If you’ve heard me gib-gabbing, you’ll know I’ve been talking about Traditional Chinese Medicine (”TCM”) a lot — with friends, over dinners, and increasingly in this newsletter. What I’ve noticed is that most people have either never heard the term, or if they have, it’s closer to a “woo woo” science in their minds. This week: what TCM actually is, and what it has to do with how you move.

A brief history of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)

Traditional Chinese Medicine has been the working medical system across China for centuries, with adapted versions across other parts of Asia such as Korea, Japan and Vietnam. At its core, TCM is a complete framework for understanding the body: one that sees you as a cohesive network rather than a collection of individual parts.

It looks to specific aspects of your body, namely your pulse and your tongue, as output indicators of your overall well-being. Those convergence points articulate whether different organ systems in your body are smooth sailing or if they are running a bit out of whack. “Out of whack” can cause your body to react in certain ways: such as by running hot (sweaty, flushing easily) or cold (poor circulation, cold hands and feet).

TCM looks at health problems as patterns across the whole system instead of localized issues at a single site.

A simple example - if you saw a western doctor because of knee pain, they would focus on what’s happening with the knee and maybe ask you to rest and ice it while a TCM doctor may focus on understanding how your sleep, digestion, or daily habits are co-factors to how much weight your knee is bearing. Sounding like physical therapy? There certainly are overlaps.

You’ve probably already done TCM

If you’ve done any movement recovery in the last five years, odds are you’ve already done TCM, just without the label. TCM has started to integrate itself into modern Western practices... cupping at physical therapy offices, acupuncture that’s covered by health insurance, gua sha as an add-on at massage studios, qi gong energy exercises all over your TikTok feed.

In physical therapy last fall, my PT in San Francisco used cupping to loosen the back muscles guarding around my spine. This was right after a round of nerve glides and right before we got to progressive loading. I wrote about cupping as my very first piece here — the modality that snuck into Western movement care years before the philosophy did.

TCM & modern movement science: two ways of looking at the same body

The Western framework is anatomical and mechanical. The body is structures — muscles, discs, tendons, nerves — and problems are local: something is weak, compressed, torn, or inflamed. You assess with imaging and movement testing; you intervene with load, medication, or surgery, and you judge the result by randomized controlled trials. Its great strength is precision. Its blind spot is everything that doesn’t show up on an MRI — which for chronic pain especially, can be a lot.

The TCM framework is systemic. Problems are patterns of flow and stagnation, and treatment aims at the system rather than the spot that hurts. Its strength is that it takes seriously the connections Western medicine historically ignored: stress and pain, sleep and inflammation, the nervous system as the thing upstream of nearly everything. Its weakness is that its vocabulary — qi, meridians, stagnation — doesn’t translate into testable “Western” mechanisms, which makes the whole framework easy to dismiss or ignore.

The language of qi and energy movement makes TCM seem less rooted in science. However, in popularized modalities that Western movement science has adopted, the picture starts to look a little different.

Where the evidence stands with TCM

Acupuncture has the most scientific support and Western backing. An individual patient data meta-analysis, looking at 39 trials across ~21,000 patients, found acupuncture has a real effect on chronic pain beyond placebo. The pain reduction was modest, but durable over time. Another promising signal of the integration: Medicare has covered acupuncture for chronic low back pain since 2020.

Looking at cupping we see a similar trend. Today it has become a common tool in physical therapy for myofascial decompression and improved local circulation. TCM uses cups to clear stagnation in the body. Both aim to lower muscle tension, increase blood flow, and calm the nervous system. I suspect we will see a similar increase in cross-studies to validate the impact, increasing access through insurance and PT offices.

I’m not a doctor, but for my own benefit I’ve spent a lot of time studying the science behind popularized TCM modalities like acupuncture and cupping. My conclusion is that large Western-style trials are scarce in TCM. The studies that exist tend to be small, and blinding is a real design problem (how do you sham/placebo a cupping set?).

What has changed in the last decade is the rise of meta-analyses and cross-system studies: researchers pooling dozens of small trials into something readable, like the acupuncture analysis above. The picture is filling in slowly, modality by modality, instead of arriving as one grand verdict.

