What is Cupping?
At Holistic Balance Myotherapy, we strongly believe in natural therapy. Our body has an incredible self-healing function, but long-term negligence can kill that sense slowly. Cupping is one of the most common techniques we use on a daily basis to help clients with stiff muscles and pain relief. Here’s some basic knowledge about cupping.
Micheal Phelps’s cupping marks drew the attention of many audiences during the Olympic games. Cupping is also favoured by many other athletes and celebrities like Jennifer Aniston, Gwenyth Paltrow and Victoria Beckham, to name a few. But really, cupping isn’t something for Olympians or celebrities only.
Cupping is something we do for patients on a daily basis. Often can get breakthrough results for some clients who suffers from stiff or sore muscles, some even have been massaged on regular term but no real beneficial. Because massage alone is challenging to remove the toxin inside the body, while negative pressure from cupping can break down the stiffness quicker than compressing alone, the toxin is a big bonus on top of that.
Cupping is not unique to Chinese Medicine.
Many practitioners think cupping is one of the most popular techniques in the Chinese Medicine toolbox. But cupping is found in the Middle East, eastern Europe, Africa, and throughout Asia. The earliest pictorial records date back to the ancient Egyptians around 1500 B.C; translations of hieroglyphics detail the use of cupping for treating fever, pain, vertigo, menstrual imbalances, weakened appetite and helping to accelerate the healing crisis.
Cupping has been studied.
Cupping may fall into the category of folk medicine, but that doesn’t qualify it as some woo-woo fringe crazy sauce vintage therapy. There are plenty of research studies such as this, this, and this where it has been specifically looked at for pain intervention. Clinical experience technically falls into the category of “Evidence Based Medicine”; and It’s our not-so-secret-clinical-experience-weapon for migraines, shoulder pain, neck pain, lower back pain, tennis elbow, golf elbow, IT band syndrome.
Because cupping works so well, everyone wants in on the action. You’ll sometimes see massage therapists, physical therapists, and chiropractors offer something called “myofascial decompression (MFD)”. Let me be clear: it’s cupping. There are a million different techniques: fire cupping, vacuum cupping, wet cupping, dry cupping, massage cupping, bamboo cupping, horn cupping, and magnetic cupping to name a few. We now have machine cupping, which works fast and magically to suit tight time frames. Rule of thumb; if you can drink from it, you can use it to cup.
THOSE AREN’T BRUISES YOU’RE SEEING
Bruising is caused by impact trauma leading to the breakage of capillaries and a reactionary rush of fluids to the damaged location from the tissue injury. There is no compression in cup therapy. The marks are the result of having internal unwanted toxins pulled up to the skin, which can include such things as lactic acid, lymph fluid, stagnant blood, or medications. When a condition exists within a deeper muscle layer and is dredged up during treatment, discolouring will appear on the skin. If there’s no gunk, there are no marks.
Click on this link to book an appointment for a session of cupping therapy.
