Myofunctional therapists are well placed to notice the signs of dysfunctional breathing. Open-mouth posture, poor tongue position, snoring, and difficulty maintaining a lip seal often appear in the same clients.
Recognizing these signs is important, but knowing how to retrain the underlying breathing pattern can add another level to your care.
The Buteyko Method equips myofunctional therapists with practical skills for breathing assessment and retraining. This article outlines how learning the Buteyko Method can complement myofunctional therapy and enable you to provide more comprehensive support to your clients.
What Is Myofunctional Therapy?
Myofunctional therapy is a specialized discipline focused on rehabilitating the oral and facial muscles. Oral myofunctional therapy exercises restore proper resting tongue posture, achieve a consistent lip seal, and establish a mature swallowing pattern. These muscles are the primary stabilizers of the upper airway and play a direct role in facial growth.
Dr. Alfred Rogers first described orofacial myofunctional therapy in 1918, recognizing that tongue posture and facial muscle tone were fundamental to airway health and orthodontic stability.
By training the lips, tongue, soft palate, and facial muscles, myofunctional therapy aims to prevent airway collapse and support proper craniofacial development. While it shapes the physical environment for breathing, this is only one aspect of effective care.
Does Myofunctional Therapy Help with Mouth Breathing?
When clients present with mouth breathing, it is reasonable to ask whether myofunctional therapy is effective. The answer is yes, but only partially.
Myofunctional therapy strengthens oral muscles, corrects low tongue posture, and encourages healthier daily habits. It is most effective when poor oral habits, weak muscle function, or low tongue posture are the primary causes.
Mouth breathing rarely has one single cause, though. It can also be linked to nasal obstruction, allergies, enlarged tonsils or adenoids, structural airway concerns, or an established habit that outlasts its original cause.
These factors fall outside the myofunctional therapist's scope and require appropriate assessment and referral to a doctor, dentist, orthodontist, or ENT specialist as needed.
Myofunctional therapy does not directly address the biochemical mechanisms that regulate breathing rate and volume. Chronic mouth breathing is often accompanied by habitual over-breathing, which reduces carbon dioxide levels in the blood.
This increases the sensitivity of the brainstem's breathing center, leading to a faster, heavier breathing pattern to meet a perceived need for oxygen. If a client is conditioned to inhale a high volume of air, they will instinctively open their mouth, regardless of oral muscle training.
Still, myofunctional therapy and mouth breathing are closely linked, and the clinical results for combined approaches are encouraging:
- A systematic review found that orofacial myofunctional therapy can reduce the Apnea-Hypopnea Index by nearly 50% in adults, while also improving oxygen levels and reducing daytime fatigue.
- A study by Diaféria and colleagues found that combining CPAP therapy with myofunctional exercises nearly doubled patient compliance, from 30% to 65%.
Muscle training clearly works. For it to hold long-term, though, it needs a stable breathing pattern underneath it, which is where the Buteyko Method comes in.
Why Mouth Breathing Can Continue After Therapy
A common challenge in practice is that clients may perform exercises correctly during sessions, yet their mouth remains open during sleep. Under physical exertion or stress, lips may part and heavy oral breathing returns, especially when conscious control over posture diminishes.
Several factors may contribute:
- Nasal obstruction: Congestion or structural narrowing can make nasal breathing difficult and should be properly assessed rather than ignored.
- An established habit: Mouth breathing may persist after the original obstruction is resolved, as it has become the client's default breathing pattern.
- Heavy breathing: If a client habitually breathes fast or forcefully, nasal breathing can feel like it isn't delivering enough air.
- Sleep: Muscle tone drops overnight, and the airway around the throat naturally narrows and becomes more prone to collapse.
- Physical activity: Clients often switch to mouth breathing the moment their breathing demand increases.
Tongue position and breathing directly affect each other. A closed mouth with the tongue resting against the palate depends on a continuous, gentle vacuum created by nasal airflow.
If nasal resistance is too high, from congestion or breathing too much air, that vacuum can't be maintained. The tongue drops, the jaw hinges downward, and the airway narrows immediately.
This is why myofunctional therapy for open-mouth breathing can look successful during the day while mouth breathing continues at night.
The muscles have learned the desired position, but the client's automatic breathing pattern hasn't caught up. Muscle strength alone can't overcome basic respiratory physics, so breathing retraining becomes essential.
What Is the Buteyko Method?
The Buteyko Method is a breathing retraining technique developed in the 1950s by Ukrainian physician Dr. Konstantin Buteyko.
Treating patients in Moscow, he noticed that people with chronic conditions such as asthma tended to breathe faster and heavier than healthy individuals, even at rest. From this observation, he built a method around three principles:
- Nasal breathing: Breathe through your nose at rest, during sleep, and gradually during physical activity.
- Light, slow, deep breathing: Reduce breathing that is unnecessarily fast, heavy, or effortful.
- Long-term retraining: Practicing consistently so healthier breathing becomes automatic, day and night, not just during a session.
For myofunctional therapists, that last principle is what makes the method so useful. It doesn't just teach a relaxation exercise. It retrains how a client breathes around the clock, which is exactly the piece muscle training alone can't reach.