The convergence is a reassuring sign, and benefits us all

As an Asian American, I have gotten the privilege of growing up with both methods of healthcare. In early adulthood, I rejected most Eastern medicines in favor of the Western medicine school of thought. But as I’ve gotten older, and have experienced more complex changes in my body, I’ve rediscovered the intentionality around Eastern medicine’s philosophies - wholeness in the body, partnership with yourself in healing and well-being.

Western science is becoming more integrative by nature, and we’re seeing much more focus on topics like systemic inflammation and nervous system regulation. Eastern medicine is getting more love by way of scientific studies and research translations that fill the gap between ancient practices and modern science.

I think that’s the most exciting thing happening in movement health right now. Not one side winning. Both systems learning to speak each other’s language, and a consumer who’s allowed to use both without picking a team.

🥇 Weekly movement nuggets 🥇

Each week, I share 3 things I’m trying or found interesting.

1. Squeezing my shoulder blades together, 10 reps at a time, during my driving commute

2. Taking magnesium (glycinate or l-threonate) before I sleep to help with muscle recovery

3. Consciously increasing protein intake (though who isn’t right now!)

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Link to part 1

Where we left off

Last week I argued movement health is becoming a category the way sleep and longevity did, a mishmash of services and offerings lacking a shared language. Today, I want to dive into that claim, starting with a map: five separate concepts and none of them on its own, “movement health.”

The Category Map

The things that keep you moving well — physical therapy, massage, acupuncture, recovery gadgets, functional training — are spread across industries that mostly don’t speak to each other. Each is at a different stage of maturity, and each solves a different slice of the problem.

Putting all this together, you get a pretty interesting picture. Roughly $130 billion a year in US spend — bigger than the sleep economy.

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Note: market-sizing numbers are research-backed but, as always, estimates at best. Contrast therapy (sauna, cold plunge) sits under general wellness for now, so it’s out of scope here.

Why we should care

Who cares if movement health is a category? Well, you should. The fact that these categories today are fairly distinct businesses from each other means that there is no communication between them, and no opportunity for you — as a consumer — to have the benefits of integration.

This past year I’ve had a physical therapist, a neurologist, an acupuncturist, a massage therapist, a few personal trainers, and multiple recovery tools going in rotation. Each time, I had to recount my injury, what I’d tried so far, and how my recovery was going. As I was working towards my personal goal to resume normal life and exercises like skiing, it was ultimately on me to design and execute a plan that incorporated the right mix of rehab, rebuilding, and recovery.

How much more efficient would it be if you could get a massage when it made the most sense physically, vs. just doing it weekly and hoping it’s the right thing to do? Or how would you know if acupuncture made sense for you in this current season, vs. physical therapy? Today — YOU are responsible for the answer. Self-motivation and research got me far, but what if care could start with your body’s particular context, not with whichever provider you happened to book first?

An emerging category in concierge

As I write this, we are seeing the beginnings of an evolution. Upscale boutique gyms are beginning to integrate physical therapy into their training practices. Life Time is piloting MIORA, a longevity clinic inside the gym; Equinox has folded bloodwork, recovery, and stretching into its offering (its $40,000/year health-optimization membership already has a sizable waitlist). It’s part of a broader trend towards “concierge” medicine — the idea that each person should have a unique and tailored plan based on their specific context and background. For now, though, it’s only accessible at a very premium price point.

So now what?

I’ll be watching this closely; it’s my thesis. I want to build here, and I don’t think I’ll be alone: retail concepts, service concepts, attempts at every price point.

Maybe Allium Health becomes the brand that pulls it together.

Longevity is going through the same thing right now. “Live a long, healthy life” has been the goal since people have had goals. And then suddenly, it’s a market, with VO2 max tests, continuous glucose monitors, Peter Attia on every podcast, and supplement stacks with their own Reddit threads.

I think movement is next.

