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Most sports come with injuries to accompany them. Although swimming is, by most
standards, not a sport associated with high risk of injury, it does have it’s
own problems. By far the biggest source of sidelining swimming injuries is the
shoulder.
I was a competitive swimmer for 14 years, sometimes doing double workouts and
15,000 meters per day. I swam mostly freestyle and backstroke. I never had a
shoulder problem until my college years. I had been training with pull buoy and
paddles throughout my freshman year of college. I started getting a little pain
in my left shoulder, but being 19 and feeling invincible, I swam through the
pain and was sure that a little rest after the season would fix me right up.
Well I did take the rest and ended up in a lot more pain when I resumed
swimming a few months later! The doctors said it was rotator cuff tendonitis. I
rehabbed and within a few more months I was back to swimming every day, but my
shoulder has never been the same since.
There are a variety of ways to give yourself a shoulder injury in swimming.
“Overuse” is often what doctors will say. This is a pretty general term and
doesn’t help many athletes when they’re trying to accomplish their goals and
avoid getting hurt! Some of the other ways include:
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Improper Technique- reaching too far and over-rotating, crossing over in
freestyle when pulling
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Sudden increase in training distance or intensity
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The use of pull buoys and hand paddles
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Swimming only freestyle at every workout
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Unbalanced strength development
Preventative Measures
1. One of the most important things in stroke technique when it comes to
freestyle and avoiding shoulder injuries is to bend your elbows underwater
during the pull. This is proper form and will keep you from putting your
shoulder in an awkward position that leads to a rotator cuff problem.
2. When you’ve had some time away from swimming and are resuming training,
always ease back into it. If, for example, you train with weights and had a
3-month layoff, you wouldn’t try to max out on your bench press the first day
back. The same applies to swimming. Instead of jumping back in and resuming the
5,000 meters you were doing before your break, start with something very light,
like 1000 the first day, 1200 the next, etc.
3. Avoid the use of pull buoys and paddles. Although it is tempting, buoys
merely give you a false sense of floatation and put unnecessary tension on your
joints, especially your shoulders. Although there are paddles designed not to
cause shoulder problems, most of the paddles out there are not needed in
training, and will cause shoulder problems if you give it enough time.
4. Swimming only freestyle at all of your workouts may seem like a good idea if
you are training for a triathlon, but I would not recommend it. First of all,
you will gain more from cross training with other strokes. And most
importantly, excess in any one stroke leads to a higher probability of an
“overuse” injury.
5. If you breath to only one side, you will develop the muscles more on one
side than the other, and this could cause a breakdown and a shoulder problem.
Incorporate bilateral breathing into your workouts to avoid this. If it’s
extremely awkward at first, start with just breathing bilaterally in warm-up
and warm-down, and slowly add it into the rest of your workouts as it becomes
more comfortable.
Post-Rehab
If you are just getting over a shoulder injury and are jumping back in the
pool, put on a pair of fins. Zoomers or Hydro Finz work the best. That way you
are accomplishing 3 things: 1) taking some pressure off your shoulders, 2)
getting a great cardiovascular workout, and 3) building strength in your legs
for swimming. One “good” thing about shoulder injuries is that they force us to
slow down, and give us a chance to work on drills and stroke technique while we
get back to health. And from what I’ve seen as a coach, many triathletes can
use a little slowing down when it comes to improving their swimming!
About the Author
Kevin spent much of his life swimming competitively through high school and at
the University of California - Davis, where he achieved All-American status.
After college, he began training for triathlons, studying nutrition, and
working on his personal training certifications. He started coaching a masters
swim team in San Francisco in January, 2001. While the traditional coaching
philosophy in swimming has been "no pain, no gain" and "the more, the better,"
Kevin didn’t subscribe to this way of grinding out workouts, and sought out a
better way of teaching his swimmers. He came across the Total Immersion method
of swimming, and began incorporating some of the techniques and drills in
workouts, as well as in clinics and private lessons. This allowed swimmers to
get more out of their strokes, swim faster, and swim more fluidly, while
keeping their heart rates down. In other words, getting more out of less! He is
now coaching age-group and masters swimmers at the Solana Beach Boys and Girls
Club in the San Diego, CA area. He has just completed a guide for triathletes
titled The Complete Guide to Triathlon Swimming, available on his website,
www.triswimcoach.com. Kevin has competed in several triathlons and has
been a top finisher at the Catfish Open Water swim in 2001 and 2002.
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