Routines to Incorporate Into Your Hair Regimen
There are hair routines and there are hair regimens. It’s the routines that make up a hair regimen. They don’t stand alone.
For example:
You have a routine of massaging your scalp every night at 8pm before bed. It’s a very important part of your hair care regimen but its not the totality of it.
Your hair regimen is built up of various routines like that nightly scalp massage.
If you feel your hair regimen is incomplete, perhaps it’s just falling a little short of one of these tried and true routines. Below are some suggested hair routines that you can incorporate into your hair regimen.
This is not an exhaustive list of hair routines to add to your hair regimen. However, adding these particular routines to your hair regimen can help transform the health of your hair.
Scalp Massages
I’ve shared a lot on massaging your scalp here on Fine Natural Hair and Faith. That’s how much I believe in this particular hair practice.
Scalp massages can provide you with a number of benefits:
- increases blood flow in the scalp leading to accelerated hair growth
- facilitates the removal of dead skin cells
- removes product build up on the scalp
- relaxes and relieves tension in the head
If you don’t have a routine of massaging your scalp on a set schedule, consider adding this to your hair regimen.
Pre-Pooing
There’s some debate around the need to pre-poo.
I don’t get bogged down in all the you should do this and should not do that advice. All I can share is what I’ve found yields results. Does that mean it’s guaranteed to work for you?
No, but it does mean it’s worth trying. Then you can decide if doing pre-poos (also known as a pre-wash) is a routine you want to add to your regimen.
The major benefit of a pre-poo is it can help protect hair from hygral fatigue. I won’t go too much into what this is. A simple definition is “damage caused from the hair shaft opening and closing due to water entering it.”
I highly recommend you read the linked article above. It’s written by another blogger and she did an excellent job explaining this.
Search and Destroy Sessions
Getting split ends is something that happens to everyone. There’s no way to fully avoid them. Split ends are a result of weathered hair – wear and tear.
If you are trying to retain length, you certainly don’t want to keep cutting your hair. Yet, you don’t want split ends hanging around too long either.
An alternative to getting a full trim is to do what’s called the search and destroy method. This is exactly what it sounds like.
You’re searching for split ends and cutting them out of your hair (destroying them) individually.
Over time, this may cause slightly uneven hair but if you predominantly wear your hair curly, it won’t matter. You’ll eventually do a regular trim to even your hair out anyway (if that’s your goal).
Here’s a really quick demo of the Search and Destroy Method done on twists shown by Cassandre Beccai:
The Search and Destroy method is a great hair routine to add to your hair regimen if you are looking to retain length while mitigating damaged caused by splits, especially incomplete split ends.
Inversion
Some use the inversion method for hair growth and while there’s some debate about going to extreme lengths for hair growth, periodically inverting your head for a period of time is beneficial in other ways.
Inverting your head can:
- improve digestion
- send fresh oxygen and nutrients to your head and face leading to fresh looking skin
- flush your adrenal glands, stimulating endorphins that help lift your mood
- stimulate your lymphatic system also helping your immune system
- promote a better night’s rest
- helps sebum move a little more readily down the hair shaft for natural conditioning
While these aren’t all hair related, routinely inverting your head still offers many benefits.
Hair Stretching
Making it a routine to stretch your hair will help with length retention because stretched hair is less tangled and single strand knots are greatly reduced.
There are a number of ways to add hair stretching to your regimen (some more effective or faster than others):
- Using a gentle hair dryer that defies breakage
- Putting your hair in 1 or more ponytails secured down the entire length with multiple seamless elastic bands
- Setting your hair with rollers until dry
- Threading
- Satin strip wrapping
Steaming
Lastly, hair steaming is a must have hair care routine to add to your regimen. Why?
There’s so many benefits including:
- Making detangling easier
- Replacing lost moisture to the hair
- Making hair more manageable
It’s your hair routines that make or break your hair regimen. This post just shared some of the routines that can make your regimen. There are some routines (or rather habits…bad ones) that can break your regimen. I’ll share more on those in a future post.
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