Physical therapy, massage, acupuncture, recovery tools, and fitness get talked about separately. Physical therapy is in an intimidating bucket called “musculoskeletal health (MSK)”, acupuncture is still considered woo woo, and my friends are skeptical about whether Theraguns actually work. But slowly — a tide is turning toward a shared language. You see it most in personal-training gyms — more and more bundle PT and recovery tools alongside training. Even chains like Equinox and Lifetime have dynamic stretching programs.

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Why Now?

The underlying problem is chronic pain, and it’s getting worse. The CDC’s most recent report puts roughly one in four US adults — 24.3% in 2023 — living with chronic pain in the past three months, up from 20.9% just two years earlier. High-impact chronic pain, pain that limits daily function, sits at 8.5%. The line has been going up since before the pandemic.

It doesn’t take much detective work to guess why. We swing between two extremes: intense lifting to build a body worth photographing, and eight to ten hours folded over a desk staring at a screen. That’s the American posture of the decade. The bill comes due in your thirties, forties, fifties — the back starts talking, the shoulder won’t go overhead, the hip clicks. People who never thought about “mobility” are suddenly googling it at 11pm. And people want it personal now — personal training has gone mainstream, across every age and budget.

And pain is only the entry point. The longer arc is longevity. How well you move is one of the clearest markers of how the back half of your life goes — Attia spends a real chunk of Outlive on it, and his Centenarian Decathlon is basically a list of things you want to still be able to do at ninety, worked backward into what you should train now. Strength and stability aren’t the supporting cast in that story, they’re most of the plot. This isn’t medical advice, just the thesis a lot of serious people have landed on.

A Category to be Named

The category, movement health, is a thesis more than a market right now. The buckets don’t share customers, or data, or even vocabulary — your PT doesn’t know your stretch membership exists, your acupuncturist has never seen your training program, and none of them have looked at how you actually move.

The next decade of movement health belongs to integration. The product that wins reads across all of it — understanding the nuance of a single body and telling you where to start. You can see the earliest sketches already, in concierge fitness sitting beside real medical workups. The pieces all exist; nobody has assembled them yet. And the technology to do it for the rest of us — not just the people who can afford concierge — is here. Whoever gets there first won’t be selling cupping or squats or a $600 massage gun. They’ll be selling the one thing none of those can offer alone: a coherent picture of how you move.

The signs were easy to file under getting older. Ankles that grumbled after a session they wouldn’t have flinched at two years ago. A tweak in my back that took three weeks to settle instead of three days. I read all of it as time passing, and some of it was. But a lot of it turned out to be a math problem: I was eating like someone trying to stay the same size, when I needed to eat like someone trying to keep moving.

Those are not the same diet. Almost all nutrition advice is built around the eating less, weighing less, subtracting. Barely any of it is written for the person asking their body to do things, who needs to build something to do them with. And the part that gets shortchanged first what nobody pictures when they picture food: connective tissue.

We all know and love protein

Muscle gets all the airtime, so I’ll keep this quick. Protein, spread across the day instead of dumped into one dinner — a palm of something at each meal, eggs or fish or tofu or yogurt or beans. The wrinkle worth knowing is that it gets less efficient with age, so the move in your forties and fifties is more, not less. Creatine is the one supplement that earns its shelf space: three to five grams a day, well-studied for strength and increasingly for the brain, no loading phase or timing ritual. That’s most of the muscle conversation, and the internet has beaten it to death.

Tendons, ligaments, fascia

Underneath the muscle is the stuff that actually stores and returns force — tendons, ligaments, the fascia holding the whole thing together. It’s what goes when you “tweak” something, and it’s behind most of the nagging injuries that never fully resolve. It also almost never comes up when we talk about eating for movement, which is strange, because it has the most particular appetite in the body.

Keith Baar’s lab at UC Davis ran the study everyone points to. In a 2017 trial in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, subjects drank a vitamin C–enriched gelatin mix about an hour before a short bout of jumping, and the higher-dose group roughly doubled a blood marker of collagen synthesis. Then the researchers took blood drawn after the drink and used it to bathe engineered ligaments in the lab, and those tissues built more collagen and tested mechanically stronger. The recipe that came out of it: about 15 grams of gelatin or collagen with vitamin C, an hour before you load the tissue.

