When you first hear about this physical therapy technique, you may question the idea of using aquatic physical therapy near you. After all, how is moving around in a warm pool supposed to help anyway? The truth is that this type of therapy can be very helpful, and it can provide three benefits to people who are treating many types of injuries and medical conditions.
1. Takes the pressure off
For most of our lives, we live with the effects of gravity every single day. It’s this force that causes the mass of our bodies to put pressure on our joints, and this sort of pressure can make recovering from injuries or treating certain conditions harder. Aquatic physical therapy, or aquatic therapy, can help take pressure off your joints.
Water has a force that pushes things up, which is called buoyancy. It’s this force that allows you to float on your back in the pool, but it also helps reduce the pressure gravity puts on your joints. This can be helpful for people with arthritis or joint injuries because it makes doing therapeutic exercises easier.
2. Benefits balance
For people with balance issues, using aquatic physical therapy near you can also be beneficial. The benefits this therapy offers for balance comes from the hydrostatic pressure of water. This pressure is the force you feel pushing in on your body when you get in the water, and this force helps keep you upright and stable. A greater feeling of stability during therapy is one benefit this pressure offers. It can also help people be more aware of the position of their joints, and this can help speed up the recovery of patients with knee and hip joint injuries.
3. Provides resistance without weights
Water has a property called viscosity, and this property is what causes water to resist objects moving through it. For example, you may have noticed it’s harder to walk in a pool than on dry land. This is because water offers more resistance to movement than air. For people using aquatic physical therapy near them, viscosity offers the benefit of resistance without the need for weights.
This can be especially helpful for people with hand injuries or arthritis who may have difficulty gripping weights, and the added resistance can be used by therapists to help patients strengthen injured or weak muscles. In turn, this can increase the support for injured or arthritic joints, which can reduce pain.
Find aquatic physical therapy at a Border Therapy Services clinic near you
At Border Therapy Services, our El Paso and Horizon City, Texas, clinics offer aquatic therapy to help patients dealing with many issues. However, this is just one of the many physical therapy techniques we can build into your personalized therapy plan, and some of the other techniques that we may include are:
- Manual therapy
- Therapeutic exercises
- Targeted stretches
- Functional dry needling
- Blood flow moderation therapy
Take the next step to reduce your pain and improve your quality of life. Contact our team today for more information or to schedule an appointment.