A guiding principle in our product development is that a good training tool targets a specific problem and teaches the athlete to solve it unaided. We assumed those problems were technique, power, and speed.
Over the years we’ve heard from people using DragSox after knee replacements, back injuries, and surgery recovery. We knew resistance in the water was useful in rehabilitation, but not the details. Recently an aquatic physical therapist walked us through how they and their colleagues use our equipment with patients. Almost all of it was novel for us.
DragSox can be beneficial after amputation because they increase resistance without compression. The elastic band can be loosened so it does not tighten around the residual limb, while still creating drag. Strengthening comes through flutter kick, hip abduction and adduction, and cycle kick.
DragSox and what they do not require
One challenge during recovery is reaching aerobic capacity without the requirement of weight bearing or compression forces. DragSox create a condition where the heart rate can be elevated under serious constraints, allowing patients to do more with less. This has worked for return-to-sport athletes across a range of injuries and conditions.
DragSox can also be effective after spinal cord injury, allowing arm resistance for patients who have shoulder function but insufficient grip strength. Nothing has to be gripped. Worn on the feet, they can provide sensory input for pediatric patients who need more of it there.
Sensory Mitts in therapy
We have written before about how Sensory Mitts stimulate sensory receptors and improve feel for water. What we had not considered is that sensory stimulation can be the goal itself rather than a means to a better stroke.
Occupational therapists use Sensory Mitts as a source of excitatory input. The sheer number of holes is beneficial because each opening is a separate point of contact — the same reason a sensory bin of small objects does more than one of large objects. The compartments do two things at once: they add drag and they add sensory input. In a therapy setting, resistance and stimulation arrive in the same movement rather than as two separate activities.
Sensory Mitts also appear in return-to-sport work. A competitive swimmer recovering from injury reported that Sensory Mitts and VB Air made the catch phase easier to feel during breaststroke sculling — the benefit we designed for, applied to rebuilding a stroke rather than refining one.
VoloBlades and VB Air for grip-limited patients
VB Air is buoyant, VoloBlades provide resistance, and both are forearm paddles. Nothing is held in the hand. Both have worked well with spinal cord injury patients and with patients whose Ehlers-Danlos syndrome affects the fingers, reducing strain during flare-ups.
VB Air is used for triceps press-downs, the buoyancy providing resistance on the way down. VoloBlades are used for horizontal abduction and adduction and for D2 flexion patterns.
Seated core work: an idea, not yet a result
Everything above has been tried with patients. This has not. It was described to us before any of the equipment shipped, and we are including it because the reasoning seems worth passing along.
The proposal: a patient with decreased grip strength sits on a platform in the water and holds VB Air under the surface. Keeping it down requires prolonged shoulder extension. Because VB Air wants to rise, staying upright requires core control for balance. Moving into horizontal abduction against the resistance — close to a seated breaststroke scull — brings in scapular strength. One tool, three demands, in a sequence a patient could progress through.
A related thought from the same conversation: VoloBlades might pair with the ankle weights and buoyant ankle floats already used to target gait deficits.
What we take from this
We have written before that coaches and swimmers find creative uses we did not anticipate. That turns out to be more true than we knew, and in a field we know very little about.
The design decisions that make a tool good for swimmers — no grip required, adjustable tension, buoyancy as resistance — matter more in rehabilitation, where a patient’s limitation is often the very thing conventional equipment demands of them.
If you work in aquatic therapy and use our equipment in ways we haven’t described, we would like to hear about it. Email us at [email protected].
Nothing here is clinical guidance. These are uses reported to us by practitioners, described so other practitioners can evaluate them.