Here’s the part that makes it credible instead of another powder. The timing matters because the tendon’s window for responding is short, but the response only happens if you actually load the tendon. A collagen scoop in your morning coffee, no exercise attached, does close to nothing. The loading is what tells the tissue to rebuild; the collagen is just the raw material on standby for when it does. Later reviews have held that line. The supplement isn’t the intervention. The work is, and collagen just makes the work pay better.

You have to eat enough to build anything

The third thing is bone, and bone wants something the wellness internet hates to hear: stop running a deficit.

This is the one that took me longest to sit with, because I was doing it without noticing. Sports medicine has spent the last decade getting serious about a state called low energy availability — not a crash diet, just a subtle, chronic gap between what you eat and what you spend moving. It hides comfortably inside “clean eating” and “I’m just not that hungry.” The International Olympic Committee puts out consensus statements on it under the name RED-S, Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, and the through-line is blunt: under-fuel long enough and the body starts defunding whatever it considers optional. Bone density. Tissue repair. For women, often the menstrual cycle — which turns out to be one of the more reliable signs of whether you’re fueled at all. The cost isn’t just feeling flat. You get injured more, across bone and tendon and muscle alike.

And the people most exposed to it are usually the ones who are careful. The ones who eat well. The ones who read the body’s complaints as a discipline problem instead of a request for food. Reader, it was me. The single most useful change I made in a year of recovery wasn’t a supplement or a protocol. It was eating more.

An older version of the same idea (we love TCM)

I spend a lot of time holding Western movement science next to Chinese medicine, and food is one of the places they agree more than they fight. TCM has always treated the deep structural tissues as things you build slowly through nourishment, not fix in a session: warming, long-cooked food, broths and congees, with digestion treated as the gate everything else has to pass through. The explanation it gives is nothing a physiologist would write down. But the instruction it lands on — feed the foundation, give the slow tissues steady input, don’t try to rush it — is one the research also aligns to. I don’t think it’s an accident that the two schools of thought arrive at the same recommendation.

What this actually looks like

I’m not a doctor, and what worked for me is an n-of-1 (!), so take the specifics as one person’s notes rather than a prescription. If you move, and especially if you’re climbing back from something, the urge to subtract is usually the wrong one. Eat enough before you optimize anything. Get protein at every meal. If a tendon’s cranky and you’re rehabbing it, try the gelatin-and-vitamin-C timing an hour before you load it, and remember the loading is the medicine. Then be patient, because the slow tissues are slow on purpose.

I still catch myself reaching for “carefully.” It’s a hard reflex to unlearn. But the whole time, my body was asking for the opposite of restraint, and I’d been hearing it as noise.

I write weekly about all things movement health.

*Source for the collagen section: Shaw G, Lee-Barthel A, Ross ML, Wang B, Baar K. “Vitamin C–enriched gelatin supplementation before intermittent activity augments collagen synthesis.” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2017

Two months later, I was on a plane to Europe (in retrospect, possibly not my best idea). Somewhere over the Atlantic, I put on a mindbodygreen podcast episode — an interview with Henry Abbott, a former ESPN writer who had just published a book called Ballistic. The book is a semi-biographical account of P3, an elite pro sports training facility and biomechanics lab in Santa Barbara. P3’s founder, Dr. Marcus Elliott, had a point of view that really spoke to me: bring actual data to mobility assessment and injury recovery, keep play in everyday life, and don’t let the friction of growing a business erode the quality of care. I was enamored enough to try some of the exercises in the airplane bathroom. I may recommend this to all for future flights.

So when I got the chance to visit P3’s “normie” facility in Santa Barbara recently, I took it. The Lab is a performance training facility closely partnered with P3, focused on bringing its high-tech, data-driven protocols to the general population. At six months post-injury, I could handle most daily activities and had started working out again. I was ready for the next phase of rehab; I just didn’t know what it should look like. That turned out to be exactly the right reason to go.

