hi I'm Elissa Weinzimmer founder of Voice Body Connection and it is time for
another How to Warm-Up video yay
How To Warm-Up
in today's how to warm-up video
we're gonna discuss warming up your facial muscles now for those following
along at home there are different categories in this how to warm up series
that I teach and I like to consider this exercise in the impulse category
although the truth is that your body and articulation are also involved in the
facial muscles if you want to understand more about the categories go to the how
to warm-up intro video and it will help you understand how to build your own
full warm-up so why warm-up your facial muscles well for one thing if your
facial muscles are kind of flaccid then you're not going to be able to
articulate very clearly and also if our facial muscles get frozen then we can't
respond to the impulses that we have to move them and of course we all know that
communication really involves a lot of facial expression so we want to be able
to move our facial muscles so let's go over what they are so here's some of
your facial muscles one thing is that you have a ring going around your lips
and then actually a wider ring as well going around the outside of your lip so
you've kind of got two rings around the inside and outside of your lips then off
of those two rings you have what we can think of as rays of the Sun going in all
different directions that can pull your lips into different configurations so
ones that go directly sideways once they go up towards the corner of your cheeks
that will make you smile right ones that go up along your nose right inside your
nose down and of course right down in the center right so what we want to do
is test and see if we can move all of these muscles let's try it so if you
were to move the muscles of your lips sideways it might look like this mm-hmm
if you were to move them up towards the corner of your cheeks it'll look like
this try it right and you can keep your lips closed
for now just let your lips be released if you were to move those muscles that
lift right along the sides of your nose it'll sort of be like
your sneer face or like I'll get you my pretty and your little dog too type face
right and the fun thing about these is that you can try doing one side at a
time and see if you can isolate them so you could try doing just the right side
just the left side you can try moving things and what you might find is that
there are certain things that you actually just don't even have the neural
pathway to know how to move if that happens two tricks for you one trick is
you can move it with your hands just literally make the muscle go into the
shape you want it to go into or another trick is if something's moving that you
don't want to move hold it steady while you try to move the
other part right so you can use your hands manipulate your face with your
hands so we can go sideways we can go up we can go sneering like this we can
scrunch right in the middle sort of like we're a little bunny rabbit trying to
scrunch our nose and of course we can go down into our frowning face right really
hard to do one side of the frown I find for most people including myself I can
do this side there it is but I can't do this side without helping so go ahead
and play around with all the different ways you can move the muscles around
your lips and then let's actually move the actual muscles of your lips and it
can go like this so if you move the outer ring first into contraction but
leave the inner ring release it's gonna look something like this and then if you
add the inner ring looks like that so I like to call this Marilyn Monroe fishy
Marilyn Monroe fishy Marilyn Monroe fishy kind of fun right so now of course you
have the ring around your lips you have also two rings around your eyes that can
squeeze your eyes or open your eyes you've got forehead muscles you've got
cheek muscles you've got your big jaw muscles so what we'll do putting this
all together once you've done some isolations is we'll move our face
around into crazy different shapes trying to find everything you can find on the
outside of your face and also moving your mouth as well so this actually is
called gurning G U R N I N G and there are competitions in the UK and have been for
a long time where people try to make the craziest face look it up it's crazy
so let's go in for a second and really try to move those muscles that you're
not used to moving you guys can totally blackmail me with this cool amazing so
this is a fun way to basically do facial gymnastics or yoga and warm up all these
muscles that maybe are just usually sitting there not doing as much as they could
I'll add that these exercises are really useful to do in front of a mirror
so you can see what's moving what's not moving help yourself
create new habits and break out of old ones and also I definitely want to give
credit to my teacher Dudley Knight from whom I learned these exercises this is
his book Speaking With Skill and Knight-Thompson speech work continues even
though Dudley is no longer with us it's really amazing stuff check it out I'm so
grateful for everything I've learned from that body of work have fun with
this practice it whenever you feel like you need help getting your impulses all
the way into your facial expressions and let me know how it goes
How To Warm Up