Collagen is a natural protein that now gets purchased over the counter worldwide. The effects of collagen are overt and violently viral. Any supplement, tool, treatment, or product promising to stimulate collagen production, is being fervently bought.
What’s surfaced as the latest age reverse hack to stimulate collagen production, are face exercises. The west is tapping into this new ‘trend’. Many cultures have had facial exercises as a part of their daily routines for years and years. East Asia has a couple of thousand-year-old facial exercises in their practices, using tools like the Gua sha.
What’s common in these geographically spaced practices, is an urge to stimulate skin collagen for cell regeneration. Collagen’s super bond network structure is what gives the skin its tightness and suppleness. With time, this network begins to turn into an unorganized mess and resultantly, skin sags, loses tightness, wrinkles and fine lines become daily occurrences and general overall skin radiance declines.
What do face exercises do?
Out of the many collagen-oriented practices are facial exercises. Their use is usually concerned with depuffing and lymphatic drainage of the face and neck muscles. Thus, their results are immediate in decreasing face weight. However, their relationship with collagen stimulation is not effectively visible.
Using your fingers and jaw muscles a couple of facial exercises are formulated. The first one is easy. Sit upright with your face facing the ceiling. Now using your jaw muscles, try to stretch your lower mouth upwards. Relax the muscle for a second, and then repeat. This exercise can be done for 10 minutes daily. This is supposed to target the fat at the jaw.
For the second exercise, you must place your face in the same position as the head looking up at the ceiling. Using the first three fingers of both hands, place your fingers on your collarbone area, on either side. Now begin to apply pressure to the site and start pushing your fingers upwards. Push them up until you meet your jaw. From there, push the finger in a different direction towards each ear, and don’t forget to apply pressure all this while.
There are a lot of other exercises that have depuffing effects and are done first thing in the morning. Some also use jade rollers or gua sha tools, or even cold spoons for hassle-free methods to stimulate collagen production.
So do facial exercises stimulate collagen production?
Studies say that this is still up for debate. The study showed that a 30-minute daily exercise over 20 weeks may modestly improve the facial appearance of some selected women. The study was insufficient to be a stand-alone thus these results may be sporadic and non-reliable for all skin types.
But, over time, consistent use of facial exercises promotes increased blood flow to the face, bringing healthy nutrients back into the facial skin and removing the bad toxins. This blood flow also maintains and strengthens the collagen balance over time. So anti-ageing effects will be noticeable only with consistent use.
Facial exercises can be empowered further by intake of an entire regulated routine. This is the list of supplementary auctions to stimulate collagen production.
What else can stimulate collagen production?
Use Vitamin C. A topical treatment that is rich in antioxidants along with anti-pigmentation qualities. They renew skin cells on the application site and fade away the spots of inflammation with time. Remember they do make the skin photosensitive so make sure to apply sunscreen after.
Destressing and Sleeping. More than a figure of speech, “sleep is what makes you pretty” is a proverb of proof. Skin goes through collagen restoration. A stressed mood leads to collagen breakdown because of oxidative stress and heightened stress hormones.
Balance your diet. An intake of collagen-rich food is on the rise and many look over the East to find a collagen and nutrient-balanced diet. For our non-vegetarian friends, get your hands on Bone Broth. This slowly cooked delicacy extracts collagen from various types of meat and works on strengthening the collagen protein in your body. For Vegetarians, many fermented foods like tempeh, yoghurt, kombucha, etc. nourish the gut and create a favourable ecosystem for collagen and elastin to stay at work.
Here are some more tips to stimulate collagen production.
Other than that, scholars, Borumand and Sibilla led scientific research and found out that Collagen oral supplements with Hydrolyzed Type I Collagen are proven to show results in the skin within 60 days.
Hydrolyzed Collagen Powder by GradeOne Nutrition contains Biotin, Vitamins E & C as well as 17 Amino Acids, making this a perfect blend to effectively rejuvenate skin, hair, nails, joints & bones.
Key takeaway.
Facial exercises stimulate collagen production when they are supplemented by other healthy habits of sleeping well, maintaining stress, using vitamin c and sunscreen, maintaining a collagen-rich diet from broths and antioxidants, and trying oral collagen supplements.
Like everything great, this methodology is slow to work but sure to work.
