Understanding Absolute Anchorage Using the Boat Analogy

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]I want you to think about a situation.

[00:00:01]You have two people on sailboats and these two people are throwing a rope to each other and pulling. It doesn't matter if it's the one person pulling towards the other. If they pull, because there's no friction preventing them from moving, they're going to close that space equally by having the two boats pull together. The larger boat is going to move less and the smaller boat will move more. Think about somebody sat standing on the dock. They can pull a very, very large and heavy ship into to that dock. It's just the friction of their feet on that dock, that absolute anchorage. In this scenario, if you just thought of braces, and you put an an elastic rubber band that hooks on from the premolars to the molars, the space is going to close with about 70% retraction of the anterior teeth and 30% mesialization of the posterior teeth. If you see the back molars all drifting forward and the anterior teeth don't move backwards, you know now that this is completely unrealistic and will never, ever happen.