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Loud, chronic snoring
Nightly snoring loud enough that a partner notices or sleeps in another room. Often the first clue.
Your Garmin has been flagging poor sleep quality for months. Your coach thinks you are overtraining. You have tried sleeping longer, cutting caffeine after noon, keeping the room cooler, and nothing has moved the needle on how you feel during long efforts or the day after a hard ride. Obstructive sleep apnea is one of the more common and least-suspected causes of performance decline in otherwise healthy athletes. It disrupts sleep architecture, tanks recovery, and shows up directly in HRV and time-to-fatigue. The South Lamar studio is two blocks off MoPac and a short ride from the Greenbelt trailhead, and we treat sleep apnea with a custom oral appliance you can wear without disrupting the training schedule you have built around your sleep.
This is not just snoring. It is a measured medical condition, scored by how often your breathing stalls each hour, your AHI, and sorted into mild, moderate, or severe.
Sleep apnea is what happens when your airway collapses during sleep and your body keeps having to rescue it. The damage is not what happens overnight. It is what happens over years. Untreated, it raises the risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.
Fit people get sleep apnea too, and it shows up as a performance problem before it shows up as a health problem. The mental model, the overweight middle-aged snorer, is built on older epidemiology. In people with normal weight and active lifestyles it presents differently: lighter or positional snoring, no alarming partner report, and a complaint that is performance-based. Power output flat for months despite consistent training. Eight hours of sleep and waking up feeling like four. HRV declining even after a coach cuts volume. Those are not training-load symptoms. They are recovery symptoms, and recovery is sleep-dependent.
We evaluate the airway, the jaw, and the bite together and coordinate with your physician, who confirms the diagnosis with a sleep study. Bring any wearable data you want, it is useful context. If you already have a sleep study, bring the report and we move straight to appliance planning. If you do not, we refer you for a home test you run in a single night. The studio is at 2717 South Lamar Boulevard, at Lamar and Manchaca, close to Zilker Park and the Barton Creek Greenbelt, with Saturday appointments available.
Sleep apnea symptoms rarely show up alone, and in active adults they look closer to overtraining than to classic apnea. Persistent fatigue despite enough sleep, a slow morning warm-up, higher perceived exertion at familiar paces, dulled cognitive sharpness. Worth tracking specifically: feeling unrested after a full night, morning headaches that clear within an hour or two, dry mouth or sore throat on waking, waking with a sharp intake of breath, an afternoon crash between one and three. The most consistent signal is the mismatch between time in bed and how recovered you actually feel.
Nightly snoring loud enough that a partner notices or sleeps in another room. Often the first clue.
Sudden gasping, choking, or a feeling of being briefly unable to breathe. The body is rescuing the airway.
A dull, pressure-type headache already present at wake-up, from a night of low oxygen and disrupted sleep.
Exhaustion that does not improve with a full night in bed. Falling asleep in meetings, while reading, or at the wheel.
Trouble focusing, short-term memory slips, mood changes, irritability that landed without an obvious cause.
Waking with a sandpaper mouth or a raw throat, especially if you sleep on your back.
Several trips to the bathroom or restless waking, often blamed on hydration but driven by airway disruption.
Worn enamel, flat edges, or jaw soreness on waking. Bruxism and sleep apnea travel together more often than not.
Obstructive sleep apnea is rarely down to one thing, and fitness does not make you immune. Jaw structure, neck anatomy, nasal passage shape, and throat muscle tone all affect how easily the airway collapses, independent of weight. The cost is biological and direct. Growth hormone releases mostly in slow-wave sleep, testosterone peaks in REM, and muscle protein synthesis accelerates in deep sleep. When apnea interrupts those stages all night, you put in the training stimulus but never complete the recovery that turns it into adaptation.
A narrow throat, large tonsils, or set-back jaw makes the airway easier to collapse.
Soft tissue around the neck and tongue adds load on the airway during sleep.
Throat muscles lose tone over time. Sleep apnea risk climbs with each decade.
Anything that relaxes the throat at bedtime makes obstruction more likely.
Lying flat lets the tongue drop straight back. Some patients are positional only.
Dentist-led, sleep-physician-coordinated, and focused on a treatment you will actually wear. We take most major dental and medical insurance, and oral appliance therapy is typically billed to medical insurance. We verify your coverage before the consultation.
A walk-through of your sleep, snoring, energy, blood pressure, and what your partner has been hearing. A short screener (STOP-BANG) flags whether a sleep study is the next step.
Hands-on evaluation of your airway opening, tongue position, jaw posture, and bite. Digital scans capture the architecture an oral appliance will work with.
