Swimming

Injuries associated with swimming are due to overuse and poor technique, with the shoulder area being the most prone to serious soft tissue / muscular injury. Breaststroke swimming can cause injury to the medial ligament of the knee due to the whipping action. Minimizing breaststroke distance by cross-training with other strokes, ensuring adequate warm-up, and increasing training distance gradually will reduce the risk of such injury.

Competitive swimmers will tend to swim all year round, often twice a day for up to 2 hours a session. Look for signs of over-training, such as poor sleeping pattern, increased resting heart rate, fatigue, muscle soreness and lack of motivation.

A well-structured stretching program should become an essential part of any serious swimmers training routine. As with all stretching, the muscles will need to be warmed, ideally with a combination of passive (warm shower) and active aerobic warm-up.

Most competition pools will have a training pool, which will enable swimmers to warm-up actively prior to racing. During training sessions, warm-up swimming drills should always be included, such as 4 x 100-meter swims with all strokes, followed by leg kicks and hand drills. Likewise at the end of your session, time should be spent cooling down and relaxing the muscles with controlled slower swim strokes.

Non competitive swimmers will benefit from spending 5 minutes performing the mobility exercises, and then a minimum of 5 minutes doing the dynamic movements.

The warm-up and cool-down stretches should be performed both before and after each session, aim to hold each stretch for 15 seconds, taking a deep breath and repeating for a further 15 seconds whilst increasing the stretch.

The following sports specific stretches should also be performed to optimize performance.