Stretching feels great! A regular stretching practice, like yoga, can help alleviate stress, make you more flexible, and generally increase mood and physical well-being there are so many benefits that you can gain from Yoga. You can mark the days that you want to stretch on your calendar, so you won’t forget your schedule. You’ll also have created the only stretch marks in history anybody ever wanted to get.
All jokes aside, stretch marks are not something most people want. They’re actually a form of scarring, caused by changes in the size of a body. As the body changes, the skins sometimes need to stretch out; this stretching is what causes the scarring, which gives us the name. This basically occurs because the amount of collagen in your system is insufficient for skin to remain elastic during relatively rapid changes to the body. Stretch marks are generally caused by weight gain, though it is not strictly linked to being overweight. Bodybuilders will often end up with stretch marks, as the increased size of their muscles stretches their skin. Pregnancy can quite often cause stretch marks; obviously, there’s considerable change to your physique when there’s another person growing inside you! Puberty is another common cause of stretch marks; when you go from being under 5 feet tall to 6 feet tall in a short number of months, you’ll probably end up with a mark or two.
Stretch marks usually start as pretty visible lines; they might be red, or even purple in appearance, and they’re often raised up. There are a plethora of preventive creams that might be recommended to reduce the occurrence or appearance of stretch marks at this stage, but their efficacy has not been confirmed. That said, techniques can be used to mask the marks. As time goes on, the appearance of the marks begins to fade, and they end up looking much more like a shallow scar; the color from them will fade, and they’ll simply look like silvery scars.
One thing you can control to reduce the chances of getting stretch marks is your levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. When you have more cortisol in your system, you’re more likely to get stretch marks; cortisol reduces the amount of collagen your system produces, so your skin loses some of it’s elasticity when you’re stressed. That’s when stretching practices like yoga can actually reduce the amount of stretch marks. Mark stretches to reduce stretch marks!
Stretch marks can occur anywhere on the body, even on the face! Fortunately, there’s a lot of cosmetic procedures to reduce the appearance of stretch marks, be they on the face or any other part of the body. Facial scar removal doesn’t actually get rid of the scar altogether; it’s better termed as a reduction, but it is incredibly effective. The same techniques can be used on other parts of your body as well! That means if stretch marks are causing you anxiety, we can reduce that anxiety by reducing their appearance. Less anxiety means less stress, which means less cortisol, which means less chance of developing more stretch marks in the future!
