Even with a very gentle practitioner, which I had, cupping can be INTENSE. If you’ve never had any sort of intense body work or therapeutic massage done, I absolutely wouldn’t recommend jumping right into cupping. I found it to be really healing for my body and noticed the results after my first session, but I also dreaded going back. The cups just kinda chill out, try to pull the tension out of the body through suction, and then leave you with a really hardcore battle mark that lasts for a few days. When you see somebody with really dark cupping marks (you know, when they look like they lost a fight with an octopus), that’s usually a sign that that particular part of the body had a lot of lactic acid, soreness, or tension. You experience this pulling through your connective tissue and lactic acid, among other things. Rather than applying pressure to a specific part of the body, cupping uses suction to pull tension out of the body. I like to think of cupping as being the opposite of massage. During the last few Olympics it was a really trendy thing amongst all the athletes and, as such got a lot of media coverage. Let me tell you, nothing is more embarrassing than emailing your boss “Yo, I can’t hold my head up anymore. My doctor prescribed, among other things, therapeutic massage and cupping to help ease some of my pain, and to eventually give me back the ability to hold my head up for a full day. This injury made me feel like an infant I couldn’t hold my head up for more than a few hours before I needed to take a break. A few years ago I was rear-ended on the way to work (a great way to start the day!!) and was left with pretty gnarly whiplash throughout my neck. I was told that Decompression Therapy would “help with circulation improvement and muscle discomfort," and that it was similar to cupping therapy but without the discomfort or octopus-style markings after. I was recently invited to the new Hand and Stone Massage and Facial Spa in Redmond to test out one of their new services, Decompression Therapy. Since this revelation I’ve committed myself to trying all of the weird things under the sun questionable pills from the internet, juice cleanses, energy healing over FaceTime, and other things that have either wrecked my bowels or rocked my world. I walked into my first real try at a yoga class a few months after I graduated and suddenly was hit by the revelation that, if I put just a little bit of effort in, I could make my body feel way better than its current state. My body would snap, crackle, and pop all day long. Like most college athletes, I walked away from my time doing the sports feeling like a burnt Rice Krispie treat. I wasn’t overtly unhealthy, I was a college athlete after all, but I wasn’t exactly hyper-aware of how the things that I was doing impacted how I felt. I mean, let’s be honest, college happened. I certainly haven’t always been this way. I have a bit of an obsession, if you will, with trying to make my body feel as good as possible at all times.
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