The week-long clinic

If you’re a Santa Barbara local, you can simply be a member at The Lab, and I’m jealous of you. It’s a special place — people from all walks of life with a shared purpose of taking care of their bodies. They host longevity circles, cookouts, and dinners on summer nights. The community is as much the product as the training.

As a visitor, the option is a week-long clinic: day one is intake and assessment, days two through four are training with a PT, and day five is a review of your protocol and training plan. You leave with a thorough evaluation of where you stand and a multi-week program to keep working on at home.

The assessment

I arrived Monday toward the end of the day, when only a handful of people were still training. That’s where I met Alex, the CEO and head of training, who walked us two blocks over to the P3 facility where the assessments are held.

P3’s core thesis is that you can’t fix what you haven’t measured. The assessment is essentially the same one the pros get: force plates, 3D motion capture, cameras recording how you squat, jump, land, and decelerate. Cameras everywhere. For someone whose past year of “assessment” consisted of a 1–10 pain scale and the question “does this hurt when I press here?”, producing actual data with my body felt like a different sport entirely. I was nervous - the idea of getting a “grade” brought me back to my high school days of chasing perfect GPAs.

The results weren’t shared right away. We would use the rest of the week to observe, sharpen, and shape the assessment and program. I left feeling more capable than I did walking in — at 6 months post-injury, I was moving better than I thought I would be.

Training

Days two through four were training sessions built directly off Monday’s data. I trained for about 90 minutes each day. Workouts always started with a dynamic warm up, and then I went into focused blocks of exercise that targeted my problem areas. For example, given my upper back injury history, over the course of the week I did many variations of wall angels to open up, activate, and build strength in my thoracic region.

What struck me was how unexotic it all was. No gadgets strapped to my head, no recovery pods. Most of it looked like ordinary gym work — squats, landings, presses, isometric holds — except every rep existed for a reason traceable to a number from the assessment. The difference between this and my regular workouts wasn’t intensity. It was specificity.

Recovery & Physical Therapy

I also met with a physical therapist a few times over the week. She had discussed my case with the training team, so already had the context, and was focused on helping me build a mobility routine to target the same areas. I was thrilled to learn my PT work up until the clinic had paid off. 🙂

Each training day ended with a recovery activity: compression boots, red light therapy, whatever was available at the time we were there, we went for it. Nothing like a little red light nap before having tacos for lunch around the corner.

The final eval

On day five, we sat down and went through everything: where my movement patterns stand, what’s likely driving the remaining issues, and a multi-week training program to take home. For me, unsurprisingly the biggest focus was building my mid-back / thoracic strength, which was necessary in order to hold up the weaker muscles and impacted joints from my injury. But on top of that, I also learned of a few imbalances in my hip movements that have definitely contributed to knee pain while running in the past. It all felt very approachable, and I left feeling like I had a few key things to focus on to better my movement health.

I’ve spent a year collecting opinions about my body — from doctors, PTs, my mom, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. This was the first time someone handed me a plan and showed me the evidence underneath it.

Reflections

The technology is impressive, but it’s not what stayed with me. What stayed with me is that this level of clarity exists — and almost nobody can access it. A week in Santa Barbara is a privilege of time and money that most people managing an injury simply don’t have.

A few things I keep coming back to:

• Data changes your relationship with fear - After an injury, you start treating your body like a haunted house — every twinge might be the ghost of flare ups coming to get you. The data empowered me to push myself and push through the mental hurdles of pain. I felt confident to get stronger and motivated to bounce back.

• Play belongs in the protocol - Elliott’s framing in Ballistic — that play is a training input, not a reward for finishing rehab — held up in person. The Lab’s community isn’t decoration. People stay consistent because they actually like being there. Thinking about play reminded me that putting in the work is needed for me to enjoy the many years of skiing, pickleball, and running I have left.

• The gap is the story - Pro athletes get measured, programmed, and re-measured. The rest of us get a referral and a handout of clamshell exercises. The science isn’t the bottleneck anymore — distribution is.

