According to the internet, I wasn't the only person who wondered what those red circles were on Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps' shoulder and back Aug 7. In fact, I bet you didn't even survive the first opportunity to click on a link that said "Olympic champion shows up with strange marks all over body. How they got there MIGHT SHOCK YOU!"
Days into the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Games, it seems implausible you haven't figured out the circles were the result of the ancient therapy practice called cupping, and Phelps is far from the only athlete who participates. The thing is, even after I found out the circles were caused by cupping and read three different articles describing what cupping is, I still didn't get it. So I figured it might be time to visit Jerod Felice, managing partner of FX Physical Therapy, located within the Under Armour Performance Center.
"What it does is it will separate the layers of tissue and loosen up soft tissue, basically," Felice said. "The body is just layers of tissue stacked on each other. The muscle, then there's a layer of fascia, and then another muscle. The cupping will separate those adhesions that kind of bind up the tissue and don't allow the tissue to glide in those grooves. This will help separate that and loosen up those pathways."
