Swimming Races Article

Injuries & Conditions Faced by Competitive Swimmers

Competitive swimming presents a distinct set of potential injuries and conditions, including swimmer’s shoulder, overuse injuries in the shoulder, elbow, knee, back and ankles, in addition to problems that are generally associated with training too hard.

Athletes often begin their competitive careers when they are as young as seven or eight years old, and train and compete year-round. Many competitive athletes swim on several different teams to maximize both their experience and exposure. Competitive athletes train intensely and near constantly. They can swim up to eleven two-hour workouts per week, in addition to participating in weight training. A typical training session involves three 30-50 minutes of strength training, and approximately 10,000 to 15,000 yards of swimming. Regardless of specialty stroke, a great amount of competitive training is done in the front-crawl method of freestyle, likely because of the speed it provides.

Swimmers are reluctant to take time off when they have received an injury, which makes rehabilitation much more difficult. Physicians and coaches try to keep time out-of-water to a minimum when designing a rehabilitation program for a competitive swimmer, because extended time out can be detrimental to a swimmer’s entire season.

In a single year, a swimmer can move their shoulder to its extreme range of motion around 2,000,000 times. As a result, it is fairly common for a swimmer to injure their shoulder, simply based on long-term overuse and repetitive trauma. Specialty strokes, like the breaststroke, backstroke and butterfly do not appear to influence shoulder pain in swimming nearly as much as the intense training with the front crawl style. Swimmer’s shoulder is the most common injury for swimmers, which is brought on by an overuse of the supraspinatus or bicep tendons which causes inflammation. Repetitive irritation of the supraspinatus tendinosis may lead to acute local inflammation which can further aggravate the injury.

Elbow stresses can be caused by swimmers using a high elbow position during the pull phase, overloading the medial tendon and placing the elbow in serious risk for injury. Swimmers can compensate for a sore elbow by lowering it during the pull phase, but the position created is less efficient and may actually increase stress on the shoulder and extensor muscles. Increased medial elbow stress increases the risk for ailments such as tennis elbow, and shoulder injuries as well. Knee injuries are also common, especially when related to the whip kick in the breaststroke.

“Breaststroker’s knee” is a media collateral ligament sprain that results from stress on the MCL that is repetitive. Feet and ankles are also susceptible to injury, especially in the form of tendonitis which is caused by repeated extreme flexing during flutter and dolphin kicking. Finally, the back is also susceptible to injury, in the form of low-back pain and stress, and other repetitive stress injuries caused by turns and poor head and body positioning while in the water.