Water-aerobics participants at YMCA discover ‘painless way to exercise’
Wading in the Uniontown Area YMCA swimming pool before the start of a water-aerobics class, Ceil Sofranko, 60, of Uniontown, showed off her toned biceps. “I have no bat wings,” she said, laughing and wagging her right arm, bent up at the elbow to show a lack of underarm jiggle.
Sofranko, who has participated for the past year in one of Uniontown’s YMCA water-aerobics classes, said she has always walked for exercise, but water aerobics is a “painless way to exercise.”
“The buoyancy in the water makes it so much better,” she said. “It’s very relaxing and the water is soothing.”
Sofranko is not alone in her opinion.
Sofranko’s classmate, Shirley Locke, 75, also of Uniontown, started taking the water-aerobics classes last fall.
“You really do feel better. You feel better immediately,” Locke said. A former swimmer, Locke said she started taking the class because she missed the water. “It helps if you have aches and pains,” she explained.
Jackie Fiano, a water-aerobics and water-walking instructor at the Uniontown YMCA for the past five years, has experienced the therapeutic pluses of aquatic fitness.
Fiano, 47, of Uniontown, began participating in the Uniontown YMCA’s aquatic-fitness classes after suffering an ankle injury during a step-aerobics class eight years ago. Fiano’s doctor told her water rehabilitation provided a swifter recovery time.
“I started doing water aerobics and it was easier. And I didn’t hurt,” she said. “The first time you go into any exercise class on land – you go in, you do the class, you come out and your body hurts, your muscles hurt, you can’t walk. When you go into water aerobics you have a soreness in your body, but you don’t have that pain. I don’t think I’d ever go back and do the land aerobics. I can do this, and I have no problem at all.”
The Uniontown YMCA offers two levels of aquatic fitness – water walking and water aerobics. Fiano said the classes follow a similar routine but are set at different paces.
“In the water aerobics class, we run,” she said. “In the water walking classes, we stride. We do a wide stride and lift our legs. We emphasize stretching.”
Fiano said working out against a current set in motion by an outside and an inside circle of students moving in opposite directions builds up a constant resistance between muscle and water. The class will also pump water weights and utilize the pool’s swimming lanes for a guided run or walk, she said.
According to the Aquatic Exercise Association’s Web site, water’s buoyancy creates “a reduced impact exercise alternative that is easy on the joints, while the water’s resistance challenges the muscles. The site also points out that aquatic exercise is a “well-balanced workout that improves all major components of physical fitness – aerobic training, muscular strength and endurance, flexibility and body composition.”
Fiano has also witnessed the benefits of aquatic fitness in her students.
“Some of the ladies who are taking classes found out that just by watching a little bit of what they eat and coming in and exercising they can lose weight,” she said. “Ladies have lost 45 to 50 pounds and a lot of inches. You seem to notice inches more in the water than you do pounds, because it tightens your body.”
Aquatic fitness is a low-impact exercise, but Fiano said, low-impact water exercise is different from low-impact land exercise.
“Exercising in water is a different way to bring your heart rate up,” she said “It is lower impact as far as the impact on your knees and your joints, but as far as working out you get the same benefit of land exercise.”
Besides adding a regular exercise routine to one’s lifestyle, aquatic fitness offers relief from ailments such as arthritis.
“If you’re up to your chest in water you’re one-tenth your body weight, so you have less stress on any of your joints,” Fiano said. “You’re more free to do movements in the water than you are if you’re above water, so it’s easier for anybody that has arthritis or had a knee or hip replacement to move and rehab in the water.”
Pat Kohrman, the Uniontown YMCA’s aquatic director for almost three years, said a class targeting the needs of people with arthritis is also offered at the YMCA.
“We don’t have many participants yet, but the program is just getting off the ground,” she said. “People stricken with arthritis come in and they are able to move through the water slowly, moving their joints, and it helps them.”
But arthritis sufferers are not the only beneficiaries of aquatic fitness. The AEA Web site states “water exercise can provide a safe, comfortable form of exercise for individuals with diabetes.”
Fayette County is 23.8 percent above state levels in diabetes-related hospitalizations, according to a recent story published in the Herald-Standard. Exercising vigorously once a week reduces the risk of Type II diabetes by 23 percent and exercising five or more times per week reduces the risk by 42 percent, according to the AEA Web site. Aquatic fitness may seem aimed towards mature individuals, with its therapeutic benefits targeting stiff joints and with Type II diabetes occurring most often in adults, but Fiano and Kohrman said there is no typical age range to the Uniontown YMCA’s aquatic-fitness students.
“Age varies all the way around,” Kohrman said. “Water walking tends to have more mature participants, but the aqua aerobics shows a variety of ages.”
Female participants dominate the local YMCA’s aquatic-fitness classes, only two of the students are men, but Fiano said she hopes more men will join.
“Any person, any age can come in here and do the water aerobics or the water walking,” she said. “It’s good exercise for anybody and if we could get more men to come in that would be good.”
Despite the lack of male participants, the overall number of students has increased since the pool opened in 1990.
“We had about eight to 10 people in the classes, and it just kind of grew,” Fiano said. Her classes, at a maximum, allow 28 students.
Uniontown YMCA aquatic-fitness classes run five days a week. Fiano said the classes, which originally ran Monday, Wednesday and Friday, had so many participants that Tuesday and Thursday morning classes were added last year.
Kohrman said the classes’ popularity rises when the temperature does.
“It goes a little slow in the winter but our fall, spring and summer classes just boom,” she said. “We have to put a limit on the number of participants in the classes.”
During a recent water-aerobics class, Sofranko and Locke, along with their classmates, pumped their bodies through the water to a beat of Fiano’s echoing voice. “OK. Here we go! One, two.”
Bodies in motion caused water to lap at the pool’s edge where Betty Zajac, a substitute instructor at the Uniontown YMCA, waded.
“These women here, they can outdo any 20 year old,” she said, smiling.