29/04/2020
Could an Anti-Gravity Treadmill save your damaged knees?
My fall came during a game of netball and, though I didn't hear a snap of bone or the ping of a tendon, my right leg stopped working immediately.
Putting weight on it felt like walking on cooked spaghetti. The next day, my knee had swollen and seized up. My husband carried me into a walk-in centre (how ironic), and an hour later I left on crutches. The verdict was that I had strained a ligament but it would get better soon.
It wasn't until five months later that I learnt I'd ruptured my anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). The knee had improved, to a degree, but still kept giving way, so I was sent for an MRI scan.
Telling my knee surgeon, Jonathon Lavelle of the Fortius Clinic in London, how many weddings I'd been to, semi-inebriated, and dancing on five-inch heels drew a look of abject horror. Each time, he said, I'd been risking far greater damage and shredding what few ligaments were left holding my knee together.
He booked me in for reconstructive surgery, which entailed removing a 20cm length of hamstring and looping it through my knee. For the next six months, I would need careful rehabilitation – oh, and anti-gravity treatment.
So it was that after three months of physiotherapy and wobbling about on the cross-trainer, I stepped on to an AlterG Anti-Gravity Treadmill, a machine normally used by elite athletes such as Mo Farah and Gareth Bale to recover from serious injury. Paula Radcliffe, who bought a £36,000 device, said it was one of the best investments she has ever made. Now, Gordon Ramsay is using one to get over an Achilles tendon problem, Stephen Fry has had a go, and Burnley and Middlesborough are the only Premiership football teams not to own one.
The premise is simple. Users are zipped into a pair of specialist neoprene shorts and a waist-high airtight bag which encloses the treadmill.
The space around your legs fills with air, lifting you up, allowing you to exercise at a fraction of your body weight and reducing impact and pressure on your joints as your run.
“It's like being a cork in a bottle of champagne,” explains the physio as I run on one of their machines. “It uses air pressure. The more air pressure you get, the more upward lift you get. The pressure can be 1.1 pounds per square inch (psi), so it's like roughly going waist-deep into water. Very accurately, you can take someone down from 100 per cent of their body weight to just 20 per cent - the same feeling as walking on the moon - in one per cent increments.”
Developed by NASA in the nineties, it was originally designed to create a downward force and allow astronauts to exercise in space to prevent muscle atrophy. But deemed too bulky for space, the idea was discarded until someone redesigned the model by flicking the air pressure controller to decrease the feeling of gravity, rather than add to it.
Marathon runners like it because it allows them to train longer without risking injury, and those in recovery, like me, can get moving more quickly.
Now, the NASA-patented technology is being rolled out into rehabilitation centres, NHS wards, private clinics and gyms, to be used with a range of serious conditions including arthritis and osteoarthritis, spinal injuries and neurological conditions such as Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis. A video clip of a man who had been in a wheelchair for five years but, with the help of the AlterG treadmill, was able to jog again, has been watched by almost five million people.
Check out these videos....�
http://www.itv.com/news/west/update/2013-08-15/full-report-nasa-technology-used-for-exercise/
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1078405/Stroke-patient-uses-AlterG-help-rehabilitation.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwAsc2Xfd_I&feature=youtu.be
The treadmills are also being used in the fight against need hip, knee and ankle replacements.
“While this can't make that joint any better, once you've got a degenerative knee, this can strengthen the muscle around the knee,” my Physio says. “It gets the fluid working around the joints and can delay surgery by years.”
Overweight or obese patients are able to run without joint pain and experience weight loss at their target weight, a dramatic motivational tool. Only those with untreated deep vein thrombosis or an unstable fracture are advised to stay off the machines for fear of doing further damage.
Dan Fivey, a sports therapist at from the UK who has owned an AlterG for 10 years, has witnessed patients in tears using the machine, so overjoyed are they by the feeling of weightlessness on their battered joints and having been offered a way to get fitter.
“Many people who are in pain with arthritis in their knees, ankles and hips stop doing exercise altogether,” says Fivey. “With this, they can keep moving without aggravating their joints and worsening the condition. It maintains muscle tone, keeps the heart and respiratory system working and is good psychologically, when immobile people tend to get a bit depressed. Coming in here and using the machine gives them a real boost.”
It's no exaggeration to say that for one of Fivey’s patients, Bob, a 71-year-old retired teacher from Cheltenham , using the AlterG was life-changing. Bob had a cardiac arrest and had suffered from arthritis in his feet and knees for years. His wife, had also developed ovarian cancer.
“Even though she had this horrible disease, she was more mobile that I was,” he says bleakly at the memory. Bob was unable to go out or walk far without severe discomfort. “I felt as though I was holding her back. I needed to be fit to look after her.”
Bob started with short 15-minute strolls on the treadmill at 20 per cent of his full body weight to build muscle strength and endurance. Today, he manages three miles twice a week at 75 per cent of his weight, a distance that takes him half an hour, and has restored his legs. He is able to go on walking holidays with his wife, who has recovered, again and they've just returned from a trip to the Scilly Isles where he walked for up to five hours a day.
“We don't climb mountains, but I can manage uneven surfaces. It has been brilliant. Without it, I don't want to think where we'd be. I certainly wouldn't be able to enjoy the lifestyle I have.”
I've been on the anti-gravity treadmill for half an hour and, even after ten months without exercise, there is not a bead of sweat on me. My breath is coming easily and running feels fluid, light and loose. Usually, when I up the pace – to jog for a bus – my leg aches and the knee joint feels slightly unstable. Now, I notice neither. I could be running on air, which, essentially, I am.
It's a great feeling. But I'd try anything – even neoprene shorts – to stay off the crutches.
