credit for photo: health.clevelandclinic.org

Healing is not something humans need to aim towards; in fact, it is a part of our natural system. Human body is made up of 5 elements, the body is capable of healing itself on its own, once we start giving it the right inputs through a natural way of living. Our body is made up 70% of water and water plays a pivotal role in cleansing and healing.

In this article, I’m going to discuss the concept of hydrotherapy in detail, with the different techniques and their benefits as well as my own experiments with Cold shower and Wet Pack.

There are many uses for different types of hydrotherapy, including treating joint pain with water exercises and easing muscle stress with cold showers or baths.

I am writing this post through my own experiences and by reading so many articles and watching videos of others’ experiences. So People should always discuss hydrotherapy with a doctor or physical therapist before starting it.

What is hydrotherapy?

Healing is inherent in a living body. I am always super excited to learn new and Natural ways that can heal us without eating any medicines and spending our hard earned money. So overall the only requisite is to remove all that is draining away our vitality. Remove all obstructions, get into Nature and a Nature-based lifestyle, and what results after that is nothing, but better health.

Our body gets support from the panchamahabhootas – Sun, air, water, earth and space, to cleanse and heal itself. During the cleansing and healing, we may face some pains, discomforts, etc. This is when we can administer or make use of different applications with the help of the air, water, sun, earth or space. The applications where we make use of water are called Hydro Therapy.

Scientific studies have shown that hydrotherapy can improve, strength and general fitness in people with various types of arthritis. The exercises can be tailored to your individual needs, so you can start to slowly and gradually build up your strength and flexibility.

Hydrotherapy refers to water-based treatments or exercises aimed to enable physical rehabilitation, fitness, and relaxation for therapeutic purposes. Treatments and exercises are performed while floating, partially submerged, or fully submerged in water, usually in specialized temperature-controlled pools.

Nowadays many of the world’s leading luxury spas offer hydrotherapy suites giving you the opportunity to take advantage of the many positive effects of water therapy. Hydrotherapy encompasses a variety of treatments, including the use of hydrotherapy pools, thermal baths and water circuits, saunas, steam rooms, ‘experience showers’ and more, which can all help to improve a number of conditions.

Some more Related Articles:-

1. Wet Pack & Healthy Lifestyle
2.  lose Weight Naturally?
3.  Benefits of Cold Shower
4. Rice water for Hair Growth

Healing Benefits of hydrotherapy

Hydrotherapy is the use of water to relieve discomfort and promote physical well-being. Hydro Therapy is very useful in assisting our body during cleansing and healing because our body is made of more than 70% of water. Finally, hydrotherapy is a great stress-reducer and has been shown to relieve anxiety and promote feelings of well-being.

The best effects of the water therapies on our body are:-

1. Equalization of the bodily heat
2. Relief from pain by dispersion of congestions
3. Temporary increase in vitality.
4. In an unhealthy body, the heat is unevenly distributed. Where ever there is congestion and stagnant blood, the temperature is more, whereas, where ever there is a poor supply of blood, the body part is cold. The hydrotherapy baths and packs assist The body in correcting these issues. Though we mostly use cold water, we don’t try to reduce the temperature of the body. Instead, we rouse the vital power to generate more heat than is lost. Because heat is life, that is, by generating heat, the life possesses and controls the body
5. The warmth of the water allows your muscles to relax and eases the pain in your joints, helping you to exercise.
6. The water supports your weight, which helps to relieve pain and increase the range of movement of your joints.
7. The water can be used to provide resistance to moving your joints. By pushing your arms and legs against the water, you can also improve your muscle strength
8. In general, hydrotherapy is one of the safest treatments for arthritis and back pain
9.  To support that within a wide range of ages and abilities, hydrotherapy may help people to increase their endurance and strength, improve balance and postural control, reduce perceived pain and muscle spasms, reduce joint pain and stiffness, aid in gait retraining, and improve functional mobility
10. Release Endorphins: hydrotherapy stimulates the release of endorphins, acting as a natural pain reliever, which will further reduce muscle soreness. Incorporating hydrotherapy as part of your fitness holiday is a great way to recover after a day’s training
11. Allopathic medical system has been using it for pain reduction, muscle, and joint inflammation treatments, as well as surgery and nerve recovery
12. Hydrotherapy is useful in all stages of the disease, whether acute, chronic or degenerative.
13. In acute stages, we can make use of hydrotherapy baths or packs to get some relief from extreme pains or discomfort.
14. During chronic stage, we can make use of hydrotherapy to increase our vitality.
15. The types of equipment that we can use for hydrotherapy are the spinal bathtub, the hip bathtub etc.
16. We could use cloth bandages or packs also for different purposes. But the cloth used must not be too new, as it can’t hold water. The cloth must be of soft cotton, used and washed, but not dirty and greasy. We can use clean washed cotton cloth or softened Turkish towels for the packs, wraps and fomentations.

