If you have some inflammation and discomfort in the shoulders from overuse, should you continue swimming to maintain ROM and some conditioning or do zero for a few weeks? This is for a HS swimmer who is coming back from a year off and went right into daily training.
That sounds right to me. Adjust workout, ice after etc. he is going to start back up in about a week from two weeks of rest. I couldn’t overrule my wife and doctor. Now he knows, I hope, to ramp in the work and effort. In all honesty, his freestyle technique is some of the best I’ve seen, so the inflamation is not from bad technique. I would have had him kicking and doing breastroke which in my experience is not hard on shoulders, especially if you just scull.
There have been some articles about return-to-swimming-protocol after shoulder pain.
Here is one: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.../
Here is another: s3.amazonaws.com/.../RU_Return_to_Swimming_Protocol.pdf
You can also go here: www.corswimmershoulder.com
The basic ideas behind the protocol are:
1) Fix technique.
2) Avoid paddles, kickboard, and other things that put excessive strain on the shoulder joint.
3) Gradually escalate swim training from zero in small steps, never progressing past a given step until that step can be completed with little or no pain.
It depends what exactly "soreness, inflammation and discomfort" is. If it's just acclimatization to training again, stopping the stimulus isn't going to help. If it's an injury or precursor to an injury, then yes, it does need to be eased up on significantly to heal.
Is the discomfort general, or in a particular ROM? Was it acute onset, or did the swimmer just wake up one morning sorer than usual? Is there any loss of ROM or strength associated with the discomfort?
I don’t think acute, it crept in on him. He admitted to some clicking, so he definitely needs to back off, but I was wondering on opinions about a hard stop being the thing to do.
I would say no on the hard stop. The body has to be able to adjust to stimuli. Just cutting everything off completely will more likely than not lead to the same issue down the line. Make sure he's doing prehab/rehab type stuff.
