History

While searching for suitable movements on the surface of the water to prepare clients for underwater therapy, the founders of WATA came across WATSU. Brunschwiler, who completed WATSU training in the USA with Dull and taught both WATA and WATSU in Switzerland, combined these two forms of therapy.
After WATSU (from America) and WATA (from Switzerland) were merged into a single method, the name Aquatic Bodywork was coined in German-speaking countries.
Aquatic Bodywork has been taken up and used by professionals from different therapeutic disciplines, for example in inpatient programmes for people with depressive symptomatology (Maczkowiak, Hölter, & Otten, 2007), after accidents (Scaer, 2001; Schitter & Fleckenstein, 2018), war deployment (Smeeding, et al. 2010) or stroke (Chon, 2009), during pregnancy (Schitter et al., 2015), and in extremely protracted pain conditions such as fibromyalgia (Faull, 2005; Gimenes, Santos & Silva, 2006; Navarro Neto, & Benossi, 2006).