The gym culture is really getting popular and popular, people are no longer finish their 9-5 life and go back home just to Netflix until 12 AM, at least not the circle I knew, after the popularity that brought by social media like Instagram or Workout App from apple store, people are really willing to spend tremendous amount of time to train their body to make it look healthier and stronger. I feel kind of old whenever my colleagues waive me goodbye with their massive gym bag that is fully equipped with their gears, or random spot them drinking their protein shakes at least twice a day, yeah, the gym culture is making people pump it up, and so does the cupping.
The gym culture is doing something positive to our lifestyles, however, it also leads to bad sides as well, there are more and more people receiving sports injuries such as hurting the ankles, muscle pain, fatigue…etc, this is inevitable since at the beginning we have no clue how much time that we need, or how much time that our body needs, failure to understand that might result in muscle soreness or injuries, and that is why products like silicone cupping set or massage gun have become trendy, because it helps your muscle to heal faster, also, the tool like the cupping set is completely weightless and portable where you can bring that everywhere you want, so these accessories have become like an additional gym accessories to us that we usually bring that every time with us whenever we go to gym.
I think the increasing popularity of cupping therapy is due to the Olympic game many years ago where athletes like Michael Phelps showed his body with polka dots and claimed that cupping help to ease with muscle pain, then it caught the media attention. To explain what cupping therapy is, it’s a type of therapy basically involve to apply a plastic cup or glass cup on the top of your skin, some of them using the pump to cause presume to vacuum the tissues, while breaking the small blood vessels, this leads recognizable we so-called “cupping bruises”, people used this as a trademark for cupping therapy and different bruises colors indicate different sickness, general, the darker the color is, the more toxin your body is.
A more scientific way to explain why this will work, there are studies claimed that the vacuum will increase blood circulation, increase local inflammation which leads the proteins that improve the healing process. In TCM studies, they used the term “Qi” flow to explain that a free flow of Qi will ensure that your wound heal faster and better, even in the western studies, researches concluded that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove scientific whether this practice will absolutely heal your body, the studies are still riddles with bias between the eastern and western medicinal studies, which has leads a huge question mark, however, there are many successful studies about people using cupping to treat their chronic disease.