Injuries can be prevented! Steps you can take
Dr. June Dies-Keys of Mulock Chiropractic explained the importance of exercise, warm-ups, warm-downs, and the potential for injuries from other sports and over-working during a presentation to a Newmarket Stingrays parents night last November. Here are highlights of her talk.
“It’s very important for parents and athletes to understand how injuries occur so they can be prevented. Here are some of the most common ways that swimmers get hurt:
- Increasing the swimming metres dramatically, as in training camp, or moving up to a higher competitive swim group.
- Training sporadically, i.e. missing workouts, coming back after being sick.
- Late for workouts or leaving early, missing proper warm ups and warm-downs.
- Changing stroke mechanics and not doing them correctly or consistently.
- Participation in sports outside of swimming.
So how do swimmers correct these things?
First and foremost, swimmers should be at workouts consistently and on time so they can warm up and down properly, including stretching. Some stretching can be done on the deck, but pool time is precious, so arrive early or stretch before arriving (some arm exercises can be done in the car on the way there if necessary) and always stretch post-workout at home.
Keeping in mind that any form of exercise can lead to some injuries, then you also need to be pro-active by icing and stretching any area that is sore.
Please Note: the most common way that swimmers get injured is participation in other sports. Sports conducted in a school setting, for example, are with students who are not in any kind of shape, next to you as athletes, and thus you are faced with insufficient warm up and down.
Generally what swimmers do is go full out for the whole school activity because you can, then walk out of the gym and sit in class or hop in the car and go directly to a work out often with no warm-up or down, no chance to re-hydrate, or pump out metabolic by-products of hard working muscles. Add to this that all other sports use muscles very differently then swimming and you have a recipe for injury!!!!!
As an athlete, you have to break the activity up in your mind into warm-up and warm-down and decide how hard you should really go depending on when you have work-outs, etc. This is true of physical education class participation and extracurricular activities.
Remember that your coach doesn’t know all your activities and needs to know if you are having pain or problems. You can still participate but you have to think, and depending on the level you swim at, decide with your coach whether some sports are better then others for you.
As a general rule of thumb, if you have a pain in the same spot for three or four workouts there is something wrong!!! Ice, stretch, evaluate your activities outside and inside the pool and talk to the coach.”
Dr. June Dies-Keys, BPHE, DC, Mulock Chiropractic on Leslie, 905-853-9685.
