Here at Ripple, we utilize many tools to help you get rid of tightness and soreness -- in the big picture, our Physical Therapy and Massage Therapy are your one-way ticket to get out of pain and feeling your best. Within these sessions, we use many different modalities.
One of our favorite modalities is Cupping!
Although trendy, this ancient form of muscular therapy has been around since 1550 BC when the ancient Egyptians started using them to help inflammation and muscle pains.
As time has passed, both the technology and the application of cupping have improved.
We mainly use cupping as a novel input to calm down your nervous system and activate a parasympathetic response. Downregulating your autonomic nervous system and allowing you to explore movement once deemed threatening by your body.
This can help you establish a better relationship with certain movements that may help you get out and stay out of pain!
You may have seen these in past Olympics when athletes would come out to swim or run with these circular bruises on their backs. Remember back to the 2016 Summer Olympics when Michael Phelps was just absolutely crushing swimming?
He ended up setting multiple Olympic records and totaled 19(!!) Olympic medals. To this day, that mark is insane and probably will never be touched again.
But -- do you remember what all the talk was surrounding Michael Phelps?
It wasn't all the medals he was racking up but instead, the big talk was what in the hell were all the purple marks were on his body!??
No, his athletic edge wasn't because he got suctioned by an octopus before getting in the pool. Those purple marks were the sign of cupping a form of alternative medicine to help increase blood flow, decrease inflammation, and clearly make you the best swimmer in the world.
It's safe to say, Michael Phelps started the cupping craze. Before him, no one really knew what cupping was, and the benefits it has.
Now, it's a totally different story. Cupping is widely utilized by PTs and massage therapists as another tool in their belt to help people recover faster and feel better.
It's for good reason too. If you've tried cupping, you understand how good you feel getting off the table and the tangible effects it has on the body. It takes tight, stuck muscles and what feels like injects life back into them. It's crazy. If you've never tried it, it's really hard to explain.
Our Massage Therapist Angel has been doing a lot of cupping these days and it reminded me of Phelps back in the day, and how great of a service cupping really is.
The reality is they don't always have to cause a bruise in order to be beneficial.
By using them paired with corrective movements we are able to elicit the same beneficial response from the nervous system without having to keep them on long enough to cause huge bruises.
That being said, we all have different responses to the suction and may bruise accordingly.
Using movement while cupping allows us to give your body context into what we want to work on. This in turn may help create a better relationship between certain activities and our body's perception of threat which may be causing the discomfort in the first place.
Click here and schedule your discovery call today to find out if cupping is right for you!
