Updated February, 2026

Picture students in a class at a massage training school. You see thumbs, fingers, and elbows pressing into muscles. Or, if you’ve ever experienced Thai Massage, you might see massage therapy classes with trainees pulling and pressing while in yoga-like postures. For most massage modalities, this understanding of pressing or stretching into tissue to relieve pain and tension is correct. Cupping is an exception.

While most manual therapies use downward pressure to alleviate muscle adhesions, cupping uses suction to pull tissues up. As an analogy, think of a dirty […]