Aquatic Therapy Balance Training
Mangiarelli Rehabilitation physical therapy assistant and aquatic therapist Sue demonstrates several exercises you can do to improve your balance through exercising in our warm water therapeutic pool. Balance is essential to your daily life, allowing you to maintain a stable, upright position when standing, walking, sitting, and climbing stairs. Improving balance and stability is a key goal of aquatic therapy. Aquatic therapy utilizes the physical properties of water to help patients heal and regain strength, balance, and function without placing unnecessary pressure on healing joints in a safe environment.
What is Aquatic Therapy?
Aquatic therapy at Mangiarelli Rehabilitation takes place in our warm water therapy pool and involves targeted exercises performed in the water to help patients build strength, mobility, balance, and stability in a safe environment with minimal stress on joints. Aquatic therapy is used to treat a variety of orthopedic injuries and conditions like arthritis, back pain, balance disorders, sports injuries, Parkinson’s disease, and deconditioning after illness. Aquatic therapy utilizes the physical properties of water to help patients heal and regain strength, function, and balance without placing unnecessary pressure on healing joints.
Why Balance Training Matters
Balance is essential to your daily life, allowing you to maintain a stable, upright position when standing, walking, sitting, and climbing stairs. Maintaining good balance is especially important for seniors as aging contributes to visual, vestibular, and muscular weakness issues that negatively impact balance. Seniors are most at risk of having a balance problem with 75% of Americans ages 70 and older diagnosed with abnormal balance. Improving balance has many benefits, including increased body awareness, joint stability, coordination, and posture as well as a reduced risk of injury and falling.
Balance Training in our Aquatic Therapy Pool
Aquatic therapy offers a safe, low-impact physical activity to improve balance and function without the risk of falling. Improving balance and stability is a key goal of aquatic therapy and the unique properties of water allow individuals and particularly seniors struggling with balance to enhance their balance safely.
Water is buoyant which allows for ease of muscle movement and reduction of pain. Buoyancy is the ability to float in water, meaning the deeper you go into water the less weight your bones and joints must bear. This significantly reduces the pressure on joints and diminishes weight-bearing stress. If immersed in water up to your neck, you bear 15% of your body weight. If immersed up to your hip level, you bear 50% of your weight. Water’s buoyancy lowers gravity’s force on you, allowing you to move more easily even with weaker muscles and perform balance and gait training exercises that you may not be able to perform on land.
Water also exerts hydrostatic pressure on the body when submerged in the pool, producing a gentle compressive force that can reduce swelling, joint inflammation, and pain. The greater your depth in the water, the greater the pressure exerted and the more support your body receives from the surrounding water, making the water a safe environment to prevent injury while working on your balance. The hydrostatic pressure provides longer times for vestibular processing for postural reactions and better movement perception. Therefore, older adults with risk of falls can perform functional exercises safely.
The viscosity of water, or water’s resistance against an object (your body) helps you gently strengthen your muscles without placing undue stress on your joints. Water has greater resistance than air, meaning the harder you push or pull through water, the more resistance you experience, helping you improve your strength while supported by the water.
The warm temperature of the water can help relax muscles and reduce pain when performing exercises in the water that would normally cause pain if done on land. Water allows patients to exercise without a fear of falling, because if a person “falls” in the water, the water will support them and allow them to regain balance rather than falling to the ground while on land. Reducing the fear of falling in seniors through exercising in an aquatic therapy pool can help them improve their dynamic balance.
Mangiarelli Rehabilitation physical therapy assistant and aquatic therapist Sue demonstrates several exercises you can do in our aquatic therapy pool to improve your balance in the video below. Sue progresses a patient from side-stepping holding on to the edge of the pool to walking without support in the water, marching, and walking heel to toe to then performing a single-leg balance in the water and doing step ups and step downs on a box in the water to build balance.
Research studies have shown that aquatic therapy is highly effective in improving balance and functional independence in physical therapy patients, particularly seniors. In one study, patients underwent an aquatic exercise program over 12 weeks, completing two forty-minute sessions each week. Researchers found that patients did experience a significant increase in balance after the intervention as well as a reduction in falls and an improvement in fear of falling among the participants.
In 2020, a study assessed the effects on balance of an aquatic muscle strengthening and flexibility program in healthy, but sedentary-lifestyle elderly women. Twenty-eight of the women underwent aquatic training over 4 months, while the control group of the other 28 women received no intervention. Researchers found that the aquatic therapy intervention group did experience improvements in their strength, flexibility, and functional balance post-intervention.
Another study compared land vs. aquatic therapy exercise groups in older adults and found that improvements in function and balance could be seen in the aquatic therapy group after five weeks. Researchers noted that in the aquatic environment, postural reactions could be planned and corrected safely without fear of falling and patients also had a greater joint range of motion in water, allowing for stimulation of proprioception and optimized feedback regarding the body’s balance given by the water’s pressure and resistance. A further study of older women who competed an aquatic therapy cardiovascular and muscular endurance program showed that women improved walking speed, agility, and flexibility after the intervention as well as experienced improvements in their static balance and moving from sitting to standing.
Aquatic therapy is a gentle yet effective way to improve function, balance, strength, and mobility through exercise in our warm water therapeutic pool. Give us a call to see if aquatic therapy might be the right next step for you to improve your balance safely!
