Winter 2021 - Water of Life: Learning to Flow
The Winter Journal
Considering our typical weather here in Vancouver, the subject of water seemed appropriate for my winter journal. The essence of water is so pure, with so many beneficial properties that support our overall health. I want to inspire and motivate you to find your own connection with water. (To reinforce key elements of this journal post, I’ve included a series of YouTube videos you can access at the end.)
We are Water
The human body consists of about 70 percent water. It’s essential for our bodies and minds. It helps us move, function and feel better.
Water provides us with nourishment, comfort, support and healing. It’s essential for our minds and bodies as it assists our internal and cognitive function, oxygen supply and energy to name only a few processes.
In short, water keeps us alive.
The Benefits of Aqua Therapy
Today I’m sharing my current experience with “aqua therapy,” an activity that can improve your life physically, mentally, emotionally and socially – the basic elements that underly my 4 Elements philosophy. Aqua therapy has helped me not only commit to my 4 Elements of Health and Training, it has also improved my movement and enhanced my body awareness and posture. It has helped my walking stride and my running gait as well as my overall strength, body awareness, proprioception (the sense of self-movement and body position in one’s own space) and balance.
If you’re not familiar with aqua therapy, it’s essentially moving by walking—forward, backward or laterally—or running while submerged in water. In my case, I started jogging with a progression into running and incorporating various band resistant, medicine ball and balance exercises to support this training while in the water.
When performing aqua therapy, your feet can be on the bottom in shallow water, sometimes on a special treadmill in an enclosed tank (my chosen option), or you can wear a flotation device in deep water and run in place, mimicking the motions of jogging or even sprinting.
Aqua therapy can benefit anyone by improving cardiovascular health, circulation, fitness conditioning, pain-free movement, proprioception, flexibility, strength and balance. It can make you a better athlete. It can help you rehabilitate from injuries. It can improve circulation and lymphatic flow. It’s easy on all your tissues and joints, and it can be challenging and fun.
Before I share more about my own experience, here are ten key benefits that we all can gain from aqua therapy:
1. Aerobic Fitness
Water provides 12 times the resistance of air. When you train in water, it’s easy to move your heart rate into aerobic levels. This is where your body heals, repairs and rejuvenates.
2. Resistance Training and “Biotensegrity”
That extra resistance helps strengthen all the tissues of your body such as muscles, joints and bones. It reinforces your “biotensegrity,” whereby strong and limber muscles absorb the load of day-to-day movement. This is especially important for aging bodies.
3. It’s Easy on the Body
While running is a great aerobic exercise, the repetitive pounding can be hard on the joints. Water running provides the same aerobic benefits without the pounding, and doing it in water can make it pain free and allow you to do more than on land.
4. Range of Movement for Flexibility and Mobility
Buoyancy in the water helps you extend movement of your limbs and range of motion in your joints in a supportive environment.
5. Balance
Running on a treadmill in a tank of water helps improve your strength and balance as you have to adapt to the load of moving water and the pressure of water in a tank.
6. It’s Meditative and Soothing
There’s just something about being in water that calms our minds and bodies, helping reduce stress and anxiety and lower blood pressure.
7. It Improves Proprioception
Often described as the "sixth sense,” proprioception is your sense of self-movement and awareness of body position in your own space. It's one of the key skills we lose. So we have to continue to practise it, especially as we get older.
8. It Exercises and Massages all Tissues
The pressure of the water on your tissues provides its own form of massage, improving circulation and lymphatic flow.
9. It’s Good for Your Posture
Running in water, especially with a flotation device in deep water, or in a water tank, provides feedback so you learn to adapt by correcting and focusing on maintaining good posture and alignment as you exercise.
10. Injury Recovery
If you’re injured and can’t exercise the way you’d like, water walking/running might be a safe alternative to keep you conditioned as you recover. In addition, all the above benefits are likely to aid healing and speed up your recovery.
Water Training
My Aqua Therapy Journey
I launched my own aqua jogging experience in November of 2021, working with Dr. Wilbur Kelsick at the MaxFit Movement Institute in Port Moody. Dr. Kelsick supported and guided me to improve my running gait, posture awareness and strength.
As some of you know from my previous journal, last year I made a purposeful and intense 25-kilometer hike to the Lions mountains, covering the distance in 12 challenging hours. To prepare for that hike, I cut back on my running significantly as I realized training to run is different than training to hike.
