How do face exercises actually work?

We all know the benefits of exercise for the body. Think of a person you know, of any age, who does regular, focused and specific strength exercises for their body. Think of how their stomach, arms, booty or legs look. This is the simplest way of understanding how exercise can benefit a muscle.

You can’t change your bone structure, but you can change your muscles.

The face exercises also focus on relaxing and releasing tension and stress from muscles. They work on encouraging blood flow to the muscles and training the mind to consciously relax the muscles. This is important to understand because some muscles need to be strengthened and lifted and others need to be relaxed.

The muscles in the face are composed slightly differently to those in the body. They are all attached to each other, the bone or the skin and mostly controlled by the facial nerve (our body muscles on the other hand are usually controlled by our bones). This is what gives us the ability to make expressions. So our facial muscles need to be targeted slightly differently. This is why some techniques in the program are about toning, while others are about relaxing. However, despite the differences in the body and face muscles, in one sense the principle is the same. If we just rely on regular day-to-day living rather than specific exercises, some muscles in our body become weak and lose tone. The same for the face. If we just rely on the movements from talking, facial expressing and eating, which are uncontrolled and often rooted in stress and tension, and we are not exercising or relaxing all layers of skin and muscles together as a unit, they become looser and saggier.

One of the most significant studies was carried out in January 2018 by Northwestern University in the USA. Participants did 30 minutes of Face Yoga, the majority of which were facial exercises, for 20 weeks and were assessed by a team of skin and medical professionals. For those who did it daily, it showed an almost 3 year age decrease in the 20 weeks.

The most important thing is to have a healthy lifestyle and a good skincare routine (exfoliate and wear sunscreen), hydrate from inside & outside (collagen, Vitamin C, Retinol, Hyaluronic acid), fix your posture (lift your arms while holding your phone and lift your laptop to the height of your eyes), bring awareness to the repetitive movements that you do (like mimics, lifting the eyebrows too often, etc.) and do face workouts and massages. You can find exercises for specific areas that you wish to work on the most on my playlist, and then you can mix it, one day you do the exercises for nasolabial lines, the second day for the forehead, etc. Little by little and be consistent