luckycel
Iron
- Joined
- Jul 1, 2024
- Posts
- 135
- Reputation
- 135
Introduction
There has been a lot of talk about how chewing can cause CCW rotation and possibly grow your mandible through mechanical tension. However, I haven't seen anyone talk about directly training the masseters. Now, I know that masseter training is mostly a joke as far as making you look aesthetic in the short term(in some cases it can make you look like a bloated chipmunk):
But it's important to mention that even if you overtrain your masseters(which isn't that likely if you're natural), you can always use botox to make them smaller. More importantly, what I want to talk about today is the effect the masseters/bite force have on your ramus and gonial angle.
How masseter size and bite force affect the ramus
Biologically, the reason a long ramus is attractive is because it literally signifies that you have a long, strong jaw with a lot of bite force. But does having stronger bite force actually correlate with having a long ramus? Well, turns out it actually does:
In this study, it was shown that jaw muscle biting force directly correlates with jaw width and ramus length. Farmers who had softer diets had more slanted, more angular ramuses, or "shorter" ramuses, while meat eaters (hunting) had more lower and longer ramuses.
Now, this is just a correlation, but there's also direct evidence on how masseter hypertrophy affects ramus height in patients with bruxism. In this study, it was shown that adults with bruxism were ~300 times more likely to show mandibular angle bone apposition(new bone growing where the ramus is) than controls. The authors conclude that mandibular angle bone apposition represents a functional bone adaptation to long-term increased muscle forces from bruxism.
Basically, the masseters put mechanical tension on the back of the mandible, and new bone grows there resulting in a visually "lower" gonial angle. Note that the angle may appear smaller on a pano, but it’s mainly because new bone is being added, not because the mandible rotated or reshaped globally. You can also see this in the images from the previous study, where the "large muscle CSA"(large muscle crosssectional area) image doesn't exactly look like the mandible is actually being rotated, as much as it looks like there's just new bone at the mandibular angle where the masseters are.
Also, one thing that's important to mention is the fact that bruxism often leads to people developing an antegonial notch, which is a logical result of bone apposition at the mandibular angle:
An antegonial notch is actually pretty common even in people without bruxism, one famous example I can think of is faceiq:
He has a good gonial angle and ramus which appears to be the result of bone apposition at the mandibular angle, just like what you see in patients with bruxism. You can see it better in this picture I found from his soundcloud:
What does all of this mean?
Based on all of the evidence i've provided, I think it's very reasonable to conclude that high bite force and large masseters lead to bone apposition at the mandibular angle, resulting in a visually longer ramus and lower gonial angle. The only drawback to this is again the risk of developing an antegonial notch, but I honestly think that it's 1000x better to have a long ramus and acute gonial angle at the cost of having an antegonial notch as opposed to not having an antegonial notch but having an obtuse gonial angle and short ramus.Of course if your gonial angle is already obtuse or your ramus is already tall masseter training probably isn't worth it, but if you're a downgrown currycel with a 140° gonial angle and short ramus, this is some major hopefuel. I'm not sure as to how effective this is in adults, but it definitely works during puberty and I think that anyone with too much CCW and a short ramus should at least TRY training their masseters and increasing their bite force.
As to the methods you can use to hypertrophy your masseters, there's quite a lot of them. Including jaw trainers, hard gum, clenching exercises or just a hard diet in general. AFAIK, you don't actually have to chew raw meat or anything like that, using a cheap jaw trainer from amazon should be enough.
Attachments
Last edited:
