Hydrotherapy is the scientific application of water for therapeutic purposes. The primary benefit of hydrotherapy is its effect upon both the circulatory and lymphatic systems. The most renowned ancient physicians, including Hippocrates and Galen, understood that bathing was an invaluable means of preserving or restoring health.
Basic Temperature-related Effects Of Water
When either warm or cool water is administered, it exerts an initial effect, directly due to the heat or cool transferred to your body. A secondary effect occurs due to the body’s reaction to the temperature challenge. This reaction is a higher level of vital activity maintained, for a time, in response to either a cool or warm application.
Hydrotherapy Guidelines And Precautions
- Temperature – The greater the difference between body and water temperatures, the greater the intensity of a hydrotherapy: a crucial point for all individuals to be conscious of to keep a hydrotherapy constructive; but always with limits of comfortable tolerance in mind. Always adjust water temperatures to accommodate your present level of comfort, because both warm and cool water can be physically depleting if improperly used.
- Duration – Both short-cool and short-warm treatments produce a stimulating effect, while overlong treatments (using either temperature) are depressive to vital bodily action. Do not be heroic; be conscious of your vitality on any given day, and adjust the duration of shower to accommodate your tolerance level.
- Time of Day – A stimulating hydrotherapy taken at one’s “strongest time” of a given day (when reactive powers are greatest) is more effective than when taken at “weaker times” during the ebb and flow of one’s daily vital energy. This principle is very important to remember.
Most tonic hydrotherapies, such as the Alternate Warm/Cool Shower and the Progressive Cool Shower, are best taken in the morning, and ideally, following skin-brushing. They are strengthening before the day begins, because one’s powers of reaction have not yet been diminished by food digestion and the various stresses of daily life.
Therefore, for those who are relatively active, early morning is most ideal, while for less vigorous individuals, a specific “strongest time” of day is a primary consideration.
Additional insights:
- Always take hydrotherapies in a warm room, but, if desired, one might open the window a bit to allow a flow of fresh air.
- When stepping out from the shower stall or bathtub, avoid placing your feet on a cold floor as that would interfere with the desired bodily warming reaction.
- Hydrotherapies should be completed 1/2- to 1-hour before meals and not within 3-hours after a meal, so as to avoid interfering with the digestive process.
- Avoid very warm or cool temperatures after a treatment as this would interfere with the normal development of a warming reaction.
One of the best features of these shower procedures is their convenience. This shower (preceded by the Vital Chi Skin-Brushing Routine) employed 3 to 4 times weekly has proved to be wonderfully restorative.
The above article is an excerpt from Dr. Berkowsky’s Vital Chi Skin-Brushing System,
