What is Cupping? 

Cupping is the use of these cups that can be made about of different materials. So, there’s rubber, there’s plastic and there’s also glass. And, so what they are utilized for is to help with restrictions in your tissues.

It can work on your fascial which tissues that runs in between structures such as your muscles. It can help lengthen your muscles and it can also help with bringing blood flow to the area. So, things that it’s good for treating.

If you have some places that is inflamed or swollen, or you have what’s called lymphedema. Cupping can be good to help decrease that inflammation, that swelling, that lymphedema in that limb.

What’s it’s also good for is promoting healing process. 

If you have tissues that is slowly healing, you can… It’ll bring blood to the area. Now, having blood come to the area is important because one, it brings oxygen and nutrients but then, it also helps clear out all the debris, all the histamines that kind a caused chronic inflammation.

It can be good for things that are like slow healing. But it’s also… It can also work mechanically in tissues. So that means that it can change the length of the fascia, it can change…

It can help with stiffness in tissues and it can also help with tightness and stiffness and lengthening shorten muscles. So, it can be good for… Let’s say, a lot of people have really tight calves or really tight hamstrings. So, you can use this set-up with lengthening them.

But it also can do a neuro… But it has a neurological component too. So, people that have chronic pain, it can help desensitize your system to that pain.

What it does is you can start putting the cups in an area that’s not painful and really get your body used to feeling different sensations. Because with a lot of people with over high levels of chronic pain, their nervous system are really heightened.

What this does is to kind a helps calm your nervous system down.

But it can also work on… It can also with people that have just kind a chronic low-level pain. Like, a lot of low back pain. So, you can provide a kind a stimulus that’s painful and that will help bring your naturally occurring opioids and enkephalins to the system to help relieved that pain.

So, these are just some of the reasons to use cupping and it can be a good add on treatment to the things that you’re already doing in PT.

Call 512.215.4227 to get started with our physical therapist at CORE Therapy & Pilates in Westlake Hills / Austin, Texas.