Did You Know: Your Tongue Is Always Young!

Your tongue performs multiple actions and is arguably the strongest muscle in your whole body. While other muscles lose their flexibility with time, the muscle wriggling between your teeth stays young forever and doesn't deteriorate with age. You might degrade your muscle strength as the time passed by but you really cannot control the urge to gobble in your favourite dishes even when you cross the age of 60 because your tongue is never too old for anything.

The shape and size of tongue has always amused the researchers compelling them to know more about this playful part of human anatomy. Although there are certain disagreements among the researchers about it being the strongest muscle in the body, there are many features which makes it the most interesting muscle in humans. Here are some interesting facts about tongue which you cannot afford to ignore-
 

1. Unimaginable Tenacity

Do you ever feel pain in your tongue? Despite performing multiple actions, it is hard to believe that it never gets tired. According to Maureen Stone, of the University of Maryland School of Dentistry, the amazing stamina of your tongue springs from the way it is built- with lots of similar bits of muscle that can each perform the same task. "It doesn't fatigue," she says," because there is a lot of redundancy on the muscle architecture."
 

2. Flexible and Fatigue-less

It can be curled, twisted and moved in whatever direction you want. This is all because it is composed of four muscles in the matrix, called the extrinsic muscles which anchors the tongue to structures in the head and neck. One muscle holds on to the base of the skull, another connects to a bone in the throat; there is a muscle that grabs on to the lower jaw and another one wraps around the pallate. All these propel the tongue from side to side, front to back and up and down.

The rest of the muscles form the tongue's body. And give it the ability to contort into endless arrays of shapes and postured. They allow it to lengthen, shorten, curl, flatten and round, and they provide shape to assist in speaking, eating and swallowing.
 

3. High Endurance

Your tongue can exert a lot of pressure and have a very high endurance. Although, we don't use it to lift heavy weights but it does have an unimaginable strength. Scientists can measure the maximal pressure the tongue can exert on an object. A device called Iowa oral performance instrument, is placed on your tongue and you are asked to push it towards the roofs of their mouths as hard as you can.

Tongue Exercises

You might need to practice some tongue-strengthening exercises if you face any trouble in swallowing your food. This medical condition is called dysphagia. This happens when food or other material accidentally enter the airways or lungs. This is serious, because it can lead to pneumonia.

You can get rid of swallowing problems my doing some tongue exercises-
 

1. Stretch your tongue out as far as you can. Put something flat on your tongue and push your tongue against that flat object. Hold one for a couple of seconds. Repeat the same exercise for 5 times.
 

2. You can do the above exercise by putting the object (spoon or depressor) below your tongue instead.
 

3. Extend your tongue as far as you can to the corner of your mouth. Hold on for a second and repeat the same exercise on the other side of your mouth.
 

4. Extend your tongue to the bumpy part on the top of your mouth. Then curl your tongue back toward the back of your mouth as far as possible. Hold on for couple of seconds and repeat the exercise.

Also Read Did You Know More Than 700 Million Bacteria Live In Your Mouth?