If you're idea of Facial Gua sha is just scraping a tool over your face, you're really missing out.

When I say missing out, I mean it's like looking at a blossomed flower but failing to see the vibrant garden all around.

That kind of missing out.

It's basically only half using the knowledge that you've got. And that's a real shame because that's the difference between mediocre changes and stunning results in fighting the signs of aging.

My background isn't in the beauty industry, it's in acupuncture and Chinese medicine and because of that, I'm looking at the face from a slightly different perspective. So I'm going to explain something here which really isn't very complicated to grasp and if you can get it, you're opening up a whole new strategy in treating the face and making people look vibrant and feeling great.

Let's start with a scenario which should help explain the main idea. Suppose you've had a leaking roof for long time and you hadn't really noticed. But one day you start to see damp patches on the ceiling and they're starting to stain. What do you do?

You paint over the stain and congratulate yourself on how new it all looks. That's what you do (yes, I know you wouldn't but bare with me). That is - until the rains come again, and the stain appears even bigger this time.

So then you decide that the whole ceiling needs replastering so you get the workmen in, they make a big mess, you clean it all up, pay them far too much and again once it's all smooth and to your liking, you'll congratulate yourself on a job well done. Until it rains heavily again and the stain comes back worse than ever.

And so you decide to make structural changes to the ceiling. You call different workmen, they break up the ceiling and reconstruct it so that it looks just like it did when you bought your home all those years ago. It looks great, you feel fantastic and it's all fixed. It took a chunk of your savings but it was worth it. Little by little, drip by drip, the stain appears and it's getting bigger and bigger. You despair and decide to call the workmen in again. And the cycle continues.

So if I tell you that your face can't have lasting changes in it without addressing the rest of the body and what is affecting it, you get it, right? The ceiling is your face. Your face is connected to your head which attaches to your neck and shoulders and then your arms, legs and rest of your body. With the same blood circulation system everywhere how can your face not be directly connected to the state of the rest of your body? And over time the things which happen to your body will affect blood flow patterns through your tissues, muscles and vessels and certain features may appear, as a result of these patterns, on your face. As you can see, it's not rocket science.

So Facial gua sha is actually a form of muscle scraping therapy involving your whole body and your face. If you just treat the face, you're not fixing the leak. So how do you fix that darn leak?

Well you need to understand how certain muscles in your face are directly linked to certain muscles in your body. And if you can maximize blood flow through these areas in your body, your face will thrive. And that's what you ultimately want with any part of your body. To thrive.

Let's look at an example which might help. I'm going to skip over the Chinese medicine stuff as to why, but there's a group of muscles which are linked from your index finger up the side of your arm to your nose and lower face. There's nothing magical or mystical about it. The ancient Chinese spent a long time studying the insides of our bodies and must have carried out untold autopsies in order to get the kind of precision of knowledge that they had. This muscle grouping is called the large intestine sinew pathway because it passes around and is heavily influenced by the state of your digestion. If you have digestive problems, it's a given that somewhere along this line, there will be signs whether it's tightness in the tissue or features on the skin.

So the state of the muscles, tendons and tissues of my lower face, mouth and nose depend on smooth blood flow through this muscular chain up my arm. What happens when the blood flow is restricted? Well, this is the key. Maybe in your finger, maybe in your wrist, maybe the elbow, the shoulder, the neck. Anywhere along this group where there is a restriction in the tissue, can affect how well the facial muscles and tendons at the other end of the chain are nourished.

So which muscles are we talking about for the large intestine?

Here are some of the larger ones: