Vibration work has been around for a long time, like most things in massage. What we can do with our hands as therapsits we can now do faster and easier with technology. Enter the new toy of sports people, the massage gun.
Quality aside, massage guns all do one thing – deliver vibration to the body and vibration is supposed to be a great recovery tool. But what’s the science behind it and how should you use it in practice? Do massage guns just help muscles relax?
If it were that simple there wouldn’t be any need for an article on it now would there!
To use a massage gun effectively you need to understand a few things about what vibration actually does to receptors in your skin and muscles because they tell your brain and nervous system how to control your muscles – relax or contract. And that’s an important difference! In fact, certain vibration frequencies can cause your muscle to both relax and contract at the same time. Now where will that land your recovery, or will it mess with your performance in your next training session? All will be explained.
Cupping – hype or help?
Lets keep it simple.
What can a suction cup placed on your skin actually do?
I’m going to write this blog from a pure and simple experience angle and drop the science (there are plenty of papers published on cupping, but the evidence is mixed).
Cupping is an ancient form of adjunct medicine that goes back to healers thousands of years ago (literally). They used all kinds of creative things to serve as the suction cup, like animal horns or shells and believed strongly in the positive impact of cupping on health. Cupping progressed through the ages and through materials until we stabalised with 2 main options these days, glass and silicone but apart from that the practice is much the same. Use of cupping in modern medicine fluctuated and went in and out of fashion and my feeling is cupping now has a sort of split reputation. People either love it, or they think it’s a load of inflated quack.
My feeling is – the split has reason! Cupping has definite benefits and has a whole load of inflated claims. So what do I believe it does for the people I work with?