2 exercises to relieve tension in the sides of the face

What’s up fam. Doctor Rick here for another tutorial.

Today I’m going to teach you how to bring awareness and relieve tension in your facial muscles. We’re going to do two exercises, the Trigger Point (Masseter) and Myofascial Release with traction.

Trigger Point (Masseter)

Time: ~5 minutes
When: Early in the day

The first one I want you to be doing earlier in the day that is trigger point work on your Masseter. So, the first thing I want you to do is find your Zygoma, which is this bone here. It feels like bone. I’ve felt the masseters of a lot of my patients recently and sometimes the masseter muscle feels like it is bone, but you find that there’s a ridge just underneath this hard bit and that is where I want you to, you can use your points as if you want, but I generally use my thumbs and you want to press into that spot. Really create an association between your awareness and the tension that you feel in these areas. You want to be pressing and just creating a little bit of space, small movements like this, and that’ll help just to relieve this spot, which is generally the most tense in the masseter muscle.

You’ll want to be doing this for about five minutes relatively early in the day.

Myofascial Release with traction

Time: 5-10 minutes
When: Anytime

The second thing that I want you to do is a little bit different. This is called Myofascial release with traction. You’re making a flat surface with your fingers like this and you’re gonna pop it just underneath the angle of your mandible. So this part here, you get your fingers. And what we’re doing is we’re stretching fascia. So a combination of skin and muscle that goes all the way through to the bone when you stretch it, which is a very unusual thing for your muscles and skin to be feeling, but it will produce very different sensations than what you’re used to. So you want to place maybe a kilo, two kilos of pressure going inwards. You want to start as low down as you can pressing in and up and just allow your hands to very slowly make their way up the sides of your face.

Now as you’re doing this, you may feel strange things, but all I want you to focus on is the slowest possible movement going all the way up the sides of your face. Now I want you to take five to 10 minutes with this exercise allowing your hands to go the whole way up the sides of your face.

I’m going to do a little bit more quickly in this video, but once you get past here, you’re going to go past the bone, that Zygoma we were talking about before and you keep that pressure. You keep the same angulation, you just keep going upwards, upwards pass that bone into your temple region and it’s called the temple because right next to it is your temporalis muscle that temporalis muscles fan shaped. So as you’re getting into this area, still with our pressure, inwards, and slow upward movement, you’re to start allowing your fingers to spread so it covers the whole body of that muscle and keep them moving up.

Let’s keep this going with that same level of traction and pressure on until you get to the very top of the head. That is your myofascial release. You can go back again with your knuckles and just go down. I was really feel that relaxation that’s come from spending the time to bring awareness to your face.

Guys, I want you to give this a try. Send me a message, let me know how it’s gone. I think this is the most and first and most important part of dealing with and resolving facial tension.

Let me know. Talk soon.