Training Tuesday #5: Swimming Injuries

Injuries

You get them, I get them, we all get them. Injuries are the bane of everyone’s life. From little niggles to breaks, tears and rips. Over the next three Training Tuesday posts I’m going to try talk through about injury proofing/prevention for swimming, cycling and running without getting too technical!

Swimming

There are hundreds of ways to get injured in day to day life and the injuries you carry into the water are going to affect how you feel when swimming. Most people are taught the basics of how to swim as a kid and after that training becomes doing ever faster repititions up and down a pool. I work on my technique everyday. It’s essential. The easier I can get through the water the more and more likely it becomes that I’ll be able to swim from North America to France. An injury could ruin this kind of trip. Below are the three classic causes of swimming injuries:

The Three ‘O’s of Swimming Injuries: Over Stretching, Over Rotation and Over Use!

Over Stretching

As a kid you will have been told that’s important to stretch out as far as you can infront of you to maximise your stroke length and speed. Whilst having a full long front crawl stroke is an asset-over stretching is a killer. If you feel your shoulder moving out of neutral in it’s socket (shoulder blade moving up and out) then you’re stretching to far. Keep your shoulder blade locked solid and use it to transfer all the power from your stroke through into your body to push you forward.

Usual overstretching injuries are down the length of you shoulder blades (rotator cuff muscles) and are usually worse on the side you breathe more dominantly on.

Over Rotating

It sounds daft but when swimming front crawl your arm shouldn’t rotate at all. From the top of the stroke your arm should pull straight down and then as you roll onto your side you should track your hand up your side lifting your arm straight back up rather than rolling it round and out. On dry land it’s like raising and lowering your hand as if answering a question in class.

Rotating your arms rather than just raising and lowering them can cause you to cross your arms across centre at the top of your stroke essentially slowing yourself down each stroke. If you imagine your arms are entering the water, on a clockface with straight ahead being 12 they should go it at 10 and 2. This will feel odd but will pull your arms out so they probably are both going in at 12.

This is where you get the pinching shoulder pains and general shoulder and deltoid aches and pains.

Over Use

Easy to blame but impossible to fix? Yeah, pretty much. Over use with bad technique will destroy your shoulder, you’ll go to the doctor and they’ll want to get their knife out and cut you up. Swimming is not and should not be painful. Fatigue kills good technique so it’s your brain you need to train to fix this. Know what your body is doing, feel your arms crossing across the centre at the top of your stroke and correct it-think of yourself swimming from a third persons perspective-you know what’s happening, see your problems and work on them. It’s important to be able to feel your swimming technique and to be focussed enough to know something’s going wrong. I usually do five minutes of so of storke drills each hour in the water-usually catch up, catch and zipper drills as that’s my main areas I get lax in!

I use an adapted Total Immersion stroke and work on gliding and getting as much forward movement out of each stroke-the video below is practially swimmers porn. If you can do a 9stroke 25metres then you’ve got it made!