Tips to Improve Your Swim Stroke and Avoid Injury
Swimming is a fantastic low-impact full-body workout whether you competitively swim or engage in swimming and aquatic exercise as part of your injury rehabilitation program. Swimming has many benefits, including improved muscle tone and strength, cardiovascular fitness, enhanced endurance, and the ability to exercise with minimal stress on your joints.
However, swimming, particularly competitive swimming, requires significant strength, training, and proper technique to successfully and safely complete strokes. A competitive swimmer can perform more than 4,000 strokes per shoulder in a single workout. The shoulder is the most commonly injured joint in swimming due to the complex maneuvers required: reaching, overhead, and repetitive movement both clockwise and counterclockwise.
The shoulder itself is a complex, highly mobile joint with a significant range of motion and freedom of movement that leaves it vulnerable to overuse injuries. It is essential to maintain correct biomechanics and proper technique throughout the swim stroke to reduce the risk of shoulder injury when swimming. Regardless of the stroke performed in competition, swimmers spend 75% of their training volume swimming the freestyle stroke, so it is key to use proper form for this stroke to prevent injury.
Tips to Improve Your Swim Stroke
In order to reduce injury and ensure you are engaging in proper technique when swimming, check out these tips:
Engage in a thorough dynamic warm-up and stretching routine, targeting the shoulder and chest muscles in particular. This helps your muscles to prepare for the workout by bringing blood and oxygen to the muscles through movement. “Cold” muscles are more prone to strain.
Bi-lateral breathing: When swimming the freestyle stroke, it’s important to breathe comfortably on both sides of your lungs. By alternating sides during the freestyle stroke, you are able to equalize muscle development and achieve symmetry as well as have a more even and efficient stroke.
Posture: Maintaining proper posture in and outside of the pool is important. If you have tightness in your chest muscles or a rounded shoulder posture from poor posture throughout the day, you can put yourself at risk for shoulder impingement, which is when shoulder tendons become pinched, irritated, and inflamed. During the freestyle stroke, shoulders should be back, chest should be forward, and the head should be looking forward and down so the water crests above your eyebrows.
Swim Kick: The kick during a stroke originates from the hips. Kick with your legs with power generated from your hips and core strength, not your feet. Your knees should have a slight bend during a stroke and your toes should naturally point.
Body Rotation: When performing a swimmer’s stroke, the body should rotate as if your spinal column is a skewer. As the right arm enters the water, the body should rotate slightly toward the right and vice versa. A flat body posture can lead to a shoulder injury, while proper body rotation facilitates bilateral breathing.
Hand Entry for Stroke: At this phase of the stroke, the “catch” phase, the hand enters the water and initiates the first portion of the pull underwater. The fingertips should enter the water first in front of your head and directly in front of the shoulder. Do not allow the thumb to enter the water before the fingers.
Pull Phase of Stroke: The pull phase of the stroke is when the arm pulls through the water, moving the body forward. The hand and arm should enter the water as an extension of the shoulder and help to propel you forward through the water. Avoid allowing the arm to cross over the midline or to swing too wide as both can lead to injury.
Recovery Phase of Stroke: This phase is the completion of a full stroke style in which the arm returns to starting position to initiate hand entry for the next stroke. The elbow should be higher than the wrist and the body should rotate with the direction of the stroke movement. If the correct amount of body rotation isn’t achieved during the stroke, the swimmer can experience more drag and will then need to expend more energy to propel forward.
Alternate Swim Strokes: When training, it’s important to alternate swim strokes to limit repetitive movement stress and trauma to the shoulder joint. While it is common to train using the freestyle stroke, alternate with backstroke and breaststroke to work different muscles of the shoulder.
Strength Training: Engaging in strength training can help address muscular and postural imbalances and increase swim speed for competitive swimmers. A 2016 study found that those swimmers who did short 30-second strength training of major muscle groups used in swimming for six weeks 3 times a week improved their swim times for both the 50 yard and 200-yard distances. Target the scapular stabilizers and rotator cuff in particular during strength training.
Progressive Training: Increase the duration and intensity of your swim training gradually to allow your body to adjust to the load placed on it. Prioritize appropriate rest and recovery to heal after a full-body workout.
Whether you have experienced an injury or would like to improve your strength and endurance as a swimmer, physical therapy can help! Physical therapists are movement experts who are trained to not only help athletes prepare for a successful swim season through a customized strength training program, but also provide evidence-based treatment for sports injuries.
At Mangiarelli Rehabilitation, our physical therapists treat common swim injuries, such as swimmer’s shoulder, rotator cuff tendinitis, biceps tendinitis, shoulder impingement, neck pain, knee pain, and back pain. Physical therapists use a variety of treatments to rehabilitate these injuries, including stretching, manual therapy, and a targeted strengthening and exercise program that focuses on improving shoulder stability and strength in particular as this joint is vulnerable to injury during swimming.
