Pull on the rubbery shorts, zip into the inner tube-like waste-high tent, start up the treadmill and leave gravity behind. The Alter G anti-gravity treadmill is taking world-class runners, overweight kids and people with spinal cord injuries to new places.
Now located in the Physical Therapy Department at Northern Arizona University and near Flagstaff Medical Center at Northern Arizona Healthcare’s Fit Kids of Arizona, the high-tech treadmill was first designed by NASA to help astronauts learn what it feels like to walk in space. However, physical therapists, nurse practitioners and professors are among those praising the down-to-earth benefits of the Alter G.
“You can run on it. You can walk on it. It basically makes running or walking easier when you take off some of your body weight and support it by air pressure,” says NAU Physical Therapy Professor Dirk De Heer, Ph.D. “You create a seal by zipping into the air bag. The airbag will fill with air depending on how much you want to reduce your body weight.”
The Alter G can reduce your body weight to as low as 20 percent, or one-fifth of your weight, without losing the strength you have at your whole weight. For example, a person who weighs 160 pounds can run as if he weighs 32 pounds. “The machine actually goes up to 18 miles an hour,” says De Heer, an extreme runner who ran a 4:04 mile in college. “That’s a 3:20 mile base, so that’s pretty quick. The world record is three minutes and 43 seconds.”
World-class runners train on NAU’s Alter G, as well as the NAU cross country team, which recently finished second at nationals in Division 1.
NAU Health Sciences Department Chair Roger Bounds, Ph.D., says the treadmill can teach the muscles, joints and nerves to work at a faster pace, quickening the runner’s cadence and creating a longer stride, training a runner’s body to improve its mechanical performance before the cardiovascular system has caught up. He says it is also valuable for rehabilitating injured athletes.
“Similar to underwater running that many runners and other athletes might do to rehab, this can decrease the load to the point where they’re pain free and it’s no longer stimulating or reproducing stress that caused the injury,” said Bounds. “They can maintain fitness or at least decrease the amount of fitness lost during the time of rehabilitation.”
Olympian Andrew Lemoncello says the Alter G helped him recover his place among the world’s fastest distance runners. He competed for Great Britain in the 3,000-meter steeplechase at the 2008 Summer Olympics, but a torn hamstring kept him from competing in London during the 2012 games. Instead of taking time off to recover, he stepped onto the fancy treadmill.
“It kept me sane,” says the 31-year-old. “I started training at about 60 percent of my body weight and slowly built up to 90 percent. It kept the muscles in good condition.”
Within four weeks of finishing his training on the Alter G, he was on schedule to break the Scottish record for 10 miles at the Great South Run in the United Kingdom’s Portsmouth. He finished with a time of 47:07, the second best Scottish time ever.
Lemoncello trains in Flagstaff and still uses the Alter G. “You have to be extremely careful not to re-injure the area. With the Alter G, you can still get in the miles [and] still have a really big workout.”
Although more scientific studies are underway to fully understand the effectiveness of the Alter G, De Heer says an individual has to run faster on the machine at a lower body weight to achieve the same results as if he were running on a trail. “Let’s say you take off 50 percent of somebody’s body weight, which is quite a bit, and you normally run a 10-minute mile. On the Alter G you probably have to run somewhere around a six minute or 6:30 mile to get the same effect.”
He adds that this space-age technology can be applied to anybody who might have trouble walking or running. “Certainly, applications that have been recent are people with spinal cord injury, people with other neurological problems like stroke, Parkinson’s disease and in addition to that, people who are overweight who you might want to have them feel what it’s like to run at a bit lower body weight.”
Nurse Practitioner Carol Gora, FNP-c, says Fit Kids has introduced more than a thousand overweight children to the Alter G in the last five years.
“About a third of them find it to be fun,” she says. “They like the feeling of being able to run and they enjoy bragging to their friends that they’re using a machine that astronauts use.”
Gora says childhood obesity has become a huge problem in the United States and now in China and India. “We used to get our food from fruits and vegetables, but now we have easy access to fatty food like chicken nuggets that our bodies can’t metabolize. And our kids aren’t moving like they used to. Parents are afraid to let their children play outside. We’re seeing two-year-olds with pre-diabetic conditions and 12-year-olds who weigh 200 pounds. Obesity causes a number of health problems like high cholesterol, cardiovascular issues and diabetes.”
Bounds says if someone is significantly obese, he or she may not be able to run because of the weight and because of the load on the ankles, hips and knees. “If you can reduce that load, they may be able to walk faster or potentially run when they either A) physically couldn’t, or B) maybe thought they couldn’t do that ever again. When you do something you thought you couldn’t do, the psychological effects are significant.”
Whether kids find it fun or not, the Alter G is prescribed as a medical treatment and at Fit Kids, it is free to patients. And whether science can fully measure its benefits, extreme runners keep training and winning. FBN
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NAU Physical Therapy Professor Dirk De Heer, Ph.D., says the Alter G anti-gravity treadmill allows for a tightly controlled training program. “For example, you can start off today at 40 percent body weight, tomorrow we’re going to go to 43 and the day after that we’re going to go to 46.” Meanwhile, the window in the air pressure balloon allows physical therapy students to observe the runner or patient and learn about biomechanics.
Photo by Bonnie Stevens
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Andrew Lemoncello finished first place in the Denver Rock ‘n’ Roll Half Marathon, his first race after coming back from injury and rehab on the Alter G.