What are the Different Techniques of Water?

1. Spinal Bath

The most important of all baths, this vitalizes the backbone or the nervous system which in turn vitalizes or works as a tonic for the whole body. One has to lie in a tub filled with three inches of water and let the backbone be soaked in the cool and calming waters. Do not forget to place a wet towel on the head so that the body heat doesn’t get into the head. Only the backbone is immersed in the water. The arms, legs, and the head are out of water resting on the sides of the tub.

This bath is very relaxing and vitalizing. One can stay in the water for about 15 to 20 minutes and then have a full shower from the head. In the beginning, one may feel warm in the head after a spinal bath. And so it is advised to have a cold shower from the head.

Benefits:

One can get highly relaxed after a spinal bath. Body works best in a relaxed state. So it helps in our cleansing and healing. It relaxes our nervous system, increases vitality; temporarily attracting more blood circulation in that particular area.

Helps relieve congestions, pains, etc. It is believed that hip baths work wonders for people with backbone issues, cervical spondylitis, and sciatica, people who have had backbone injuries or surgeries. A spinal bath is beneficial for everyone in general. For highly stressed-out people, it is a boon, as one can get relaxed in a very short time. It is beneficial even when one is in a good state of health.

2. Hip Bath

In a hip bath, one sits in a tub of cold water of about six inches. When one sits in the water, the water must reach the navel. The water should be moderately cold.

Sometimes, we administer hot and cold hip baths too for certain health issues. A wet towel is again placed on the head to keep the rising heat from increasing the temperature of the head.

This bath helps the internal inflammations to come to the surface. After a dip for around 15 minutes, one must get out of the tub, wipe the body get dressed and either go for a walk or lie down in the bed with a blanket to cover the whole body. This we do to increases the temperature again around our abdomen and hip area.

In Natural Life Style(Mohan Gupta Ji Naturopath) suggests to use Hip Bath/Spinal Bath to heal your body while eating healthy diet. To know more about this 👉Check This Video Here.

Health Benefits of Hip/Spinal Bath

1. It helps in helping the old deposits in the intestine to lose up
2. It gives some relief to the tired and overworked organs of elimination, like the kidneys, bladder, colon, etc.
3. It helps to remove toxin from the reproductive organs. So ultimately our digestive system, reproductive system and the eliminatory systems get some relief and are relaxed by the hip bath
4. Both the hip bath and spinal bath must be taken before meals or after at least two hours after a meal. But if one is suffering from stomach pain after a meal and it is not yet two hours, still he can take a hip bath to get relief
5. The spinal bath is another important form of hydrotherapic treatment.
6. This bath provides a soothing effect to the spinal column and thereby influences the central nervous system
7. It is given in a specially designed tub with its back raised so as to provide proper support to the head
8. The water level in the tub should be an inch and a half to two inches and the patient should lie in it for three to ten minutes.
9. It is beneficial in almost all nervous disorders such as hysteria, fits, mental disorders, loss of memory and tension
10. The neutral spinal bath is soothing and sedative treatment, especially for the highly strung and irritable patient
11. The duration of this bath is twenty to thirty minutes. The hot spinal bath, on the other hand, helps to stimulate the nervous, especially when they are in a depressed state
12. It also relives vertebral pain in spondylitis and muscular backaches

3. The Immersion Bath

There is a growing trend for cold immersion and you might have heard about Wim Hof from the Netherlands an Iceman. He leads workshops around the world in taking practitioners beyond their fear-based imaginings to reap the health benefits of Cold water immersion.

