SUPPORT YOUR PHYSICAL THERAPIST. DON’T READ THIS ARTICLE.

Efficient swimming means less shoulder strain

By Dan Cipriani

Athletes must sometimes wonder: Since physical therapists fix everyone else, do they get hurt themselves? You bet we do. Just like doctors get sick and dentists get cavities. As both a professor of physical therapy who works regularly with athletes, and as a triathlete who competes as often as he can, I've been on the injured list plenty, usually after a big push to do something about the typical triathlete's torment: a lackluster swim leg. It's a predictable sequence. Get in all those extra laps trying to buff up the swim numbers, then watch the shoulder go to pot. But one weekend last fall, I finally found out why it was happening. Speed was what I was after at one of Terry Laughlin's Total Immersion workshops. And speed I got, to be sure. But along the way, I was also introduced to what turned out to be the safest form of swimming I know. It's scary. If Laughlin isn't stopped, he could cut my shoulder-injury business to nearly nothing. Turns out that what gets us into trouble most often is that we've been taught to swim like what we are: land creatures crawling through the sea. What gets us out of trouble is finally figuring out how to swim like fish instead of humans. It not only makes perfectly logical sense, but also works.

As a triathlete I learned in two days to swim farther and faster, and with less effort, saving valuable energy for the bike and run. And as a physical therapist I learned how to help my shoulder patients (triathletes, mainly) swim with less stress. And how is that? Stop making the shoulder the whipping boy of the swim stroke, as though the power that moves us must come from the arm. Those are forces that, frankly, the shoulder was never designed to produce. But only recently have we understood enough of how it functions to recognize that fact. The shoulder is essentially a "ball-and-socket" joint, much like a racquetball (the upper arm) resting on a bottle cap (the shoulder blade or scapula). Not a super-stable design, obviously, so the joint relies on special muscles to keep it in place. Those, of course, are the four little rotator cuff muscles. And while they can rotate the shoulder (turning your arm in and out as in a tennis backhand) they're really intended just to hold things in place.

It's actually a fairly simple job, but swimmers don't let those muscles stop there. Taught to pull ourselves through the water stroke by stroke with our arms, we way overload that bottle cap and racquetball, asking the shoulder muscles to generate most of the power we need to dig our way through the water, despite the fact that it's the smallest group of muscles in the entire upper body. We've got a job for a rottweiler and we press the poodles into service. No wonder it doesn't work out.

Worse, we make next to no use of the muscles of the hips and trunk, dynamos with power to spare and, so far, nothing to do. When the quarterback launches the 60-yard bomb, the pitcher fires a 90-mph missile, the tennis player smacks the 100-mph serve, that's where all that explosive power starts. These same muscles can work for us in the pool, too, by rolling our hips and torso from side-to-side. Once you start using that rolling motion as your crankshaft, and use the arms simply as the blades of the propeller, the rotator cuff muscles can go back to being the steering cables they were meant to be, not the engine they weren't. Result: less shoulder stress, less shoulder injury.

So if you learned to swim in the days before Lycra and Gatorade, and were coached to float flat on the water, now's a good time to forget it. Start rolling those hips and shoulders, and see where it gets you. And if those rolling hips seem a little lead-like, balance yourself by consciously pressing your torso into the water, letting your butt bob up where it belongs instead of dragging you down. That's another good way not to work any harder than you absolutely have to.

Now that I understand what my hips are for, I expect to be a faster--and safer--swimmer, and a less-injured physical therapist. And as Laughlin's ideas get around, I'll probably have more time to train, too. Fewer shoulder problems, fewer patients.

Dan Cipriani is Assistant Professor of Physical Therapy at the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo, and a therapist to Masters athletes at the College’s Orthopaedic Out-patient Clinic. This article originally appeared in MasterSports newsletter.