If a diagnosis is not yet on file, we coordinate a home sleep test or an in-lab study with a sleep physician. Diagnosis stays medical, treatment is delivered here.
You leave with the plan: which appliance fits your case, what insurance will cover, when the appliance will be ready, and the follow-up schedule to fine-tune fit.
For mild to moderate obstructive sleep apnea, an oral appliance is enough for most patients. It resembles a sports mouthguard but is custom-made from your impressions, fits over the upper and lower teeth, and gently advances the lower jaw so the airway stays open. In the mild-to-moderate range the outcomes hold up against CPAP, mostly because far more people actually wear the appliance every night than wear the CPAP every night. From a training standpoint it adds nothing to your sleep logistics: no machine, no mask, no power, nothing to pack for travel. If you already wear a night guard for grinding, the fit is similar.
Custom oral appliance therapy is clinically proven for mild to moderate OSA, and for patients who cannot tolerate CPAP. Quiet, portable, and easy to wear, which is the only treatment metric that actually matters: the one you keep using.
For positional or mild cases, the gains can be real before any device: side-sleeping training, avoiding alcohol close to bed, weight management, and treating nasal congestion. We screen for these so they are not skipped.
LifestyleA precision-fit mandibular advancement device that gently advances the lower jaw a few millimeters during sleep, holding the airway open. Quiet, portable, often medical-insurance-covered, and proven for mild to moderate obstructive sleep apnea (and for patients who cannot tolerate CPAP).
Most commonFor severe cases or partial responders, the appliance pairs with CPAP at a much lower pressure setting, or alternates by night. Often makes CPAP tolerable for patients who otherwise abandon it. Coordinated with your sleep physician.
Pairs with CPAPWhen appliance therapy is not enough, we refer you to a trusted ENT or sleep surgeon for advanced options such as Inspire, soft palate surgery, or maxillomandibular advancement. We coordinate the handoff and stay involved in your ongoing dental care.
Outside referralThe right tool is the one you will use every night. We will help you find it, not sell you one.
A lot of practices stamp the word “sleep” onto a generic guard and call it done. We do dental sleep medicine properly: the right appliance for your airway and bite, titrated over follow-ups, and verified with a follow-up sleep test. We are on South Lamar at Manchaca, near Zilker and the Barton Creek Greenbelt, with same-week consultations and Saturday appointments.
We work alongside Austin sleep physicians on diagnosis, sleep studies, and titration. Treatment stays inside an evidence-based loop, not freelanced from a single chair.
A 3D digital iTero scan, an airway and bite analysis, and an appliance precision-fit to your jaw. No goop, no putty trays, no one-size shell. Titration dialed in over the first few weeks.
If CPAP is not working for you, you are not stuck. Oral appliance therapy is the leading non-CPAP option for mild to moderate OSA, and a key partner in combination therapy for severe cases.
Clenching, grinding, and worn teeth often travel with obstructive sleep apnea. If you are dealing with one, you are often dealing with the others, and we handle them under one roof.
Crowding and a narrow arch can crowd the airway. Invisalign can widen the arch and improve how well you breathe at night.
Explore Invisalign →Sleep apnea and gum disease share the same inflammation. We keep your gums healthy while we treat the airway.
Explore periodontal care →Cleanings, exams, and airway screening on every visit, your dental home between appliance check-ins.
Explore preventative care →Related reading: How to treat sleep apnea naturally at home · Is sleep apnea genetic? What science says · Airway expansion for sleep apnea · Adjusting a sleep apnea appliance after gum surgery · How Yoga, along with Invisalign Arch Expan · Clinical Guidance on
Serving South Austin and the 78704 corridor
South Lamar Studio
2717 South Lamar Blvd #1086
Austin, TX 78704
Phone: (512) 717-5315
Getting here: At South Lamar and Manchaca, accessible via the 803 MetroRapid or MoPac, minutes from Zilker Park and the Barton Creek Greenbelt.
Areas served: Zilker, Barton Hills, Bouldin Creek, Travis Heights, South Congress, and the Manchaca corridor. Primary ZIP 78704.
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The honest answers to what patients ask us most. Do not see your question? Call us. We would much rather chat than have you guess.
Call (512) 884-5656A 45-minute evaluation, sleep-study coordination if you need one, and a custom oral appliance built around how you actually sleep. On South Lamar near Zilker and the Greenbelt, two blocks off MoPac, with same-week consultations for Barton Hills, Bouldin Creek, and the 78704 corridor. Medical insurance often covers oral appliance therapy, we will verify before you commit.