Cold hydrotherapy, cryotherapy, or a good old-fashioned ice-bath, may be a trend among current health influencers, but it’s been around for millennia. The claims are that it can help reduce muscle soreness and accelerate muscle recovery, increase metabolism, decrease inflammation

 Pain and inflammation also decrease (as experienced in patients with rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia due to increased production of opioid endorphins in the body). Research has shown that cold showers or cold immersion create a “positive systemic stress activation”, through which the high density of cold receptors on the skin sends an overwhelming amount of electrical impulses to the brain.

If you’re interested you can buy and read Wim Hof’s this book 👉The Wim Hof Method: Activate Your Potential, Transcend Your Limits and also this one 👉The Way of the Iceman: How the Wim Hof Method Creates Radiant, Long-term Health–Using the Science and Secrets of Breath Control, Cold-Training and Commitment

Cold Exposure Reduces Muscle Soreness and Accelerates Recovery

According to a study published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, a 10-minute cold water immersion after an intense cycling session can help lower fatigue and lessen muscle soreness.

Here’s how this cold exposure benefit works?

Cold water causes your blood vessels to constrict, which decreases blood flow to your muscles. That’s why we ice after an injury to reduce the swelling that occurs with inflammation and even after extracting a tooth doctor suggest to eat or drink only something chilled. So Dentists often recommend eating ice cream when you’re recovering from wisdom tooth surgery. While the coldness may have a soothing effect on the wound

Muscle growth depends on the inflammation response for breaking down and building back up newer and stronger muscle fibers. Because cold exposure helps to reduce inflammation, it can impair this process and block the muscle and strength gains you’re after.

How to Try Hydrotherapy?

You don’t have to swim under the polar ice cap like Wim, but consider experimenting with ending your morning shower in cold water, which is called contrast hydrotherapy.

Tanking cold shower is easy and it has so many health benefits. I’ve found, that if I start off with a warm shower, and turn my temperature down over time, cold showers are actually pretty comfortable. Its not even a chore or fight to do, and once I’m at the coldest temperature I started to love it.

The longer I am in them, the more it starts to feel warm and comfortable. It’s really only the initial shock of the first couple of minutes, but that goes away almost immediately, because now I’m fully immerse myself and commit every day to take only cold shower. Even I bath my hair with cold water, which I started for my one week rice water challenge for hair growth

4. Abdominal Wet Pack

A broad wet cold bandage wrapped around the stomach to give relief from excess heat in the abdominal area. In chronic conditions, it is better to cover the bandage with a woolen wrapper to not expose it to cold air.

Benefits of using Wet Pack

1. Wet Pack Cotton Pati is a set of 3 Strips with proper user manual.
2. Wet Pack Patti Material- Cotton
3. It includes 1 Strip for Head, 1 Strip for Neck, 1 Strip for Stomach
4. Size- 2.25 Meter Length and 1 Meter Breadth
5. The Kit consists of a cotton bag for easy after use and storage.

👉 Benefits of Abdominal Wet Pack

5. Enema

An enema is water introduced into your colon with the help of an enema can, to help remove the old dry matter from the colon. An enema is usually advised only when there is no bowel movement for a day or two. Otherwise, it is always better to let the body work and push filth out on its own.

6. Contrast hydrotherapy

Contrast hydrotherapy is the practice of alternating between hot and cold water therapy to relieve your aches and pains. This is commonly done by athletes, who are known to take ice baths after a game, followed by a hot tub, and then repeating

Final Thought

The sigh of good health is, when one has a cool head, warm feet and a soft stomach, which is a sign of good health. When one is sick, hydrotherapy is one of the ways in which, one can try to bring a balance in the temperatures and help his/her body to work better and eliminate toxins that are lying in the body from years. So, hydrotherapy along with other good healthy lifestyle, for example; daily routine Yoga, meditation, walk, eating more fruits and vegetables can help one to reverse his health condition from sickness towards healthy life.

I hope this article is going to help you in some way. There are many more articles that you can enjoy reading, so explore more articles on reicpeswithnore.com and don’t forget to check our YouTube Channel.