INJURY-FREE SWIMMING

Attention in the pool! Don’t get hurt getting better.

By Terry Laughlin

Injury-free swimming? That’s redundant, isn’t it? Swimming is supposed to be injury free. No matter how badly you beat yourself up in your other sport, you can always convalesce doing risk-free laps in that gentle, weightless, watery world, right?

Well, yes and no. Swimming deserves its reputation for being both vigorous and gentle. But "gentle" cannot promise "injury-free," and though there's no equivalent in the pool to a runner's stress-fractured shin or a skier's torn knee cartilage, there is one joint you have to watch out for: the shoulder. That's especially true of older athletes. We may swim less yardage and do other things instead, but the accumulated strain of years of those "other things," such as golf, tennis, softball, or any other overhead sport can be setting us up for shoulder trouble in the pool.

That's because your shoulder joint is practically built to get into trouble. An inherently unstable design, it's like a golf ball (the top of your arm bone) on a tee (the socket the bone fits into), the two pieces held in place by no fewer than 17 different muscles. That bold engineering lets the arm move in every direction, which is nice, but through continued use the muscles can fatigue and become over-stretched. When they do, they allow the humerus (a k a arm bone) to wobble in the joint and possibly pinch the muscles and tendons that wrap over the shoulder. And a pinched tendon quickly becomes a swollen, inflamed, and painful tendon.

How likely is that fatigue? A swimmer's shoulder rotates 1,200 to 1,500 times every mile while a major league baseball pitcher's may do 1,000 in a week. So a Prevention Plan for Swimmer’s Shoulder is clearly in order. Here's how it works.

Get ready. Warm up. Start each workout with 5 to 10 minutes of gentle swimming (at least 10 percent of your total time or yardage), followed by 5 minutes or so of on-deck flexibility exercises (see below), and your shoulders will be prepared for most any workout.

Get smooth. Don't just swim, work on swimming well. A balanced body puts less load on the arms, and guess what that does for the shoulder joint? Breathe to both sides, too, which spreads the work more equally between shoulders.

Get supple. Swimming promotes natural flexibility and fights the stiffness of aging better than any other aerobic activity, but it's not enough by itself. If you do no others, at least use the stretches described below, which effectively target the muscles you're about to use. Beyond that, good routines are out there by the hundreds in one exercise book after another.

Unfortunately they're usually typical maintenance work, and about as exciting as changing the oil in your car. So I do have a recommendation, because that's how I felt when I started looking around for a stretching plan that would be more fun and preferably more effective than the usual. And I can now recommend yoga. The exercises (or "postures," as they're properly called) are more exciting than plain stretching, do more good, and do more to balance your body. Probably one of the best-known programs for athletes is Beryl Bender Birch's Power Yoga: The Total Strength and Flexibility Workout (New York: Fireside/Simon & Schuster, l995). This is the official yoga program of the New York Road Runners Club, and is taught by Beryl Bender Birch throughout the United States. This book will tell you more than you might need to know, but it does so in an engaging and entertain way. And you will get a lot more out of your "limbering-up" time.

Shoulder Guards (Three protective joint-prepping stretches.)

Do two reps of each of the following, 10 to 30 seconds per rep, before and again after your swim workout:

The muscles underneath the shoulder. Put both arms overhead in the streamlined position, then lean first to the left side as far as possible, then to the right. Feel the pull all the way down your side.

The muscles in front of the shoulder. Put both arms behind your back, fingers interlaced, and slowly, steadily raise your arms upward behind you as far as possible.

The muscles in back of the shoulder. Put one arm across your body so that the shoulder is under your chin and the hand, forearm, and upper arm are parallel to the ground. Without turning your body, use your other hand to pull the arm as close to your chest as possible. Reverse.