During my post-hike recovery, I wanted to run again but realized I had lost my awareness and strength in my running gait. I felt off-center and heavy in my stride. I felt strain and resistance in one of my hamstrings that was only triggered by running.
I was determined to get my running stride back, so I made a commitment to the aqua jogging process. I began with a six-to-eight week plan, using the clinic’s AquaCiser.
After just three weeks of supervised training, I knew the therapy was working. I could feel my imbalances correcting. My stride began to regain its strength. My posture improved. I could feel these changes when I ran outside.
A Workout of All Elements
Although my hamstring has healed fully, I’ve continued my aqua therapy because it encompasses all the health elements of my “4 Elements” philosophy: Physical, Mental, Emotional and Social.
Physical
By choosing to conduct my aqua therapy in my bare feet, in a closed water tank with a treadmill, I feel the improvement through my whole body. It’s there as I strike my foot, up through my trunk to the top of my head. I feel stronger, more aligned with my gait and with my body. I feel a greater appreciation for what my body can do.
Mental
Running in water improves my focus as I work on form, posture and alignment. I must adapt to the load and movement of the water to stabilize my pelvis and trunk to maintain balance. This focus becomes a meditation that keeps me in a consistent stride. It allows me to bring my breathing and yoga practice into my training as I embody the water.
Emotional
By allowing my body to simply be with the water, I feel safe, supported and comforted. I can move in a way that releases my worries and stresses. Water is deeply soothing, and I appreciate how it has given me a safe training space to stress and push my mind and body in ways I didn’t think I could, especially on days when I’m dealing with other life stresses.
Social
Aqua therapy can be a social activity, and I appreciate the support and encouragement Dr. Kelsick has provided through these months. He has helped me gain confidence to stress my body safely and push it in ways I didn’t think I could. Also, by trusting his leadership, I’m able to work further on managing my meditative process as I train through the frequent stress and challenges.
The overall result is that, when I run or walk outside, moving through air rather than water, I feel strong, stable and aligned. This training experience has helped me enhance my emotional resilience with better stress management. These skills apply not only to my training, but also with my overall health and life challenges.
Learning to Flow
Aqua jogging has also helped me learn to face stress and feel a deeper connection to my body. My earlier sessions with the AquaCiser sometimes felt stressful with many moments of anxiety. There was a lot to think about. I felt off-centered, clumsy and uncomfortable as I focused to connect to my body in water. I would tire from all the correcting, especially in the first three weeks. I couldn’t go as fast or for as long as I wanted. These progressions took time and patience, checking in frequently on how my mind and body felt and trust in myself when I had mental resistance.
I had Dr. Kelsick video me as I ran. Initially I was critical of how my body looked in a bathing suit. I had to look past my tissues fluttering in the water and my imbalanced gait. I had to remember that it wasn’t about how I looked, but how I felt. I shifted my focus to appreciation, being grateful that my body could do this and to remember the goal of this process: make the corrections to improve my stride and get stronger so I could continue to run outside—something I love doing.
Dr. Kelsick pushed me to work hard. But I appreciated his support and his attention to the little things that made huge differences in how I felt and progressed.
As I worked through each new session, I learned to relax, to flow, to let my mind and body work together. I learned to center my breath despite the resistance of the water. I even began cold-water immersion. Through the fall and winter, I swam in the ocean at various beaches in B.C. and near my home. (I’ll write more about this in a future journal.)
The embodiment of the cold ocean water enhanced my emotional resilience and stress management. Whether I was ocean swimming or in the AquaCiser, I consciously chose these stresses. I used the unity of my mind and body and controlled focus of my breath to guide me through. I learned to align with nature, facing the stress of cold water and learning to breathe and move with ease. This stress management became a part of my aqua jogging meditation and experience. The two experiences and tools fed each other and supported me to flow through the winter.
Most importantly, I accepted that I can’t control the stress of the training, but I can control how I respond to it. I’ve learned to carry this lesson to the stresses and challenges of my life in general.
Training for Life
I think the most valuable lesson I’ve learned from aqua therapy is that we’re all training for life, especially as we hit middle age and beyond. Yes, we can have specific training goals, but a key reason for exercising is to simply live better, to walk and move freely, with more energy and without pain and appreciate what our bodies can do.
The Tao te Ching urges us to be like water, to simply flow. In this regard, I believe aqua jogging or aqua therapy is an ideal exercise that teaches us to relax and flow in the water of life.
Videos
Here are some videos that demonstrate the AquaCiser training, along with my cold water immersion.
