The Brain Muscle Connection That Face Yoga Can Fix
When we begin to face yoga, what happens, in the beginning, is that for most people, the facial expressions and movement is unconscious. These are the unconscious movements (or lack of movements) that we have learnt since we were children. This is the language of our brains to our muscles that express emotions and have been this way since we were young.
Many factors can govern the way our muscles work on our face and have done so since we were children. From the way, we have held stress or tension in the muscles, which could be activated from growing up in an area with a lot of sun. If this is the case you may have grown up squinty the eyes or scrunching the forehead more - and these are the areas that hold stress.
There can also be muscle stress if you clench your teeth, which affects the teeth tissues and then make the muscles around the jaw and mouth overworked. This then makes the other muscles atrophied, which means that the muscle fibres are not active in this area. They're kind of withering away and losing their elasticity.
These factors can then decreases the volume of the muscle and the facial tissue. All of this plays out over years and years of repetitive, unconscious patterning from the brain to the facial muscles and areas. So when we start to face yoga, we reignite this connection through the brain, from the brain through the nerve, which signals the muscle to contract and do like a workout.
This process truly begins the training and the reworking of the muscles in the face!
Just as the body needs regular movement to stretch out the muscles, so does your face.
It's the same with the muscles in the body. When we want to grow our muscle mass there, in the beginning, we may not see a lot of change, but we have to keep persistent and work on controlling the contraction of the muscles because that's where we have the best exercise.
The best result of the exercises is when we can feel the contraction of the muscle. We can consciously really start to control the contraction and the release in the muscle tissue. So when you start face yoga, you may be using 20% of your muscle fibres on the face.
This is a random number, but you can utilise it as an example of where you will start and then grow with the muscle usage percentage also growing. Doing daily workouts will start to increase this percentage from between 3 to 6 months - which I like to say is then a percentage of 80% - 90%.
Muscle Resistance and Face Yoga
When we start face yoga we are faced with resistant facial muscles. These muscles have, as mentioned above, been working in a particular way since you were a child. Now here you are, as an adult beginning to rework and train the muscles in a completely new way.
So we need to be patient with the practice, as this reprogramming of the muscles takes time. It’s a process that you can make progress on bit by bit each day. You will learn how to work on just feeling more and connecting more to the facial muscles. These can be new feelings, as you may have never felt these muscles before.
And when the results start to show, which they will show up over time - it’s different for every face. Then you can connect deeper into the muscles and use the exercises very effectively.
The workouts become deeper, more vigorous and more precise.
In the Beginners 5 Week Challenge in the My Face Yoga Gym, you will learn how to work and activate these muscles on your face with basic exercises. These exercises are the entry point into face yoga, and will become your foundation for your daily practice. I have designed the Beginners Challenge as a way for you to not only learn how to master the exercises but how to cut through the unconscious muscle patterns that brain has created on the face.
This combination, with daily discipline to the practice, will give you long lasting results!
