Cupping, Dry Needling and Sports Taping

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Cupping, Dry Needling and Sports Taping

Our qualified practitioners are trained in Dry Needling, Cupping, and Sports Taping. These techniques are great for trigger points, pain relief and mobilising muscles and soft tissue.

Cupping

Cupping is an ancient method of healing therapy and can be traced back many thousands of years. The process of applying cups on the skin to create suction increases blood circulation to the area where the cups are placed. It relieves muscle tension that, in turn, improves overall blood flow and promotes cell repair.

The soft tissue technique lasts between one and five minutes and help with injuries to restore movement by lifting and stretching the underlying tissue.

Benefits include:

  • Increases proprioceptive input to the targeted muscle
  • May help with the healing process
  • Can create increased mobility in scar tissue
  • Increases the body’s load and pain threshold
  • Relieves muscle tension and delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS) from exercise and training
  • Helps with relieving myofascial pain with decompression
  • Can help reduce inflammation

Dry needling

While at first glance they may seem the same, Dry Needling is different to Acupuncture.

The essential difference is that Acupuncture has been used for thousands of years in Traditional Chinese Medicine to relieve pain, discomfort, or many other health issues by opening up a person’s energy flow or chi. Dry Needling, on the other hand, is a relatively new technique designed to stimulate and ease trigger points, or provide relief for muscle irritability. It’s also sometimes called intramuscular stimulation.

With Dry Needling, your practitioner places several filiform needles* in “trigger points” within your muscle or tissue. The needle helps release the muscles knots and relieve any muscle pain or spasms. The needles remain in your skin for a short period of time.

Dry Needling allows damaged or injured muscle to move around and is a technique often used to treat sports injuries, muscle pain and stiffness, and even fibromyalgia pain.

Benefits include:

  • Relief for some muscular pain and stiffness
  • Stimulates targeted muscles
  • Stimulates healing
  • Easing the trigger points
  • Improve flexibility
  • Increase range of motion

Sports Taping

Sports taping is used for injury prevention and management and allows for normal movement. While not regarded as a permanent fix or guarantee against injury, it is designed to stabilise and neutralise vulnerable muscles, joints and ligaments.

Essentially, the objective of Sports Taping is to provide an injury with additional support, but additionally, to prevent further damage to the already injured body part.

At Thrive Sports Chiropractic, we use two different types of Sports Taping depending on the athlete’s circumstances.

Supportive Taping: Strong and rigid with minimal elastic properties commonly used to tape ankles, knees, shoulders, elbows and wrists for all athletes involved in various sports. It is usually applied before a game to stabilize the targeted region and minimize injury.

Kinesiology Taping: Very different look and feel to supportive tape, it is a thin, stretchy, elastic cotton strip with adhesive on one side designed to move with your body and not restrict joints, muscles or ligaments. It helps with stimulation of the targeted muscle and allows some support with a bit of movement so that you can still perform in your sport or activity.

Benefits include:

  • Muscle, joint and ligament support and stability
  • Swelling Reduction
  • Rehabilitation
  • Alignment
  • Blood circulation
  • Reinstate confidence