Face Exercise For The Mouth & Jowls

Your mouth is an extremely important part of your face, because along with your eyes, it is what people look at the most when they speak with you. However, in addition to being used for verbal communication, your mouth can also communicate non-verbally depending on what shape it forms.

A smile for example, indicates approval or pleasure, whilst downturned mouth corners indicate disapproval or pain. As a result, the way that your mouth and mouth area look can send signals to other people, and these signals are what others will use to judge and form an impression of you. Apart from your overall emotional state, one of the first impressions that people form when looking at your face is your approximate age.

When you look at someone, you automatically label them as being a baby, a child, a teenager, a young person, a middle-aged person or an elderly person. These are categorizations that happen instantly, and affect how attractive we find another person to be and how we act towards them. Since the face is often the first unexposed part of another person that we see, it is the face that we use to judge a person’s age.

If their face does not match their biological age, it is not uncommon to express surprise and make a remark about how young that person looks. This is the power that the face has in age determination, and why you should take good care of your facial skin if you want to keep a youthful looking appearance for as long as possible.

The Aging Face

As the face ages several things can happen which make a person look older, although in this article, we shall only be focusing on the mouth and jowl regions.

In terms of the effects of aging on the mouth, the skin surrounding the mouth may start to develop fine lines and wrinkles. This is most noticeable in long-term smokers, who tend to have very pronounced wrinkling along the upper lip.

Aging can also noticeably affect the lips themselves, which, with age, tend to get thinner, lose volume and appear more pale in color. This tends to be a problem for middle-aged women, which is why lip injections containing dermal fillers such as collagen or restylane have become so popular in the past few decades.

The effect of aging can also appear on the sides of the mouth in the jowls. Saggy or flabby jowls can hang down the sides of the face and cause a person to look older than they actually are. Sagging jowls can happen in both young and old regardless of weight, and if left untreated, will slowly change the appearance of a person’s face making them look increasingly older beyond their years.

Another undesirable consequence of sagging jowls, is that eventually the sagging skin on the side of your face can start to pull your mouth corners down. This can produce an unhappy or even aggressive looking face, which can affect how people perceive you and interact with you.

What Is Face Exercise?

Face exercises are simply exercises that you do to workout the muscles of your face. If these muscles are not exercised, then over time they will become weak and flabby causing your skin to sag and wrinkle. In fact, if started early enough, doing face exercises on a regular basis can be a great way to help delay the signs of aging and vastly reduce the likelihood of you needing cosmetic surgery such as a face lift.

Below you will see a picture that shows all the different muscles in the face. This can help you to better visualize which muscles you are working on when you do your mouth and jowl exercises.

Before we move on to the descriptions of the mouth and jowl exercises, it is important to note that in order to receive maximum benefits from doing face lifting exercises, that you need to do them on a regular basis.

The muscles in the face take a long time to respond to exercise to the point where they tighten up your skin, so this is not something that you should expect results from in one or two weeks. Most people will notice good results within three months.

Skin Care

Skin care is probably something that you are already very familiar with, as anyone who is interested in anti-aging will most likely have a good skin care routine that they follow each morning and night.

Because face exercises are something that you should be doing regularly, it is a good idea to try to incorporate them into your existing skin care routine. This means that when you finish cleansing, toning and moisturizing, that you can then do your face exercises afterwards so that you don’t forget to do them later on.

It is however, important to only do facial exercises once a day, as you need to allow some time for the muscles in your face to recover from your previous workout session.

It is also good practice to slightly moisturize or wet your face when doing facial workouts, as this will help to reduce creasing of the skin which may lead to wrinkles. If you are concerned about your skin being creased, use your fingers to stop the skin moving in areas which are creasing as you do your face exercises.

In the rest of this article, we are going to be looking at face exercises for two specific regions of the face:

• Mouth face exercise

• Jowls face exercise

Facial Exercises For The Mouth

This mouth exercise will help to firm the muscles around your mouth (buccinator and obicularis oris muscles), which, over time, will help to give your mouth and lips a fuller looking appearance.

The muscle group that we are exercising is called the orbicularis oris, and the good thing about exercising this part of your face is that many other muscles in the face are also exercised as a result of the orbicularis oris contracting and relaxing.

There is a very well known, but also very expensive, device, known as the facial flex face exerciser. It does exactly the same thing as the following exercise does, but it uses a device to exercise your mouth muscles whereas we will be using our fingers.

• Place one finger from each hand inside the corners of your mouth.

• Pull the mouth slightly apart.

• Pull your mouth closed (sideways), working against the resistance created by the pull of your fingers.

• Relax.

• Repeat this 30-50 times.

The following animation shows you what muscles are activated with the facial flex face exerciser. When you do the mouth exercise that has just been described, you will be activating many of the same muscles. As you can see, this is a very effective mouth exercise to do, but please make sure that you have clean hands before putting them inside your mouth!

Alternate Method

This facial exercise targets the corners of your mouth, and so helps to prevent the mouth corners from sagging downwards and affecting your facial expression. Sagging mouth corners make you look unhappy when your mouth is closed.

• Grab the inside corners of your mouth with your thumb and finger.

• Your finger will be inside your mouth, your thumb will be outside on top.

• Open and close your mouth (sideways), working against the resistance created by your fingers.

• Repeat this 20 times.

This is a similar exercise to the previous one just described. However, because you are applying more resistance to your mouth corners, your mouth should be getting a stronger workout as a result. For most people though, the first exercise should be enough for promoting a healthy mouth area and lips.

Alternate Method 2

Here is something specifically for your lips. You will know if you have done this lip exercise correctly as your lips will have a slight burn to them after you have finished your repetitions. This is lactic acid build up in the muscles and shows that you have done the exercise correctly.

• Purse your lips together and extend them outwards.

• With your lips pursed tightly, open and close them like a goldfish.

• Repeat 20 times.

Try to find your own limit when doing this exercise for your lips, as it can be quite tough to do the first few occasions. You should however, find it easier with subsequent attempts and be able to do more repetitions. This is one face exercise that you will definitely feel a burn from!

Facial Exercise For The Jowls

This face exercise targets the jowls. When your jowls sag it makes the lower face appear to droop downwards over the jaw line. This makes a person seem to have aged prematurely, and can also affect the overall character and expression of a face.

• Place four fingers from each hand along the jaw line.

• You should place your pinky finger in line roughly where the corner of your mouth ends (still on your jaw line).

• Smile so that you move the corners of your mouth upwards.

• When you do this correctly you should feel the skin under your fingers working against the resistance of your fingers (being pulled upwards).

• Repeat this 20 times.

• You can do this jowl exercise with both jowls at the same time or a separate jowl each time.

Jowl exercises can be a bit trickier to get right than exercises for other parts of the face, as some people have difficulty locating their jowl muscles. These muscles also tend to be quite weak in most people, so it will usually take a few sessions before you notice your jowls getting stronger.

Also, unlike other parts of the face where it is recommended to moisturize first, jowl exercises are best done on a dry face. If you try to do your jowl exercises on a moisturized face, your fingers are likely to slip off and you won’t be able to do the exercise properly.

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