Osteoarthritis of the Knee - Why Does Hydrotherapy Help?

The main difficulty facing arthritis sufferers is that they are told exercise will help but exercise very often increases their pain. Our natural instinct to avoid pain makes us more likely to do less activity, resulting in weaker muscles that don't support our joints.

To break out of this cycle you need to exercise these supporting muscles to make them stronger. The pay-off is less pain but the road is not easily travelled. The most difficult part is getting started. There needs to be a bit of 'trial and error' - gently testing various exercises until you stumble across one that lets you fatigue the muscles without aggravating your knee pain. The best way to do this is to seek the advice of a physical therapist. If the co-pay remains too expensive, there is no reason why you can't have a go yourself. You will need to do your research and find as much information as you can on the subject. There are also some inexpensive books covering this subject.

Why the pool?

Osteoarthritis is primarily a disease of weight-bearing joints. Being in water helps you eliminate or greatly reduce the load on your joints. This allows some exercises to be pain-free in water that would otherwise aggravate you knees.

Purpose built hydrotherapy pools are heated. Heat helps combat stiffness in joints (but remember it can aggravate some inflammatory conditions). The combination of gentle exercise and heat can help lower pain levels. Remember though - just because you don't have access to a heated pool doesn't mean you can't benefit from this type of exercise. Any body of water takes weight off your joints.

The pool also allows you to start very gently. A common reason for people giving up on exercise is that they start too fast, too soon. This causes a flare up and the natural response is "I'm not doing that again......I could not walk for days"

Start in chest high water and walk some laps. If this doesn't bother your knees before or after, add some shallow squats. No two knees are the same so its up to you to learn about your knees and take control of  your arthritis.