How to Fix Sleep Apnea without CPAP (3 Exercises)

Name: How to Fix Sleep Apnea without CPAP (3 Exercises)
Uploaded: 2026-09-02T12:00:37.000Z
Duration: 8 min 35 s
Channel: Dr. Eric Berg DC

Dr. Eric Berg DCSeptember 2, 20268m

Topics11

How to Fix Sleep Apnea without CPAP0:00 Weight Loss and Sleep Apnea Connection1:00 Three Simple Exercises to Strengthen Throat Muscles1:31 Tongue Position Check1:45 Nose Breathing Benefits2:30 Exercise Number One: Tongue Root Press3:30 Exercise Number Two: Palate Lift5:02 Exercise Number Three: Cheek Suction and Hold6:00 Recommended Duration and Results Timeline6:32 Alcohol's Effect on Sleep Apnea7:01 Vitamin D and Sleep Apnea Connection7:30

In a Nutshell

Three simple daily throat exercises—tongue-root press, palate lift, and cheek suction-hold—can strengthen the 20 muscles that keep the airway open, reducing or eliminating sleep-apnea obstruction and snoring within weeks. Nose breathing (optionally with mouth tape) plus maintaining adequate vitamin D levels further improves airway tone and oxygen–CO₂ balance, while alcohol worsens muscle relaxation. Weight loss helps only about one-third of cases; the exercises work regardless of body size.

AI-Generated Notes

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Over a billion people have sleep apnea and many of them don't know what simple exercises can fix sleep apnea. After watching, check your airway by looking into a mirror and saying "ah" to see how much space you actually have. With sleep apnea, the airway is narrow and the muscles in the back of the throat are a little too relaxed and they can collapse at night and cut off your oxygen. There's definitely a connection with a good night rest and having enough oxygen. If you don't have enough, that's going to keep you up. A lot of people with sleep apnea are on the CPAP machine blowing air into their mouth trying to overcompensate with this obstruction in the back of their throat.

Another common thing that's taught is that you need to lose weight to get rid of sleep apnea. Apparently, that only actually helps in about a third of the cases. There's a lot of people that are thin and they have sleep apnea. Your airway in this tube in your throat is made from about 20 different muscles. If those muscles lose tone, they become lax and they actually increase in volume and they can obstruct the airway, especially if you're sleeping on your back where you have gravity pulling the back of the tongue into the airway.

Three very simple exercises will strengthen those muscles so you will no longer have this obstruction in the back of your throat when you sleep. These exercises will also help you stop snoring if that's also a problem. You really only need to do these exercises once a day for 7 minutes.

Before doing these exercises, check where your tongue is inside your mouth. If it's resting on the floor of your mouth, that could be part of the problem, especially if you are a mouth breather. It's not necessary to get into the various theories of why the tongue muscles and the related muscles lose their tone. It could be because we're consuming a lot of soft food. It could be because we eat meat that doesn't have collagen anymore and it's just very, very tender. In the meantime, let's actually get you to breathe through the night.

Highly recommend starting training yourself to breathe through your nose, especially at night. There's even mouth tape that you can get to kind of get in the habit of doing that. When you start breathing through the nose, this creates a back pressure that actually helps reduce sleep apnea. With a lot of people when they breathe through the nose, there's more of a restriction and they might feel that they're not getting enough oxygen, but that's actually not true. That restriction helps balance out oxygen and CO2, increasing the absorption of CO2. If you even just think about a panic attack, usually the person is hyperventilating. They actually have too much oxygen without enough CO2. So, what do we do for a panic attack? We breathe in a paper bag, increasing CO2, which then allows us to get more oxygen. So, nose breathing, despite the feeling that you're not getting enough air, actually will help you get more oxygen in the lungs.

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How to Fix Sleep Apnea without CPAP (3 Exercises)

How to Fix Sleep Apnea without CPAP00:00

Weight Loss and Sleep Apnea Connection01:00

Three Simple Exercises to Strengthen Throat Muscles01:31

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