If you’ve lost a step — say you don’t have the stamina you once did — your best bet would probably be to do cardiovascular exercise to improve endurance. If you feel you don’t have the muscle power or tone you want — or used to have — you could lift weights or do other strength training to work out your body.
Generally speaking, the benefits of exercise have been thoroughly studied and are widely known, extending to body and mind. However, in an effort to retain a youthful appearance, some are doing a totally different kind of workout: facial exercises. The hope is that the same kind of results, which are well-documented for the rest of the body, will hold for physical appearance from the neck up.
That idea was recently tested in a small study of middle-aged women that researchers believe was the first research of its kind evaluating whether facial exercises or facial “yoga” might improve skin appearance, thereby helping people look a little younger. “What we found was that when you enroll people into a facial exercise regimen — one that in our case required exercising once a day for 30 minutes for the first 12 weeks, and every other day thereafter — we did in fact get some noticeable improvements in facial appearance,” reported Dr. Murad Alam, a dermatologist and vice chair and professor of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. He led the research published last month in JAMA Dermatology. “In particular, we found that the upper and lower cheeks — the central part of the face, if you will — became plumper and fuller over time.”
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Just 16 study participants completed the full program. The participants were taught facial exercises by Gary Sikorski, 60, of Providence, Rhode Island, who designed a facial exercise program called Happy Face Yoga, and sells DVDs providing instruction on doing the exercises. The workout included muscle resistance facial exercises — participants used their fingers, thumbs and palms to to apply resistance to facial muscles.
For instance, Sikorski describes one exercise called “the Cheek Lifter” this way: “You simply open your mouth to form a long ‘O.’ You fold your upper lip over your teeth. You smile to lift those cheek muscles up, and then you take your index fingers and you set them on top of those cheek muscles. Then you relax that cheek muscle so that it goes back to its normal position, and then you lift it up again — and that’s a cheek pushup.” Ten of those cheek pushups is one set. “At the end of the 10 pushups, then you move the finger away from the face and lift it up toward the ceiling, and you lift your muscles up to that finger and make those muscles stretch up to the ceiling as far as you can to get the extra stretch for another 10 or 20 seconds, and then you hold that pose, and then you relax.” Then do that exercise one more time, he says, and that’s one set.
Reviewing photos of participants taken before and after they completed the exercise program (not knowing which was the before picture and which was the after), Alam and another dermatologist, estimated the participants looked, on average, about three years younger after the 20 weeks of exercises.
However, in addition to the study’s small size, the research had numerous limitations, including no control group to compare the results against. Alam says the preliminary findings seem to suggest improvement, “but certainly more research needs to be done.” Alam says he has no financial relationship with Happy Face Yoga and that he isn’t endorsing any particular approach. Rather, he thinks many facial exercise programs could potentially confer some benefit; and the study didn’t find any risk of harm from doing facial exercise. “At this point, we know that it does seem to have some benefit for making your face fuller; and over time, as you know, skin sags and the fatty layer under the skin becomes thinner — the face does thin out,” Alam says. “Counteracting that might make them look potentially … more youthful in their face; and that might be something they might benefit from.”
Sikorski suggests doing muscle resistance facial exercises for best results, though no comparative studies have been done to evaluate different types of facial exercises against each other.
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While at least at first blush facial exercise “seems to provide a modest but real benefit,” according to Alam, he doesn’t see neck-up workouts replacing procedures like Botox injections to reduce the appearance of aging. Rather, he suggests they might augment or improve results from these procedures and provide another option for people who choose not to have procedures done to possibly mitigate the signs of aging.
He notes that an initial concern facial exercises might create more wrinkles — as facial expressions can over many years — did not bear out in the short-term study, though long-term research is still needed.
“What this study suggested is if you move your muscles, and you do facial exercise, you can replenish some of the volume that we normally lose as we age in our faces. But while doing this, all you’re going to do is create more wrinkles,” counters Dr. Gary Goldenberg, a medical and cosmetic dermatologist and an assistant clinical professor of dermatology at The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. “I don’t think that it will actually work long-term. I think long-term people are going to look worse.”
Sikorski, who’s done facial exercises since he was in his 40s, contends that he and many others he’s taught to do the exercises have seen positive results, and that he hasn’t received any reports of the exercises causing wrinkles. “If you looked at me when I started facial exercises … you could see that I had crow’s feet. Now you would have to really look hard to notice that there are some fine lines there,” he says. Along with making the cheeks fuller, he says facial exercises improve appearance in other ways like firming up the jaw line and lifting mouth corners.
But with more study needed to evaluate the reports of benefit — particularly over the long-term — Goldenberg suggests forgoing facial exercises. Instead, for those who want to improve the appearance of youthfulness, he recommends taking steps like protecting against harmful UV rays and following a simple skin care routine daily. “The most important part of any anti-aging routine is sunscreen and sun protection,” Goldenberg says. “In reality good skin care involves washing your face with a cleanser twice a day, applying and moisturizing with sunscreen in the morning, doing a vitamin A derivative at night” — like applying a retinol cream — “and then using a moisturizer at night,” he says.
[See: 14 Ways Alcohol Affects the Aging Process.]
He also counsels patients about the importance of diet, cautioning against a high-glycemic diet, which includes foods that can spike blood glucose, from sugar to bread, and unhealthful habits like smoking. “There is evidence that high-glycemic diets cause inflammation, which causes collagen breakdown, and that causes more wrinkles and lines and kind of sagging of the skin,” he says. In regards to lighting up, “Smoking decreases blood flow to all body organs; and there’s also evidence that smokers are more likely to engage in high sun exposure, because they’re both high-risk behaviors.”
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