Hijama vs Sports Cupping: What Is the Difference?

In the summer of 2016, a swimmer walked out at the Rio Olympics with round purple marks across his shoulders, and for a few days the whole world asked the same question: what are those circles? (WGBH News, 8 August 2016). The answer was cupping. And ever since, a good number of people who search for hijama arrive with that picture in their heads.

It is a reasonable place to start. It is also not quite the right one.

The short answer

Sports cupping and hijama share a tool and very little else. Both use cups and suction, and both can leave round marks. Sports cupping stops at the suction. Hijama - which is also called wet cupping - adds a few small, shallow scratches between two rounds of suction, and it is done as a practice of the Sunnah, not as part of a training routine.

We offer both. Dry cupping, the suction-only kind, is $115. Hijama is $135.

What is the same

The cups go on the skin, the air is drawn out, and the skin rises gently into the cup. That part is identical, whether it happens in a team's recovery room or in ours. So is the mark it leaves - a round, coloured circle where the cup sat, which fades over the following days.

If you have only ever seen cupping on a television screen, then you have seen roughly what the first few minutes of a session look like. That much of the picture is accurate.

What is different

The scratches. In hijama, the first cups come off, the practitioner makes a few very small, shallow scratches on the skin where they sat, and the cups go back on. That second round is the part that makes it wet cupping. Sports cupping has no second round. Most people who come to us for the first time find the scratching is quicker and smaller than they had imagined - but it is a real difference, and it is better that you know it before you book than discover it in the room.

The reason. For the athletes in those photographs, cupping is one recovery routine among many, chosen for the sake of the next race. Hijama is something else. Muslims keep it because the Prophet ﷺ was cupped himself and spoke well of it, in narrations recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim. It is a Sunnah practice first. That is how we offer it, and that is the only frame in which we offer it.

What comes before. Because it is wet cupping, a session here begins with questions - about your health, anything you take, anything that has changed. Sometimes the honest answer to those questions is not today, and the session moves. A suction-only session elsewhere may not ask you anything at all.

What hijama is, in one paragraph

Hijama is the cupping practice of the prophetic tradition: light suction, then a few small, shallow scratches, then suction again, done by a trained practitioner with a sterile, single-use kit, in a private room, one person at a time. It is offered here to Muslims as a Sunnah practice. It is not a medical procedure, and it is not a substitute for medical care.

Which one should you book?

That is your decision, and nobody will make it for you. A few honest pointers:

• If what you want is the Sunnah, you are looking for hijama - wet cupping.
• If the scratches are the part holding you back, dry cupping exists, and there is no pressure to move from one to the other.
• If you are not sure, say so when you book. You will be talked through both before anything is decided.

There is a longer piece on the difference between wet and dry cupping if you want the detail of each, and another on whether hijama hurts if that is the real question underneath.

Who you will see

Sisters are seen by a woman practitioner and brothers by a man. The two lanes book on separate calendars, and every session is one person at a time behind a closed door.

We are inside the HAWA Fairfax Community Center at Fair Lakes - Room 401a, on the fourth floor. By appointment only.

Book at hikmahealing.art/appointments

Hijama is a traditional practice and is not a substitute for medical care. If you are on medication, pregnant, or unsure for any reason, speak to your doctor first and say so at intake.