I left with a plan, a jump photo I’m unreasonably proud of, and a stronger version of the conviction that sent me down this road in the first place: people recovering from injury don’t need more opinions. They need a clearer picture of their own body, and a way to act on it.

Growing up, we had tai chi and qi gong posters on the walls — robed figures mid-stance, Chinese characters running down the side. A side hobby for my dad, and definitely not for me. It wasn’t until I saw the growing number of videos in my Tiktok feed that I thought to take a deeper look into this practice, and really understand the benefits.

Qi gong (气功, “life energy cultivation”) is a 4,000-year-old practice from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The structure is simple: slow, intentional movement, coordinated with breath, repeated daily. In the TCM model, the body runs on a network of channels, meridians, through which qi flows. Stagnation is what produces pain and fatigue. Qi gong is the practice of keeping those pathways clear through movement.

Given qi gong falls under the TCM framework, it’s easy to dismiss. TCM feels a bit like an all or nothing thing — either you “believe in it” or you don’t. That’s the point though - modalities within TCM have their merits, and picking apart each one from a research-led perspective can yield surprising insights.

The research is strong

While qi gong is firmly rooted in the Chinese medicine tradition, its effects on stress, sleep, and chronic pain can be explained via western concepts as well.

Dr. Felice Chan, a board-certified TCM practitioner and acupuncturist with a neuroscience background, writes:

“Your nervous system needs pockets of joy and stillness that are not tied to productivity. Moments where you step out of fight-or-flight and allow your qi to settle. This is how hormones regulate. This is how digestion repairs. This is how immunity strengthens.”

While western sports science doesn’t use the word meridians, it does have a consistent research signal for what slow, diaphragmatic breathing does to the nervous system. A nasal inhale coordinated with physical expansion activates the parasympathetic nervous system, reduces cortisol, and modulates pain signaling over time. The two frameworks describe different mechanisms and prescribe the same work.

The strongest signal is on stress and cortisol. A 2024 systematic review of randomized controlled trials found that qi gong produced significant stress reduction compared to not just no-intervention controls, but also stretching programs and cognitive-behavioral therapy. A 2025 network meta-analysis spanning 44 studies found qi gong ranked second only to yoga in cortisol reduction among all exercise modalities tested — a field that includes running, strength training, and HIIT.

Sleep is the next most consistent finding. A 2025 systematic review published in Frontiers in Public Health analyzed 15 randomized controlled trials involving 1,074 participants and found consistent improvements in sleep quality. The effect is particularly well-documented in people with chronic stress and long-term health conditions.

Anxiety and depression have a meaningful evidence base, though more mixed. Multiple meta-analyses show statistically significant reductions in anxiety scores following one to three months of regular practice. The proposed mechanism runs through the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems — specifically, parasympathetic activation and downstream effects on cortisol and inflammatory markers.

Where the research is still catching up:

• Most trials are small (under 100 participants)

• Protocols vary significantly between studies, making direct comparison difficult

• Placebo controls are hard to design for a movement practice

• Long-term follow-up data is limited

None of that makes the research weak. It means qi gong is in the same position as most complementary medicine: consistent signals across independent studies, not yet at pharmaceutical trial scale. What separates it from many alternatives is that the evidence base is growing, and the outcomes being measured are objective and reproducible.

Starting a practice

Starting a practice might look like daily 10 min sessions for three months. It works best in the morning, before you go about your day. One of the most widely practiced qi gong sequences is eight movements, each done for about one to two minutes. A few of them:

• Arms raising overhead, palms up, then slowly lowering — like a full-body stretch

• Drawing a bow: wide stance, one arm extends forward, the other pulls back

• One arm pressing up toward the ceiling while the other presses down, alternating sides

• Wide-stance squat, swaying the head and hips in opposite directions

• Rising onto your toes, then dropping back to flat feet, letting the vibration travel up your spine

Most people I’ve talked to try qi gong for a day or a week, and then stop. Qi gong rewards commitment; the nervous-system adaptation that makes qi gong effective is cumulative. For post-acute recovery, for chronic pain that hasn’t responded to more aggressive intervention, or for anyone looking for a daily practice that does something the gym doesn’t: qi gong is the most accessible Eastern modality with the clearest evidence base.

