Perhaps your body could use a break from the impact of day-to-day fitness activities. Or maybe you’ve been hurt and need a non-impact way of keeping fit. Or perhaps you want a gentle and refreshing way to workout.

Deep-water running – where you are suspended vertically in water by wearing a flotation belt -- can do the trick. You can get your heart rate up, pump up your muscles, and even finish feeling as if you’ve had a full-body massage.

How does deep-water running work?
You wear a flotation belt around your waist or torso – one is made by Aquajogger and another by Speedo. They hold you vertical in the water, with your body sort of hanging from them without your feet touching the bottom and with your head and tops of shoulders out of the water. That means you’ll need anywhere from a 5- to 6-foot depth, depending on how tall you are. (That eliminates lap pools.)

Why wear a belt?
Some people deep-water run without a belt. But wearing a belt makes sure you:

• Stay tall and don’t lean forward from your back,
• Can focus fully on getting up your heart rate and not on staying afloat or upright,
• Allows you to use a “tether” to tie yourself from the back of the belt to the side of the pool so you can workout even harder by “running” away from the tether.

Technique Tips
All you do is put on the belt, stay vertical, and mimic a running (sprinting) motion with your arms and legs. Here are a few more tips:

• Keep your abs tight to support your back.
• Avoid leaning forward from the waist.
• Raise your knees up to about hip height, then push down and slightly backwards with your foot
• Bend your arms in a 90-degree angle and swing them from the shoulder.
• Allow your fingers to come just below the surface of the water in front of you, and to your hips at your side in the backward swing.
• Try to “run” harder by moving your arms and legs faster. But that’s not actually possible! The faster you push, the harder the workout will get because of the resistance of the water against the push.

What to Do Once You Get in the Pool

• Interval length - Although you can get fancy with workouts, some experts recommend you simply mimic your land workout by approximate time in water. If that doesn’t mean anything, then try doing a minute fast and a minute slow, alternating for as long as you way.
• Intensity variations - Monitor intensity by how you feel since your heart rate will be lower in the water by about 10-15 beats than it is on land. It will feel quite hard at first because your muscles in your upper body have to work harder in all directions!
• Where to run – Most community and college pools have lap or adult swim times set aside. Other than one incident, I have always been welcome sharing the lanes. Sometimes it helps to call ahead and find out when a pool is less busy, or if they have any policies that would affect you.

Runners and cyclists or other pure “land athletes” may just shrug and say, “I don’t like the water.” Well, I didn’t like the water either, but was forced into it a number of years ago with a chronic sprained ankle. Now I’m addicted to the refreshing yet intense workout – on hot days it’s a great break, and on cold winter days the warm pool is a toasty retreat.

So go ahead, get all wet!