Best Exercise for Dogs With Hip Dysplasia

What do you do to exercise your dog if it suffers from hip dysplasia?  This is one of the most common questions asked about dogs with dysplastic hips, since exercise is the start of an increased pain cycle for your pet.

All dogs need exercise, especially dogs who are getting up in years.  If your dog sufers from hip dysplasia or arthritis it can be a conundrum, either getting some exercise to help keep their overall health, or no exercise to help them with reduced pain.  This is a perplexing dilema when it comes to the wellbeing of your pet. 

With dogs suffering from arthritis this is a little less of a problem, since there are medications that will help mitigate the pain.  With hip dysplasia this will not only cause pain, but will wear the joints even more causing increased pain in the future.  If your pet suffers from either one of these problems you should have them on a daily regime of glucosamine and chondroitin to promote joint health.  This treatment really does help in most animals and you should have any working dog on them from an early age. 

If your pet is overweight you must reduce their weight to relieve the pressure on their joints.  Failure to maintain your pet's ideal weight will cause your pet more pain and suffering. 

To allow continued mobility for pets as well as humans, range of motion exercises will allow better flexibility and mobility.  Also cardio exercise is important to maintaining good health.  For pets suffering with arthritis and hip dysplasia these types of exercises can be problematic.  For most pets in pain doing any type of cardio is not possible due to the fact that most of these exercises require either brisk walking or running.  This puts increased stress on joints and will cause the pet increased pain.

By far the best exercise for dogs with hip dysplasia and arthritis is one that is low impact, that is it doesn't stress the joints.  The exercise physicians recommend for their older human patients is swimming.  This not only works well in humans, but in our pets as well.

Putting your dog on a swimming schedule will help increase their overall health with the added benefit of not causing increased pain and inflamation of the joints. The overall benefits of swimming are:

*  Allows for more strength and energy
*  Increased muscle strength around joints
*  Helps to maintain bone strength (bone density)
*  Helps control weight

For me my dogs have never been pets, they have been part of the family and have probably received better medical care than I have at times.  I consider it my duty to provide the highest level of care and protection for my animals as I would to any member of my family.  If you would like to consider an altenative treatment to your current pain and hip dysplasia medication I would highly recommend ArthroIonX.  It can even provide help with hip dysplasia.  If you treat your pet as a family member please give it some consideration.