It’s no wonder it’s been blowing up on social media - it’s a free and approachable way to work towards nervous system regulation. The barrier to entry is low. The commitment is daily and short. The framework is optional.

Read more about Qi gong and see a few example videos here.

Stretching is currently in the middle of a massive retail expansion. StretchLab has appeared on Entrepreneur Magazine’s “Fastest-Growing Franchises” list four years running, and big-box gyms like Equinox and Lifetime have rebranded their floor plans to include “recovery zones” centered on assisted stretching. Even the digital market is peaking, with apps like Pliability (formerly ROMWOD) successfully convincing us that “holding a pose” is a pillar of high performance. Stretching is a net positive; it manually pulls on muscle fibers to relieve the sensation of being physically clamped together.

But why isn’t it fixing your shoulder?

In most cases of chronic tension—distinct from the soreness you feel after a hard workout—tightness is a symptom, not the root cause. It’s a signal that your body is compensating for something else. A classic example is the “desk slump.” If you spend eight hours a day rounded forward, your chest muscles eventually lose the capacity to hold up the weight of your head. To keep you upright and balanced, your shoulder muscles tighten up to act as a secondary support system. Your shoulder is effectively “guarding” you. Stretching that shoulder provides a temporary release, but it does nothing to address the structural demand that caused the tightness in the first place. You are essentially trying to loosen a knot that your body is tying on purpose for safety.

I am not a doctor, but in the case of a nagging shoulder, a few likely culprits are usually at play:

• The Ergonomic Trap: The way your desk is set up might be forcing your body into a un-natural “shape” it has to work overtime to maintain.

• A Strength Deficit: What feels like tightness is often actually weakness. If a muscle isn’t strong enough to handle its daily load, it will lock down to create stability.

• The Stress Response: If you’ve been carrying a heavy load emotionally, your nervous system can keep your muscles in a state of high alert, making them feel short even if they are physically fine.

Stretching is a genuinely positive habit, I’m not arguing against it. But it works best as maintenance, not triage. If you’re being consistent and still circling back to the same ache, the stretching is doing its job but something upstream isn’t. The useful question isn’t am I stretching enough — it’s what is my body compensating for. Otherwise, you’re just paying for the privilege of being temporarily limber.

The stretching boom is, in a way, a mirror of the problem it’s trying to solve. We want relief that’s fast, visible, and feels good in the moment. Assisted stretching delivers all three. I’m not gonna lie - I thoroughly enjoyed my StretchLab session. What it doesn’t deliver - and what no amount of holding a pose will - is a more resilient body. That comes from the less photogenic work: building strength in the muscles that are overloaded, improving the movement patterns that are creating the compensation, and treating tightness as a message worth decoding instead of a signal to mute. Stretching has a role in that protocol. Just not the starring one.

Is cupping having a moment in 2026 and also having an identity crisis? The same word now refers to a wellness add-on at the spa, a facial beauty product you can buy at Ulta, a physical-therapy tool for chronic back pain, and a centuries-old practice rooted in traditional Chinese medicine. Each version means something different, claims something different, and delivers something different. What does cupping actually do, and is it worth the hype?

The origin of cupping

Cupping has been around for thousands of years. Most people know it as a key pillar of traditional Chinese medicine, but it also draws roots from Middle Eastern and Egyptian traditions, dating as far back as 3000 BC. This ancient mechanism is very simple: it uses suction created from the cups to draw negative pressure and pull your tissue upward, increasing local blood flow, but even within that there are a couple different types of cupping.

The Western understanding and most modern version of cupping is used as a form of myofascial decompression, which increases circulation in the general area and helps with nervous system regulation. In the more Eastern or traditional Chinese medicine framing, cupping is a key way to clear “stagnation” in your body and helps to move your energy around and release blockages that are in your meridians. We’ll talk more about traditional Chinese medicine in another post.

There are many styles of cupping, and it’s not all the same

• Dry cupping: static suction, the classic marks, mostly used for relaxation and circulation. This is the version that is most common in western culture today — and the type we will be most focused on.

