“Can snoring actually be fixed with training?” — this is a question we hear often. It takes patience, but tongue training can produce a real, measurable effect.
This time, we’ll explain how to address the muscle weakness that contributes to snoring through targeted training.
Kazuyuki Sugaya
Director, Ueno Snoring Clinic / Anesthesiologist
Our director, with over 20,000 general anesthesia cases, focuses primarily on the diagnosis and treatment of snoring and sleep apnea, offering care tailored to each patient. [Insurance-Covered] Ueno Snoring Clinic
This article was reviewed by our Director, Kazuyuki Sugaya, and explains accurate medical information about the testing and treatment of snoring and sleep apnea syndrome (SAS) in clear, accessible terms.
The causes of snoring range from the structure of the throat to body weight. Ueno Snoring Clinic doesn’t rely on a single treatment approach — we’re set up to recommend the best plan for each patient from a broad, evidence-based range of options.
Insurance-Covered: Thorough Testing and Ongoing Treatment
Self-Pay: Address the Root Cause, Short-Term Focus
*As a clinic specializing in snoring treatment, we work to resolve “snoring that won’t stop” through both insurance-covered and self-pay options.
Quick Answer
Snoring caused by weak muscles in the mouth, tongue, and throat can, in some cases, be improved through targeted “oral fitness” training. Devices such as Patakara (a lip-muscle trainer), Oral Stim (a tongue-muscle trainer), Breath Fit (a respiratory-muscle trainer), and MFT trainers (which support overall oral-function therapy) each target a different muscle group involved in keeping the airway open during sleep. That said, training alone is rarely a complete solution — it tends to work best as one part of a broader plan that also includes lifestyle changes and, where needed, medical treatment.
📋 What This Article Covers
In recent years, an approach that’s been drawing attention involves strengthening the muscles that support the upper airway — the muscles around the mouth, the tongue, and the throat — through targeted exercise, as a way to improve snoring.
This is what’s known as oral fitness, or oral muscle training.
Oral fitness devices are medical support tools or wellness products designed to strengthen the muscles in and around the mouth and face. They’re built to target things like tongue strength, the strength of the muscles around the lips and cheeks (the orbicularis oris and buccinator), the muscles at the back of the throat (the pharyngeal constrictors), the range of motion and stability of the lower jaw, and the muscles used in swallowing.
Training these muscle groups to work correctly is expected to help prevent or reduce issues like “the throat closing during sleep” or “the tongue falling backward.”
In this article, we’ll walk through how this kind of training can help improve snoring.
Patakara® is an oral rehabilitation device designed to strengthen the muscles of the lips. You hold a soft rubber attachment between your lips and pull on it while pursing your lips into an “oo” shape, which intensively trains the muscle that closes the mouth (the orbicularis oris).
It was originally used widely for rehabilitation purposes — for people who had trouble closing their mouth, drooling due to a slack mouth, or speech and swallowing disorders. More recently, it’s gained attention as a supportive tool for snoring and sleep apnea, since it can also help “improve mouth breathing” and “prevent the mouth from opening during sleep.”
One of the major causes of snoring is mouth breathing. When you sleep with your mouth hanging open, the tongue is more likely to fall backward into the throat, narrowing the airway and making loud snoring or apnea more likely.
Strengthening the muscles around the lips with Patakara® can lead to changes such as:
This device tends to be a particularly good fit for:
That said, depending on your teeth alignment or dental crowns, there are cases where caution is needed — it’s a good idea to check with a dentist or snoring specialist before starting.
Oral Stim is a device dedicated to strengthening the muscles of the tongue. It’s used to assist exercises that involve pushing the tongue forward, pressing it down, or lifting it.
The tongue’s muscles are responsible for:
— and this last function is essential for preventing tongue-base collapse, where the base of the tongue falls backward into the throat.
Oral Stim was originally used for rehabilitation of conditions like dysphagia (difficulty swallowing food or liquid) and dysarthria (unclear speech), and it has a well-established track record in the field of oral rehabilitation.
Tongue-base collapse is seen in many patients with snoring and sleep apnea. When you sleep on your back, gravity pulls the base of the tongue backward into the throat, blocking the airway.
When this happens, it can lead to:
Strengthening the tongue muscles with Oral Stim is expected to help the tongue hold a forward, upward resting position on its own — in other words, to help prevent tongue-base collapse.
The specifics vary depending on the clinic or rehabilitation program, but common exercises include:
These movements are typically repeated a few dozen times, done consistently every day. Much like strength training at the gym, repeatedly moving the tongue in the correct direction gradually retrains its resting position and builds muscle strength over time.
Breath Fit® is a device designed to strengthen the respiratory muscles — the muscles responsible for inhaling and exhaling. As you breathe through your nose, the device applies moderate resistance to both your inhale and exhale.
Since every breath adds a bit of resistance, this efficiently trains muscles involved in breathing, including:
Using a respiratory-muscle trainer like Breath Fit® can help with:
Snoring and apnea aren’t only about “a narrow throat” — “weak breathing” plays a role too. When the respiratory muscles are weak, they may not generate enough negative pressure when the airway narrows, and poor ventilation can make apnea worse.
Training the respiratory muscles isn’t only useful for snoring and apnea — it’s also applied to:
Which makes it a form of training with a fairly wide range of potential benefits.
MFT (Myofunctional Therapy) refers to a program that comprehensively trains the “functions around the mouth” — the tongue, lips, cheeks, chewing, swallowing, and breathing — as a coordinated system.
The goal of MFT is to correct habits such as:
— and replace them with a correct tongue resting position, nasal breathing, and a normal swallowing pattern.
An MFT trainer is a medical mouthpiece-style device developed to support this myofunctional therapy.
It typically combines several design elements, such as:
You could describe it as a device that lets you carry out part of MFT simply by wearing it, or by wearing it for a set amount of time each day.
MFT trainers are used in particular in two fields:
In children, correcting tongue position and mouth-breathing habits early can have a positive effect on jaw growth, dental alignment, and facial development.
In adults, an improved tongue position and a shift from mouth breathing to nasal breathing can, in some cases, improve snoring and mild-to-moderate sleep-disordered breathing.
These devices are often recommended by dental clinics, orthodontists, and sleep clinics, and are generally intended to be used under professional guidance as part of a combined “training plus device” approach, rather than on their own.
In this article, we’ve introduced four representative devices:
What matters most is understanding that none of these devices will make snoring disappear like magic on their own.
What they can genuinely help build, with consistent use, is:
In that sense, they’re best thought of as training partners, not a solution in themselves.
As described above, there are various self-training approaches that can help improve snoring. That said, as we’ve noted, training alone is often genuinely difficult to sustain, and many people find it hard to keep up over the long term.
In our view, the most effective approach to snoring treatment combines three elements — lifestyle changes, training, and medical treatment. Combining all three tends to reduce the burden of each individual piece, which makes the whole approach much easier to sustain.
In recent years, minimally invasive medical treatments have also become considerably more advanced. We’ll cover these in more detail in a future article.
English Support Available
We provide medical services for international patients. Please check our English website for details on how to visit our clinic.
Supervising Physician
Kazuyuki Sugaya, Director of Ueno Snoring Clinic
After graduating from Fujita Health University School of Medicine in 2004, Dr. Sugaya began his career as an anesthesiologist at Toho University Omori Medical Center. He has since gained extensive clinical experience at municipal hospitals and private clinics nationwide, administering general anesthesia in over 20,000 cases. In 2020, he founded the "Tokyo Spine Clinic," and has served as the Director of Ueno Snoring Clinic since 2025.
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