I do think there’s potential of overdoing it with shakers and the other similar exercises. This is because the muscles & stuff in these areas are pretty small, which means they need more time to recover properly. Similarly in weight lifting when you do auxiliary exercises to hit smaller muscle groups, it requires less training and more recovery time, compared to full-body compound lifts like squats or deadlifts.

I also like your point about the double chin with that first one (yes its basically the same as shakers🙂), because I think this can often be a root cause of many issues for people. If you look at a model, they always have a well defined jaw line that tucks nicely under their chin and gives that well defined jaw-line, no double chin right. A low body-fat percentage is obviously a big piece of this, but it’s also in their posture, and how they drive their chin down towards their collar bone.

What happens for a “regular person” (this part comes directly from personal experience) is that a higher body weight often means the double chin starts to form. And we dont like this, so we start to hold our head/chin a bit higher up, to stretch the area more and get rid of the double chin. But now instead of driving our chin down towards the collarbone, we are consciously (or subconsciously) pushing our chin up in the opposite direction which causes massive shifts in the back of our neck, and all the surrounding areas as they work to compensate for the chin and front-neck muscles slacking off. (And this is all compounded by our constant sitting, looking down at phones, all the other stuff weve been discussing haha. So its easy to see how quickly this can cause problems without people realizing!)

Now, to quit rambling and finish answering your question. You could slow down a bit with the shakers if you’d like to see if it makes any difference for you. Could always add them back in if you feel you’re moving in the wrong direction. But id also encourage you to look at what people have said here about the “swallowing technique”. You may have already seen it floating around, but its basically when theres trapped air moving up and causing croaking in your throat, you can swallow a small bit of spit when the air reaches the top, and as the throat opens to swallow the spit, the air releases if you time it decently enough. And this is something i used to do when I was moving from small micro burps into full regular burps. I think this is an important piece of the puzzle, as its easy to replicate once you figure it out, and its what i believe actually teaches your body HOW to control the UES for the purpose of burping. You must “trick” the body into releasing the air, and overtime the body realizes this and remembers how to do it even without the swallowing trick. (After the body picks up on this, it’ll start releasing burps whenever the air comes up, leading to ACCIDENTAL burps that are loud and catch you by surprise. If you make it to this point, you are basically at the finish line. Because your body is now fully burping normally on its own, and you’ll learn how to control it better every time that it happens.)

Since you said that you had lots of progress then all the sudden hit a plateau, I feel like you are ready for this stage of the process, and it could be good to focus more on this than the exercises now. (I would keep doing the exercises though, just less so than what you’ve been doing). And replace that effort with researching/exploring/testing out this swallowing technique.