• Wet cupping (hijama): involves small incisions, draws blood, more common in Middle Eastern traditions, rarely practiced in US wellness settings

• Fire cupping: flame creates the suction, traditional TCM method, still used in authentic TCM clinics

• Silicone/myofascial cupping: the cups move across tissue, this is what your PT is likely using, closest to a deep tissue massage in effect

• Facial cupping: the Ulta aisle version, much smaller cups, used for lymphatic drainage and “gua sha adjacent” skin benefits

Cupping is typically done with a clinician, but we’ve seen the rise of at-home cupping sets. You can order an air pump/suction cupping set or a silicone cupping set from retailers like Amazon or Ulta. Be mindful not to leave cups on for too long or with too much pressure. While bruising is normal and clears in a few days, the goal is to stimulate the area but not cause additional pain.

Is cupping beneficial?

It’s hard to make the case that cupping isn’t beneficial at all. The harder question is what counts as “evidence” for a modality like this, because the research base looks fundamentally different from the clinical trials we associate with pharmaceutical drugs.

Pharmaceutical pain trials are typically large, well-funded, and designed to show a clear short-term reduction in pain in narrowly defined patient populations. Alternative therapies like cupping don’t have that infrastructure behind them, and the research base reflects it. A 2025 review in Frontiers in Medicine mapped 234 published studies on cupping for pain over the past 25 years across 31 countries. The most-studied applications include lower back pain, neck pain, migraine, and fibromyalgia. Studies are spread across small trials with inconsistent protocols, and the results are mixed: some show meaningful pain reduction, others show effects similar to sham (placebo) controls.

That mixed signal doesn’t mean cupping doesn’t work. It means the research framework we use to evaluate pharmaceuticals isn’t the right one for evaluating an intervention like this. Both things are true: there is a substantial body of clinical research on cupping, and the field is still working toward standardized protocols and stronger study designs. Cupping has been around for millennia and is still catching up to the modern framework for evaluating it.

Almost 10 years ago, Michael Phelps showed up to the 2016 Rio Olympics with circular marks across his back and shoulders. Wikipedia traffic for “cupping therapy” hit an all-time high the following day. Today, it is commonly an add-on for massage therapy, and it’s very trendy to do cupping to improve lymphatic drainage and help the face and body look more toned. The reality is that, while cupping has limited clinical evidence at scale, it’s clear that people are adopting it for both its cosmetic impact and for pain management, chronic pain relief, and recovery.

Could cupping be worth a shot?

Cupping is a safe modality that has shown positive benefits for pain relief and improving circulation as part of a broader treatment program or protocol. Cupping is most credibly a component of a treatment plan, not a replacement for one.

I’ve personally found cupping at my physical therapist’s office very helpful. The targeted placement and deep suction seemed to really help my muscles relax. I would consider it a key part of my recovery protocol over the last 12 months, as I’ve recovered from an upper back injury. Massage cupping has been mixed, and I recently purchased the WTHN cupping set from Ulta. The silicone suction cups don’t quite get the same effect as the air cupping technique, but it does feel relaxing. I’ll keep at it and report back.

If you’re struggling with back pain or are feeling like you have a lot of chronic muscle tension from an active lifestyle, cupping could be an interesting step for you. Cupping could also be an effective form of self-relaxation, as a complement or replacement for massage therapy. Trying an at-home set could be an inexpensive starting point. It doesn’t replace seeing a practitioner who is able to target areas that require deep tissue release or move areas that have energy stagnation. If that’s your goal, then definitely reach out and work with a trusted practitioner instead.

Here to stay

Cupping therapy is here to stay. The identity crisis isn’t really a crisis — it’s an ancient practice meeting a modern wellness culture that is ready to embrace it. I suspect it will continue to integrate into modern physical therapy, wellness consumerism, and it could become the next “weekly massage”. As someone who spends too much time on computer work, I’m always looking for ways to make deposits back into my body’s wellness bank. Is cupping on your list of wellness remedies to try next?