How to Fix Face Asymmetry - Ascending Asymmetry

What is ascending asymmetry:

There are various types of asymmetries and they all affect your whole body and face. Today we analyze asymmetries generated literally from the soles of your feet!

Ascending asymmetries are caused by one foot standing taller than the other, creating an imbalance that climbs up the kinetic chain to your hips, spine, shoulders and head, wrecking havoc in its way.

As your body tries to remain in equilibrium (in order to conserve energy) it "corrects" these imbalances by creating new, opposite ones to keep its center of balance.

Feet Asymmetry

Your feet are not monolithic structures that just "work". They are made out of 26 bones that work together to create arches that create mechanical advantages (Hunter gatherers where prolific runners, optimal efficiency while running was key to their survival).

Problems arise when the arches of your feet are different to each other:

Imbalanced Feet

If one of your arches is higher than the other, the leg with the low arch is practically SHORTER. That wrecks havoc on the whole balance and energy efficiency systems of your body.

In order to compensate, your body tries to rectify the lateral imbalance at higher parts of your body. The first point of imbalance we will discuss (there are more in between), are the hips.

Hip Tilt

The hips try to absorb a part of the asymmetries' impact by rising the low side a bit, using the oblique and other muscles. That's not enough though, as you can see from the picture, the asymmetry is still there.

That is because the hips are in the middle of the kinetic chain. The party starts as we get closer to the head, which is able to move a lot more in any direction.

Next stop : Shoulders!

Asymmetrical Shoulders

INVERTTED. The asymmetry changed sides! How? The closer we get to the head, the more the body can compensate. Plus, if you know anything about levers, the further away we get from the center of gravity of the body, the more a slight tilt can compensate for the imbalance.

The shoulders lean to the opposite side to counter-act the weight placed on the "shorter" leg. How do they do that? By tightening up the trapezius muscle on my "tall" leg side.

Next stop : HEAD!

Head Asymmetry

SCREWED. As you can see, F&*%CK. My head is tiled to the right Significantly. We eluded about this earlier: the head is free to move more than any other part of the chain, thus, it will do MOST of the compensation.

For my weight to be equally distributed on both feet, my head is tilted to the side that would get less weight put on it, "rebalancing" my weight...

Face Asymmetry

How? The right trapezius and right neck muscles get stronger, pulling on the right side of my face MORE than on left. That extra pull, has over time, created an imbalance in my bone structure, literally changing how the left and right side of my face looks.

My left side is more forward grown (as it is pulled back less), while my right side is compressed and is lacking behind its potential. My palate is asymmetrical too!

Worst thing is, this is PREVELENT. A lot of people, maybe YOU reading right now, have it! There are ways I am counteracting this problem right now, attacking the root cause as well as the symptoms, making extremely fast progress. If you are interested in a post dedicated on such techniques, leave a comment bellow!

Inherent Asymmetry

It is almost impossible to achieve TRUE perfect alignment as our body is physically biased to the right side in regards to the size and attachments of the right dome of the diaphragm as well as internal organs.

When we move our body dynamically through space, there are tilts, bends, and rotations that take place to load and pressurize one side of the body at a time as we land and leave the ground.

The key is to minimize the degree of asymmetry and to harness the alignment of not just static posture but also energy transfer in motion for both sides of the body. Ask in the comments if you want more detail on that!

Face Asymmetry Resources:

For an Advanced Mewing Tutorial click here!

For a deep dive into Restructuring your face with Chewing click here!