Exercisers defy gravity on machine designed for NASA

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/CELIA STOREY
Physical therapist Derek Lagemann shows Tom Singleton how to run on the Alter G anti-gravity treadmill at PTI physical therapy in Little Rock on Jan. 14
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/CELIA STOREY Physical therapist Derek Lagemann shows Tom Singleton how to run on the Alter G anti-gravity treadmill at PTI physical therapy in Little Rock on Jan. 14

Anti-gravity treadmills have landed in Arkansas.

Actually they arrived via truck from a factory in Fremont, Calif., but they did come from outer space. Or anyway the idea for them came from NASA.

The brand name is AlterG, and in the past year and a half, regional sales rep Jason Parnell has sold eight “medical model” anti-gravity treadmills in Arkansas, to nursing homes, hospitals and physical therapists.

Several were already here.

Mikaila Riedel, marketing manager for the California company, counts 13 sites in the state with AlterGs. Arkansas Children’s Hospital just acquired one in December, for use by patients.

These devices are being used by spinal cord injury patients, stroke patients, frail elderly people who fall easily, amputees learning to use a prosthetic leg, people recovering from hip or knee replacements or surgery to repair a ligament.

But some physical therapists also invite the general public (“self-payers”) to take a free test run on an AlterG and then, if they want more, to pay a fee to use it regularly.

Who would want to?

People with joint diseases like arthritis who don’t have access to a pool or simply despise swimsuits

Runners who know that Olympic coach Alberto Salazar supplements his athletes’ training with time on an AlterG (Arkansas’ earliest adopter was the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. In a video posted on YouTube in 2010, women’s track coach Lance Harter said he had found so many ways to work out his athletes on the machine that they wore out its motor.)

Basketball fans who followKobe Bryant’s or LeBron James’ tweets (Los Angeles Lakers star Bryant ran on an AlterG last year during his recovery from surgery to repair a torn Achilles tendon. The Miami Heat’s James wasn’t injured; his AlterG video clip was shot for a Samsung ad.)

Obese people who want to exercise but quit because walking hurts too much ...

AlterG appeals to a vast range of people who would benefit from weighing less - at least while they do lower body exercises.

HOW IT WORKS

The AlterG is a treadmill encased in a big fabric bubble that’s stoppered by a human body. The user shimmies into tight neoprene shorts attached to a plastic tutu that’s edged by a zipper.

Wearing his tutu/shorts, he steps onto the treadmill and into the opening of the deflated bubble, pulls the fabric up around his waist and zips himself in.

His body plugs the bubble.

The machine weighs him, and then as the bubble inflates, air pressure lifts him along with the wall of the bubble away from the belt of the treadmill.

That motion unloads or “de-weights” his joints - which can also be done in a swimming pool and is one of the reasons pool therapy’s recommended for rehabilitating injuries or keeping an arthritic body mobile. But it’s hard to measure how much unloading happens in water, says physical therapist Derek Lagemann, co-owner of Physical Therapy Institute (PTI) in Little Rock.

“In a swimming pool you’ve got to find a level,” Lagemann says. “The higher the water level is, the more de-weighting you have. A pool will usually have one or two levels, so you can’t really change your support incrementally.”

But the AlterG inflates precisely by 1 percent at a time - at the push of a button - offsetting the user’s weight while he walks or runs forward, sideways, backward or stands in one place to jump or do squats.

“And you don’t have to get in a swimsuit,” Lagemann says.

If doctor’s orders specify that a patient should put only 25 percent of his weight on a newly replaced hip, AlterG allows the therapist to comply in a “very objective” way, says physical therapist John Galloway, owner of Galloway Therapy in North Little Rock.

AlterG can effectively negate up to 80 percent of the patient’s weight for people weighing as much as 350 pounds. It can take off 65 percent for people who weigh more, up to 400 pounds.

Galloway likes not having to “guesstimate” how much strain his patients are putting on their joints. “We can knock it down to 25 percent of your body weight and we can gradually reintroduce, over sessions, that body weight, increase the percentage that they’re doing and then get them up to where they are fully weight bearing,” he says.

“And patients are not going to fall … they’re completely safe. It’s been a really good thing for rehab.”

“It’s a great piece of equipment,” says physical therapist Brenda Minks, who works at Coulter PT in Russellville.

“We use it on a daily basis, probably an hourly basis. Twice an hour sometimes. We use it with our knee and hip patients, back patients. We’ve used it with spinal cord injury patients. It allows them to take that weight and that strain off their body, similar to what you get in the water.”

