How Exercise Affects Your Hair
If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to be more active, but you’re struggling to find the motivation, then keep reading to see how exercise can affect your hair. You might be surprised by the facts.
How Does Exercise Affect Your Hair?
Many factors influence your hair health. From diet to mental and physical health, it’s all about keeping the body healthy and keeping hormone levels regulated. Exercise has many benefits for the body including stress relief, better blood circulation, and stabilizing hormone levels. Like we’ve mentioned in past blogs, stress is one of the leading contributors to hair thinning and hair loss. When you’re stressed, your general health will start to decline. You may notice dull skin and hair and, of course, more strands of hair piling up on your brush.
Exercising regularly increases serotonin levels, also known as the “happiness hormone” or the stress-reducing hormone. Serotonin helps to reduce cortisone, another hormone directly related to hair thinning and hair loss. The higher the cortisone levels, the more hair loss you will experience. Here’s the thing, it’s essential to find the right balance and what exercise routine works best for you because over-exercising can increase stress and lead to higher cortisone levels.
Each hair follicle has blood vessels that feed necessary nutrients and oxygen to the scalp to help hair thrive and grow strong. Exercise increases blood flow and circulation throughout the body and flushes toxins out of your system. Fresh blood and oxygen to the scalp allow for more nutrients that improve the hair’s health and stimulate growth. Once again, over-exercising can cause more harm than good, so be careful with how you treat your body and never overdo it.
What Exercises Should I Be Doing?
The most important exercises to participate in for hair health are the ones that get your blood pumping—cardio, calisthenics, and yoga are the best.
Cardio: Do aerobic exercises or running. Blood will pump through the body and scalp to release toxins and keep sebum levels regulated for stronger, healthier hair. All it takes is 30 minutes two to three times per day to start seeing results.
Calisthenics: Think stretching and lengthening routines that aid with overall strength and energy levels. You’ll start to notice an improvement in your posture which allows blood to circulate more readily to the scalp.
Yoga: By performing inverted poses like headstands, downward-facing dog, plow pose, etc. blood flows through the body and reaches the scalp to allow for healthier hair growth. As a bonus, yoga is also known to reduce stress.
In addition to keeping your overall health in check, it’s important to maintain your hair from the outside too. After working out, it can be tempting to whip out the dry shampoo and call it a day, but such carelessness could be a detriment to your hair’s health. In our previous blog, we talked about how dry shampoo and other commonly used hair products could be the reason for dry, dull, and brittle hair. It’s better to wash or rinse the hair after a sweat session rather than piling on the dry shampoo. So, have you noticed a change in your hair when skipping a few days or weeks at the gym?
