heard the same thing over and over, and they’ve already prescribed you tons of daily stretches to alleviate your pain.
This trajectory is very common, and the assumption for most people is to get a hip replacement once it gets bad enough.
But there’s good news: your hips do not live in isolation. What that means is that they’re attached to the rest of your body and, therefore can be influenced by those faraway structures and systems. Many of these are not obvious, so people fail to address or assess them.
And I saw this tweet which got me thinking: why not consider the role my hips play in the problems with my jaw? I’ve always had issues with my hips. If you’ve read my work on Core Training, you’ll know chronic back pain was one of my biggest woes growing up. After a car accident, my jaw pain got quite bad, though I pinned it down to stress.
But interestingly, I was also struggling massively with weak hip flexors and a very tight, inactive posterior chain. And when that improved, my jaw problems became a distant memory. I never stopped to think that there could be a possible connection here.
To put this to the test more recently, I found an exercise from Spinewise to see if there was an inextricable link between my jaw and hip:
Using a table or furniture to stabilise you, stand on one leg and slowly take it through a full range of motion: Move your raised leg forwards, backwards, side-to-side, and rotate it internally and externally.
Notice any pain or tension in the hips: After you’ve done that, repeat it with the other leg. You can also do this while lying down; it may be better to have someone move your leg and make a judgment for you.
Repeat the test with something flat about 2-3mm thick between your teeth: I used folded-up paper. Repeat the test and pay attention to your range of motion and level of discomfort.
If you notice your hip ROM improves even a tiny bit—or the pain decreases during the movement—then it can indicate problems relating to your jaw and hip.
Trauma loves to infuse itself in our hips. As I dived further into the hypothesis, I remembered that not long after my car accident, my jaw pain was significantly bad for over a year, around the same time that I had severe lower back pain. When my hip problems improved, suddenly my jaw pain seemed to heal, too. It did come back occasionally, but it was far less severe.
Jaw pain or teeth grinding aren’t the only symptoms you might experience. You could have jaw popping, chronic headaches, ear ringing, or other muscle tension and misalignment problems in your temporomandibular joint (TMJ). Logically, people with these symptoms tend to address the muscles of mastication, or what you use to clench and chew, first. Few people stop to consider that they could be looking in the wrong place.
The problem can arise in different areas: your face, cranium, neck, pelvis or feet. Understanding it all requires knowing about the fascia—the soft tissue of your connective tissue system—found everywhere in our body. Imagine it as a long, connective fabric extending from head to toe, front to back, holding everything in place.
It envelopes every major structure in our body, surrounding our muscles, muscle fibres, blood vessels, nerves, bones, and organs. In short, it’s everywhere.
Humans have underappreciated the role of our fascia for seemingly four decades. We’ve only recently gained a significant understanding of how it integrates into our overall health by looking after our posture and movement.
There are three main types of fascia:
Superficial - under our skin
Visceral - surrounding our organs and glands
Deep - surrounds our muscles
Deep fascia comprises tough, fibrous connective tissue holding many sensory receptors to communicate pain, proprioception (awareness of movement and body position) and other feedback mechanisms that talk to the brain. As it surrounds our muscles, deep fascia forms myofascial chains that cross our joints and run along our entire body.
This was perpetuated by Tom Myers, a movement specialist who outlined twelve myofascial chains, such as the Superficial Back Line and the Superficial Front Line (Anatomy Train; Myers, 2001). Think of it like this: these chains can run from the feet to the brow ridge. And if you saw your muscles wrapped entirely in cling film, and you tugged at it from one part of your body, you’d likely feel the pull elsewhere.
When any area between your feet and head becomes irritated, loses functional capacity, and turns unbalanced, your body will try to compensate. It can be triggered by trauma, poor posture, prolonged static posture, or movement imbalances—which, in turn, can impact your jaw.
Several studies support the link between the jaw and the hip. One study in 2009 found that myofascial release (MFR) of your TMJ massively increased hip range of motion. A Belgian chiropractor, Dr. Jean-Pierre Meersseman, discovered that if a patient had a pelvis with a “short” leg (signs of an un-level pelvis), he could correct the leg length temporarily by placing test cotton rolls between the patient’s teeth. Lastly, according to the Bristol Medical Clinic in 2018, women in their third trimester were found to more easily release their pelvic floor and hips by focusing on their TMJ muscles.
So, it’s clear that there’s the possibility of one area influencing the other. If you have a forward head posture, grind your teeth, work at a sedentary job, round your shoulders or have an unbalanced walk, perhaps the solution is like they say: it’s all in the hips.