As I was getting out of the Juniper pool after my regular swim, I couldn’t help noticing the lively masters team getting ready to start their “Fast Friday” session. While Coach Bob was writing the workout on the dry board, swimmers ranging from early thirties to mid-eighties were stretching on land, putting their swim googles and caps on and others were jumping in the pool eager to start their morning workout. As I looked around the spirited team members, I had a strong hunch there could be a good story behind any of these swimmers. I approached Coach Bob with this question in mind, and he immediately responded: “Yes, go to lane 1 and ask for Dr. Bruce Becker.”
Little did I know then that Dr. Becker is a nationally recognized physician, lifelong swimmer and leading expert in the physiological and mental benefits of aquatic therapy. He has worked with Olympians to veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to individuals with a wide range of neurological conditions. At age 83, he swims regularly 6 miles a week. As a passionate swimmer and water baby at heart myself, speaking with Dr. Becker only left me with more reason to be in water as much as possible.
Excerpts from the podcast with Dr. Bruce Becker (quotes have been abridged for print version)
Bruce Becker: Aquatic therapy has been the major focus in throughout my professional career and I have found it so useful both in terms of myself, in terms of maintenance and physical conditioning. But for patients from a broad range of difficult issues, from neuromuscular disease, multiple sclerosis, spinal fractures, complicated pelvic fractures, complicated spinal cord injury, pulmonary disease, cardiac disease, virtually a whole panoply of medical pathology, as well as working with elite athletes, from middle school up through Olympian, world class gold medalists. And the benefits are ubiquitous. Whether you’re an infant or a ninety-year-old. It is unique in that there are really no medications that cross that entire age spectrum.
Adriana Marino: Why does getting in the water feel so good for most?
BB: The feeling of getting into warm water is very, very unique. One of the essential effects that I have tried to investigate throughout my career is the universal effect of somebody sitting down into a warm water bathtub and just going, ahhhhhhh, and I wish I could explain fully from a medical standpoint what that is all about. That increase temperature has a bunch of effects on the human body. It drops blood pressure because the blood vessels relax. It typically decreases heart rate even though the water is warm. And there are a bunch of cardiac effects from just being in the water.
AM: Tell us about those physiological changes.
BB: So, you basically get in the water and in that emerged environment, you’ve got hydrostatic pressure pressing in and all of the parts that are under water. If you’re in neck depth water, the body is basically pushing on your skin, compressing veins inside, pushing the blood up into first the thorax and into the heart and lungs. But at the same time, it’s doing that with interstitial fluid- that is tissue fluid that is not in the vein, but is within muscle. So, there’s a lot of fluid and it increases cardiac volume during immersion like that.
AM: What does that mean for the heart?
BB: Basically, it pushes about 700ml of fluid up into the lungs. About a third of that blood goes into the heart. So, it tends to dilate the heart. The heart rate is a consequence of that. Dilation tends to slow automatically. At the same time that it does that it basically expands and then contracts more. Pulse rate is really important; something that frequently is obsessional in working with athletes. They worry about an exercise that doesn’t boost their heart rate dramatically.
AM: Zone two. Zone three.
BB: Exactly. And when I was especially working with the Olympians, I had to explain to them the basis of the physiology. Working in water basically expands the heart. And at the same time, it’s expanding the heart, it’s making contraction more efficient. So that you increase stroke volume- the amount of blood that’s pushed out with each beat — by about 30%, which is very, very significant. And as a consequence, the decrease in rate, coupled with the increase in volume, means the body is working more efficiently. And at the same time, it’s doing that contraction. Your peripheral arterial structures are relaxing as a physiologic benefit.
So, it basically turns out that the difference between a maximum heart rate in land and in water is about 12%. So, if you’re working to maintain a sustained heart rate on land of say 130, which is pretty rapid, basically, in water you’re dealing with a number that’s down into the teens (110-120). And yet you’re still getting the same cardiovascular benefits out of it, and actually even some more because it’s more efficient for the heart to deliver blood that way than when on land. It’s really quite amazing.
Listen to the complete podcast with Dr. Bruce Becker here.
Adriana Mariño is the producer and host of Bend into Balance. She is a board-certified functional medicine health & wellness coach and a graduate of the 200-hour yoga teacher training at Namaspa and loves to swim, ski, hike, bike, and travel. Adriana can be reached at adrimarino@hotmail.com.
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