Better than water, says her boss, Seth Coulter, who about eight months ago bought the first AlterG that Parnell sold here - even though the demonstration model was out of commission.

He says it has put to shame an underwater treadmill that Coulter relied on for years.When he moves his practice to new offices later this year, he’s taking the AlterG but not the underwater device.

“We’re going to decommission it and put it out to pasture,” he says. Too many patients have incisions they shouldn’t get wet. And “you have to get undressed, dressed, wet, dry, undressed, dressed. With AlterG you slide those shorts on, you’re in the machine, you do your stuff, you’re out. It’s so much nicer.”

Healthy people are using his machine as well. He has a few ultrarunners who are AlterG self-pay customers; they use the treadmill instead of massage therapy after a long event to speed healing of their battered muscles.

ATHLETIC ADVANTAGES

In December, Villanova University runners Alex Tully and Colin O’Mara, at home in Little Rock for Christmas break, kept up their long-distance schedule on the anti-gravity treadmill at PTI. Such athletes might run 125 miles a week, Lagemann notes. They can take one or two of their sessions indoors onto an AlterG and de-weight themselves a bit, “so they’re saving the compression of the knees and the hips and the ankles, but they’re still getting the muscle firing. They’re still getting the cardiovascular benefits of it.”

AlterG workouts can be designed to improve strength and speed by gradually increasing the pressure applied to sinews and bones over time, Lagemann says, letting the body gradually master motions that otherwise present a risk of tearing the body down.

The appeal to achy and/or ambitious recreational athletes is so obvious that in other states some fitness centers have added the anti-gravity treadmill to their standard lineup of ellipticals, treadmills and stairclimbers, Parnell says.

Lagemann thinks it’s not all that smart to jump onto any repetitive motion machine in the hope of curing a nagging injury without first ensuring your joints can move smoothly enough that treadmill exercise won’t make matters worse. So although PTI lets the public buy time on its AlterG (fees range from $15 for 10 minutes to monthly plans allowing three 60-minute sessions per week for $250), the therapists assess a customer first.

“I would have him do a quick scan of range of motion of the hips, knee, spine, talk about any aches and pains,” Lagemann says. “We’d clear any physical ailments and joint limitations, and if we’re 100 percent good with all that, then we’d just go through the tutorial of how to utilize the device.”

Little Rock Marathon coach Tom Singleton, who recently tried out the device at PTI, does not like his beginning marathoners to use treadmills instead of pounding the pavement, and he thinks avoiding the stress of impact could be a bad idea, too. “They need to adapt to that,” he says.

But he agrees with Lagemann that AlterG workouts could be handy in the final three weeks of training - the taper - when marathoners who’ve grown used to running or walking for hours are advised to slack off drastically.

“Particularly for the advanced runners who really don’t like to slow down, cut their mileage,” he says, tapering brings anxiety. He figures an athlete could de-weight himself on an AlterG and run hard to ease pre-race jitters.

Also, in the week after the event, it could be handy to have a way to weigh less for a while.

“And,” he says, “it was fun, by the way.” ASTRONAUTICAL INVENTION

On its website, NASA’s Office of the Chief Technologist hails the AlterG as a space shuttle spinoff, thought up in the 1980s by Robert Whalen, a scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center as a tool to help astronauts exercise in low gravity.

His son, Sean Whalen, a business student at Stanford University, realized the commercial potential of “differential air pressure technology.” In 1992, Whalen licensed the idea to the company that became AlterG. In 2005, Nike’s Oregon Project, Salazar, the Oakland Raiders and the Golden State Warriors tried out the prototype anti-gravity treadmill on their elite athletes.

It proved very versatile. Not only could football and basketball stars use it to build springy power and endurance in their ankles, stroke patients could use it to regain the ability to walk. In 2008 the Food and Drug Administration approved anti-gravity treadmills as a medical device.

Today it’s possible to try these machines and buy time on one at Galloway Therapy in North Little Rock, (501) 319-7659; Searcy Physical Therapy in Searcy, (501) 268-2513; Coulter PT in Russellville, (479) 967-5155; Physical Therapy Institute (PTI) in Little Rock, (501) 301-4530; and the Good Samaritan Society SeniorCare Facility in Hot Springs Village, (501) 922-1377.

More information is at alterg.com.

ActiveStyle, Pages 23 on 02/17/2014

Upcoming Events