Welcome to our Swimmer's Sports Medicine site! We've brought together information on several topic areas related to swimmers' injuries, including some good ideas on self management and prevention.

 

Our attention is focused to a large extent on the shoulder. A high school swimmer performing a workout of 6,000 yards can expect to make over 2,000 overhead cycles with each arm during that swim! Some studies have reported that as many as 60-70% of swimmers will experience shoulder pain which restricts their training at some point in their career. In short, there's plenty of room for improvement in preventative measures!

 

Swimmers also experience knee pain (particularly breaststrokers), back pain and, to a lesser degree, inflammatory problems of the neck, arms and legs.

 

Some of these injuries stem from technique problems. Many result from training increases which are too aggressive, (too far, too fast, too soon). Most are related to simple fatigue in key muscle groups, contributing to stroke breakdown as the swimmer tires.

 

Our interest in swimmers began over 28 years ago, when we got tired of hearing that old line, "If your shoulder hurts when you swim...don't swim!" We didn't (and still don't) believe that was acceptable, so we started to do something about it.

 

We hope you will find good practical and useful information here for dealing with the aches and pains of swimming which go beyond typical sore muscles. Drop us an email (swimmers@concordehealth.com) if there's something else you'd like to hear about, or if you have other strategies that might be useful to share with others.