Progress is tracked using the Control Pause, a comfortable breath-hold taken after a normal exhale. While not a medical diagnostic test, when considered with symptoms, health history, and observation, it provides an objective baseline for a client's breathing stability that can be monitored alongside muscular changes.
The goal is not to take a large breath or hold it for an extended period. Training is controlled, gradual, and tailored to each client's health and ability.
Why Breathing Retraining Is the Missing Piece
Telling a client to close their mouth and breathe through their nose is simple. Making that feel comfortable and automatic is a different matter entirely.
Some clients breathe faster or more heavily than necessary at rest. Their breathing may be shallow, audible, or irregular. When instructed to breathe only through the nose, they may feel discomfort or air hunger, making it difficult to maintain the lip seal and tongue posture developed in therapy.
This is where the Buteyko Method and myofunctional breathing therapy work hand in hand. The Buteyko Method teaches clients to gently clear their nasal passages and normalize their breathing volume, restoring comfortable, effortless nasal airflow. Once nasal breathing becomes the default rather than an effort, the client no longer has to consciously force their lips shut.
These approaches do not replace the need for proper evaluation of nasal obstruction or other medical causes. Once any obstruction is addressed, breathing retraining helps clients become genuinely comfortable with nasal breathing rather than merely tolerating it.
In myofunctional therapy, nasal breathing is more than an outcome; it supports the desired oral resting posture. With a clear nasal airway, the mouth remains closed naturally and the tongue rests against the upper palate, providing a stable environment for therapeutic exercises.
Why Myofunctional Therapists Should Learn the Buteyko Method
Myofunctional therapists are often among the first professionals to notice an open mouth at rest, audible breathing, frequent sighing, upper-chest movement, or difficulty maintaining nasal breathing. Learning the Buteyko Method turns those observations into practical assessment and retraining skills.
- An objective breathing assessment: The Control Pause gives you a clear baseline for respiratory stability and a way to monitor change over time, well beyond simply asking whether a client usually breathes through the nose.
- Tools for clients whose progress has stalled: Structured exercises to ease congestion, reduce breathing effort, and gradually extend nasal breathing into movement support clients who understand correct oral posture but cannot yet sustain it.
- A broader understanding of sleep-related breathing: Mouth breathing during sleep is a major risk factor for sleep-disordered breathing, since it allows the soft palate to vibrate and the tongue to fall back into the throat. Research suggests myofunctional therapy may help some people with snoring and obstructive sleep apnea by training the tongue and upper airway muscles, and breathing retraining adds another layer by addressing nasal breathing, breathing volume, and daytime habits. Neither is a cure for sleep apnea or a replacement for medical diagnosis, CPAP, or other prescribed care, and anyone with suspected sleep apnea should still receive appropriate medical assessment.
Adding these skills leads to fewer plateaus, greater confidence in multidisciplinary care, and clearer communication with dentists, orthodontists, and sleep specialists. It also helps identify when referral is needed rather than repeating the same instructions.
Madison Scott, BSDH, CertBBM, is an orofacial myofunctional therapist and Certified Buteyko Breathing Educator, and says: "Buteyko is often the first place where we start. When we improve breathing, patients are in a much better state to begin myofunctional therapy. Because of that, we've had consistently better outcomes."
How Myofunctional Therapy and Buteyko Work Together
Myofunctional therapy and the Buteyko Method complement each other. Myofunctional therapy develops tongue posture, lip seal, swallowing patterns, and muscle coordination, while Buteyko retrains breathing function to help clients achieve quieter, lighter, and more comfortable nasal breathing.
Together, they answer two separate questions:
- Can the client's tongue, lips, and facial muscles achieve the desired posture and function?
- Does the client's breathing pattern allow that posture to be maintained comfortably?
A client may require myofunctional therapy to coordinate closed-mouth posture and breathing retraining to make nasal breathing comfortable and sustainable.
The sequence varies for each client. Some require medical or dental treatment before training can progress, while others benefit from starting both therapies together. The appropriate approach is individualized, within scope, and coordinated with other providers as needed.
Combining both approaches allows retrained muscles to maintain their new position more easily, as Buteyko restores quiet, slow, diaphragmatic nasal breathing. The tongue remains on the roof of the mouth due to the preserved nasal vacuum, and the lips stay sealed because the urge to over-breathe is corrected. Structure and function work together effectively.
Become a Well-Rounded Myofunctional Therapist
Myofunctional therapy can improve tongue posture, lip seal, and oral function. However, these improvements may be difficult to sustain if dysfunctional breathing is not addressed.
Learning breathing retraining helps you understand why some clients continue to mouth breathe, struggle with nasal breathing, or lose progress during sleep and physical activity. It also provides practical tools to address complex cases with greater confidence.
The Certification in the Buteyko Breathing Method, led by world-renowned breathing expert Patrick McKeown, teaches you how to assess breathing patterns and support quieter, lighter nasal breathing.
Expand your expertise, improve client outcomes, and become the practitioner other professionals trust with difficult cases. Explore Buteyko Clinic International's certifications today.
