Hi everyone!
It’s January here in Oklahoma, USA and our temperatures sway from freezing one day, to days like today when it’s about 60 degrees F after work. I’ve got our still-new-to-me pool heating up to as close to 80 as I can get it, and in a bit, I’ll jump in and swim – hard – for at least thirty minutes, but maybe as long as two hours, depending on the wind.
Last year, I wrote my first blog post about swimming and talked about how much I love the water and what my plans were to use the pool as my main source of exercise and an additional time of hard-core compression. I’m happy to say that I’ve been doing exactly that, as often as I can and I really love it. I thought it’d be fun to update you on all this today.
Let me start with this: Being in water makes me happy. And I have gotten more wear from this particular bathing suit than should be legal this past year.
My occuptional therapist, who treats my legs for six weeks after each surgery, is specially trained and certified in the Tidbhar Method of water therapy. This year, she provided me with a list of exercises I can do in my pool, and a copy of that is here for you. My plan is to make a little video (I’ll come back and link it here) to show you what the exercises look like.
So this last summer, when the pool was finished, I hopped in and started doing my best to do these exercises. I know that being in water is like multiple times more compression than wearing actual compression, so just being in four feet, or nine feet of water is amazing for our legs. So just getting in and staying in is a win. My other theory is that moving at all is doing more than sitting on the couch, so don’t let perfect be the enemy of movent. So I moved, and I swam and i walked and ran, and jumped and had fun. And then I got some water weights and did a little more and a little more. And yeah, my strokes aren’t perfect, but I’m moving!
And guess what! My stamina increased and I could get away with wearing shorts without compression longer in the summer. And the doctor let me in the pool just two weeks after my November surgery, and boy did my arms retract quickly after a pretty good lipedema reduction. I’m so pleased!
I keep buying bathing suits, but I’m super comfortable in public in my aquatard from Junonia (no, I’m not sponsored, I just love them.) And I wear it everywhere, and I swim as much as I can. In Hawaii, Mexico, at White Water (local water park), at the lake…I just swim. And I do not think twice about what I look like in a suit. Water is good for us and no one likes how they look in a suit anyway.
So I hope you’ll enjoy swimming and go for it! Find a suit you love. And wear the heck out of it.
Susan
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