What’s the latest workout craze? Facial fitness
By Beth Teitell
Boston Herald Columnist
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
In the category of Strange But True, I offer this: There are people - mainly in California, but brace yourself, like sushi and lattes this trend will come East - who hire personal trainers for their face.
Your butt, it turns out, doesn’t have the only cheeks that exercise.
Or, as Cynthia Rowland, facial fitness coach to the stars and a woman who commands $2,500 per session, explained it, “There are 55 muscles in your face and neck and they atrophy from disuse. If they don’t get exercise, you are going to resemble your great-aunt Hilda.”
If I were smart I would have pretended I’d never heard of this new kind of circuit training and continued with my current regimen, which consists of slathering on anti-aging creams that promise to lift my face with absolutely no effort on my part (other than paying through the nose). Alas, Rowland and I were going to be in New York at the same time, so we planned to meet, but not before I promised to do the exercises on her “Facial Magic” DVD.
And I intended to, really, except that when the DVD arrived, with its rigorous jowl and nasolabial fold and neck exercises, I became so exhausted that I stashed it away, and repaired to my bathroom to apply an extra dose of anti-aging cream.
“Your face,” my husband pointed out, “is a couch potato.”
On the phone, Rowland told me I’d “never guess (her) age,” and indeed, she was ageless - a less zany Bette Midler, with a charismatic manner and a very muscular forehead. “Have you been doing your exercises?” she asked, slipping on her trademark white gloves.
Uh, no.
“Then you’ll feel this tomorrow morning,” she said, standing behind me in the horribly well-lightedbathroom, anchoring various facial muscles (of mine) with her gloved hands while I practiced resistance training with my forehead and tried not to look at myself in the mirror.
But wait! What’s this? Do my eyes look as if they’re open wider, as if I’d had a brow lift? “If you do the exercises, they’ll stay like that,” Rowland told me, mentioning that my forehead, in its unexercised state, was “mushy.”
Mushy’s not exactly a compliment, but who cares? In a few months of doing the exercises six times a week for 20 minutes a day I’ll look 10 years younger, at least. My forehead will be the envy of recent college graduates.
“Wow!” my mom said when I told her about the results. “So have you been doing it?”
Well, I would, and I want to, but who has time? The ugly fact about facial fitness is that it forces you to pit body parts against each other. Twenty minutes a day, six times a week on my face is 120 minutes fewer to spend working on my abs.
I have had some limited success in fitting my facial routine into those odd moments of downtime. Sitting in traffic, for example. A sluggish drive offers an unspoiled opportunity to grimace and mug myself into facial tautness.
And you should see how quickly other drivers get out of my way.
