Your safe swimming pool can help you stay active and healthy as an aquatic therapy pool in your own backyard. Home aquatic therapy gives you an easy, comfortable way to rehabilitate injuries, maintain activity, and find relief to tissue and joint ailments that make out-of-the-water mobility so painful. It can be the perfect solution for elderly pool owners, but swimmers of every age group can reap the benefits of incorporating their pool into their health and wellness practices as long as a focus is maintained on aquatic therapy safety.
Anyone can use a swimming pool for exercise. In fact, it’s more accurate to say that almost everyone who uses your pool is getting exercise in some form, whether it’s intentional or they’re just maintaining a higher pulse rate while splashing around and having fun. While exercise can be part of using your pool for aquatic therapy, the term is more frequently used to describe an intentional program meant to harness the pool’s unique qualities to treat the body and its ailments.
Aquatic pool therapy is possible because of the properties that exist when you immerse yourself in a body of water. We tend to think of water as making us weightless, giving us the ability to float, but the truth is that the water is very dense and heavy, flowing in to fill every empty space in the pool as it’s created when we move in the water. This mass helps lift our bodies, supporting part of our weight, pushes against us, and creates a stable thermal barrier around swimmers while they are using the pool. They may be the same qualities that make your pool party a fun event for the whole family, but for those who need a methodical, low-stress way to exercise their body, they’re a path to wellness.
Whether you’ve decided to pursue the health benefits of aquatic therapy on your own or it’s been directed by your doctor, it’s far easier to commute to your backyard several times a week rather than collect your swimming apparel, drive to a gym or rehabilitation facility, change, do your therapy routine, shower, change back, and drive home. It also frees you from “business hours,” leaving you free to pursue your therapeutic activities when it fits your schedule the best.
While you can usually trust gyms and rehabilitation centers to meet their responsibilities under pool safety laws, when you own the pool, you can ensure it has the right equipment to improve your aquatic therapy safety without inhibiting your treatments. A removable mesh pool fence helps protect the perimeter around the pool with strong, rip-resistant mesh walls and a self-closing, self-latching gate that prevents unsupervised access by children or other at-risk pool users. Swimming pool safety covers can also be installed as a second layer of protection above the pool’s surface, keeping out dirt and debris while preventing a full-grown adult from entering the water, instead holding them up and out of danger until they can be helped to safety. It’s important to make sure your home wellness aid doesn’t become the sight of tragedy by contributing to the thousands of deaths attributed to accidental drownings annually.
One of the benefits of aquatic therapy in your pool is improved proprioception, or your awareness of how your body is moving and the position of your joints while it’s doing so. For those suffering from joint conditions–either due to ailments or injuries–this can be an invaluable therapeutic tool. It allows for a healthy range of motion that helps strengthen the body with less risk of injury from improper alignment or over-extension.
Beyond the support and improved awareness of your joints, the resistance of moving through the water helps lower the impact of your exercise when compared to similar movements out of the water. When you exercise in an aquatic therapy pool, the water helps support a portion of your body’s weight, reducing the force distributed through tissue and joints as you move without robbing exercise of its effectiveness. This can help mobility-impaired elderly but also proves invaluable to obese patients who need support while they strengthen their bodies and special needs children and adults who can benefit from an environment that requires less strength from their body for controlled movements that improve muscle and nerve response.
The water in your aquatic therapy pool is always pressing against the body. This pressure acts as a gentle compress, which has its own set of aquatic therapy benefits. The gentle, cool-to-warm pressure helps relieve inflammation in soft tissues and can also help ease the discomfort from joint ailments such as arthritis. Since your body is also supported by the water during your therapy session, there is a decreased risk of the activity exacerbating your injury in the process.
Improved aquatic therapy safety starts with a free estimate from your local pool safety expert. They’ll schedule a visit to take a look at your pool area, get the measurements they need, talk to you about your safety needs, and tailor a written estimate that shows you how cost-effective peace of mind can be without compromising on the protection of your loved ones. Whether it’s a removable mesh pool fence that keeps out pets but is easy and convenient for seniors to use or the addition of a swimming pool safety cover that maximizes your protection for the whole family, they’re ready to help you. Request your free quote from your local All-Safe Pool installer today.
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