Shoulder Health and Injury Prevention for our Swimmers
Swimming is regarded as a low-impact non-contact sport with only mild-to-moderate risk for injury. The largest risk for injury can occur due to overuse or a relative imbalance in strength and technique. There are several key aspects to maintaining health in the water. These include the the development of optimal technique, reinforcing healthy mechanics through each stroke, maintaining flexibility and reinforcing with strength and mobility exercises as needed.
Core technique and swimming posture: From our early developmental groups to the high-performance cohort, we emphasize proper, age-appropriate technique development. These include alignment of head with trunk, balanced stroke alignment, and optimizing rotation during appropriate strokes.
Strength training: When appropriate, strength training is incorporated in a developmentally appropriate timeframe, focusing on the core and shoulders. Early focus might include planks, squats and unweighted mobility exercises such as the ‘I’s, Y’s and T’s’.
Stretching: Our swimmers are encouraged to arrive at practice with ample time to perform both dynamic and static stretching – ready to hit the pool with lose and warm muscles.
Regulating total distance: Our coaching staff closely track the overall distance of each group weekly to ensure that swimmers remain within developmentally-appropriate workloads where the goals of the swimmers align with those of the staff and team.
Great resources for swimmers and their parents can be found at the USA swimming website and, as always, the coaching staff is here to help with conversations about your swimmers if questions arise.
An April 2024 update from USA Swimming is available by clicking this link.
In April 2002 USA Swimming participated in a Sports Medicine Task Force on Swimmer’s Shoulder. As part of that initiative, there were a series of exercises to consider for shoulder injury prevention in the UN-injured swimmer. These exercises can be found by clicking this link.
