Anti-Gravity AlterG® Treadmill
Whether you’re a professional athlete, weekend warrior, weight loss candidate, young competitor or patient, AlterG® can help you.
Chosen by sports medicine experts, top athletes and trainers as the best low-impact running or walking training tool, the AlterG® is a new way to improve your fitness, lose weight and train smarter. Whatever your wellness or fitness goals are, the AlterG® can help you achieve them!
Who is the AlterG® Anti-Gravity Treadmill® For?
The AlterG® Anti-Gravity Treadmill® can be used by anyone looking to improve mobility, strength, or fitness. The treadmill can help patients rehab lower extremity injuries, control weight, maintain cardiovascular condition, retrain gait without awkward compensations from pain or injury, and reduce the risk of re-injury.
Thus, everyone from athletes to orthopedic, neurologic, and geriatric patients to those looking to lose weight are great candidates for time on the AlterG®. Whatever your wellness or fitness goals are, the AlterG® can help you achieve them!
AlterG® Benefits
Research supports the use of body assisted support systems like the AlterG® Anti-Gravity Treadmill® for a wide variety of rehabilitation and training purposes, as they can both restore normal walking and running mechanics and support healing tissue. Overall, use of the AlterG® as part of your treatment at RET can help optimize rehabilitation and improve recovery times. It has also been widely adopted by professional athletes as a training and conditioning tool, because it reduces the risk of impact-related injuries during exercise.
In addition, your physical therapist might use the AlterG® Anti-Gravity Treadmill® to:
- Reduce gravity’s impact by selecting any weight between 20% and 100% of your body weight by 1% increments
- Rehabilitate lower extremity injuries with less pain and less impact
- Improve mobility, strength, and safety for those with neurological conditions
- Provide a safe way to lose weight and exercise more intensely while unweighted
- Train without pain and reduce the stress to joints and muscles
- Recover effectively and with less pain after training or competition
The AlterG® Anti-Gravity Treadmill® Technology
AlterG®’s technology was originally developed by a researcher at NASA as part of an effort to help astronauts maintain fitness during prolonged space flight. This FDA-approved technology, combined with a pressure regulation system, allowed them to build the first-ever anti-gravity treadmill.
The AlterG® technology enables your physical therapist to remove weight in 1% increments from full, normal body weight down to just 20% while allowing you to maintain your normal walking or running form, movement and mechanics. TheAlterG® Anti-Gravity Treadmill® uses unloading and progressive loading to achieve the aforementioned benefits. The treadmill uses air pressure to help unweight the participant.
How It Works
After putting on a pair of AlterG® shorts over your existing clothing, you’ll step inside the chamber of the machine, which will zip closed around the shorts. This allows the lower body to be fully enclosed and supported by the air pressure.
Once the machine has been calibrated, your physical therapist can begin to adjust the body support percentage. From there, the treadmill operates like a regular treadmill with speed adjustments for walking or running. So that your therapist can observe your mobility and gait, the sides and back of the bubble are clear.
To find out which locations offer this treatments, please visit our locations page.