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Hot Water Therapy Exercise : Knee Walk and Knee Circles

June 30th, 2010

The Knee Walk hot water therapy exercise is meant to treat lower back. The assumption is that you are lying in hot water tub. The knee walk exercise is good for abdominal muscles, and doing it without hands will increase the workout for stomach.
- Position a towel or cushion beneath you, your head and shoulders as well.
- Recline against the back of the tub, or the edge of the hot tub.
- Settle down until you are nearly lying on your back, but do not drown.
- Knees should be up, your feet suspended, loose and comfortably dangling.
- Place your left hand on left kneecap and right hand on right kneecap.
- Walk your knees back and forth – a total of three to five inches back and forth is plenty.
- Do for 30 to 60 seconds.
- You can walk your knees without keeping your hands on knee caps once you are comfortable with this exercise.

The Knee Circles hot water therapy exercise is meant to treat lower back. The assumption is that you are lying in hot water tub.
- Position a towel or cushion beneath you, your head and shoulders as well.
- Recline against the back of the tub, or the edge of the hot tub.
- Settle down until you are nearly lying on your back, but do not drown.
- Knees should be up, your feet suspended, loose and comfortably dangling.
- Place your left hand on left kneecap and right hand on right kneecap. Keep your knees tightly together.
- Move your knees in a circular motion. Move at a comfortable speed. try to keep your entire lower back on the tub bottom at all times.
- Do not make big circles at first. Do this for a few seconds at first and work up to 30 to 60 sec.
- Once you are comfortable doing this exercise, do it without keeping your hands on knee caps.

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Posted in Hot water therapy, backache, health, heat, hot, pain

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Hot Water Therapy Exercises: Shoulder Lifts and Shoulder Circles

June 23rd, 2010

Shoulder lifts are meant for the areas like neck, trapezius and upper back. In all these exercises, the assumption is a hot shower is beating down on your body. For doing this exercise, stand normally and the gap between your feet should be about 18 inches. Posture during standing: imagine you are hanging from a string where the string extends from the top of your head to a hook above your head. This ensures that you are standing straight and tall. Further, your shoulders are held loose and your arms are resting comfortably at your sides.
- Move your shoulders up (imagine the effort is to touch your shoulders to your ears) and, but your shoulders should not be moving to the front or the back. However, your head and neck should remain extended.
- Keep in this position for 6 seconds while breathing comfortably.
- Relax, get your shoulders slowly move to the normal position (you can use your finger tip to slowly move down your legs and drag your shoulders down along with them).
- Do this exercise for five more times.
- Standard precaution : you need to maintain a good posture.

Shoulder Circles

This exercise is also meant for neck, trapezius and upper back. Shoulder circles are very similar to shoulder lifts, the difference being you will mix circles with your shoulders instead of simply lifting them up.
- As in previous exercise, stand comfortably, and move your shoulders forward to the maximum extent possible, but your shoulders should not lift up.
- When your shoulders have gone the maximum possible forward without lifting, start raising your shoulders. Your arms and neck should not tighten.
- Without causing any turtling of the neck or tightening of any muscles other than in the shoulders, bring your shoulders as far back possible.
- Now complete the circle by bringing your shoulder down. After this, bring them to their normal relax position.
- The attempt should be to do this entire motion in one smooth motion rather than three or four separate motions even if it takes up to 30 seconds, it is fine for the first few attempts.
- Your breathing should remain normal.
- Now, do the shoulder circle in opposite direction.
- Once you are used to this exercise, it should not take more than 6 to 7 seconds per circle.

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Posted in Exercise, Hot water therapy, backache, cure, health, heat, hot, neck, pain

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Exercise techniques : why exercise is important?

June 22nd, 2010

Rhythmic exercise can help your back and neck in two ways. It will loosen joints and muscles, and it will increase the range of motion that is possible. Certain exercises can do this by contracting and relaxing the muscle fibers that have gotten used to being permanently shortened.
Exercise helps flush muscle tissues that suffers from a permanent state of semi-contraction and decreased blood circulation. On full contraction of muscles, toxic materials are pushed out of the blood. Soon after, when the blood moves back in due to the relaxation of muscles, the blood carries along fresh nutrients and more oxygen.
It is similar to cleaning a dirty cloth. You would put it in clean water, squeeze it elsewhere, then again put it in the water and squeeze it elsewhere. Through this method the dirt in the cloth gets removed.
Many of these exercises can be done outside the shower and without water but it is important to understand that these exercises get far more affected when done inside a shower, especially with hot water since hot water has an advantage by increasing blood circulation and causing localized relaxation wherever the water comes into contact with the body.
An improvement technique:these exercises would be far from effective if some amount of massage (even if only for a minute or so) is applied on the affected muscle groups. Another important precaution is more about safety: a bath can be a slippery area and injuries due to falling or impact can be troublesome. It is necessary to have some object to act as an cushion, large bath towel placed at the bottom of the bath is ideal for this purpose (if it gets wet you can always dry it later).

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Posted in Exercise, Hot water therapy, backache, benefits, cure, health, heat, hot, neck, pain

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