Why You Should Add Face Yoga To Your Everyday Wellbeing Routine
Like yoga, Dr Gray’s approach to healthy, beautiful skin is centered on your body’s natural ability to heal itself. As a dermatologist, Dr Gray focuses a lot of his efforts on preventive medicine and practices, and in the body’s ability to heal itself. Yoga is a great tool for staying healthy because it is based on similar principles. He even practices yoga himself at least once a day.
The purpose of yoga is to attain optimum health—or one’s best possible physical condition, given their genetics, history, lifestyle, environment, and age. While there are more than 100 different types of yoga, most sessions typically include breathing exercises, meditation and assuming postures that stretch and flex various muscle groups.
However, before last week most of us had never heard of face yoga as a practice.
'Face yoga is a combination of exercise for the face, massage, acupressure, relaxation and wellbeing’ - explains face yoga world expert Danielle Collins in an interview with Metro.co.uk.
The exercise part of it is about strengthening the muscles in the face. ‘We always stop at the neck when it comes to exercising the body but we forget that there are actually 57 muscles in the face – those muscles can be strengthened and toned just like in the body.’ *
Step 1: Massage
Massaging your face is an easy step that you incorporate to your daily skincare routine. It’s great for your circulation – bringing the fresh blood and oxygen up to the skin’s surface and it helps with toxin removal. It’s also good for boosting the collagen and elastin in the skin as well.*
Step 2: Acupressure
Acupressure is simply applying pressure to certain parts of the face. It helps improve the circulation and elastin production in the skin, while at the same time brightening and firming it.
Try using your index fingers to gently tap around the eye socket. This practice reaches the lymphatic drainage system, helping to get rid of fluid around the eye area which is responsible for puffiness and dark circles.
Step 3: Wellbeing
Like the traditional yoga practice, face yoga has a holistic, wellbeing aspect to it – it’s not just exercising the face, not just massaging the face.
Danielle Collins recommends using positive affirmations when doing face yoga. If we feel good on the inside that really shows on our face – and vice versa.
To further your understanding of face yoga, check out this video where yoga expert Ranjana Khan explains the benefits of this practice and teaches us some easy ways to do it.
How long do you have to do face yoga for to start seeing the results?
Collins recommends 10 minutes on the upper and 10 minutes on the lower face. Take a look at this app - Face Yoga For Your Busy Life which has a load of 1-2 minute sections that you can do at various parts of your day.
Face muscles are quite small – it doesn’t take as long to work them as it would some of the bigger muscles in the body.
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You really need to try face yoga if you want to get rid of your dark circles