Practice annoyance: unexpected acid reflux - cause/remedy?

Has anyone else experienced this? I have never in my life (52 yrs.) had any problem with heartburn or acid reflux. But often when I'm doing my swim practices, and pushing hard, I get something like acid reflux - a slight burning in my esophagus. At times it persists throughout the day. I never have a problem on days I don't practice. I've thought of experimenting with calcium pills before workouts, since I know working muscles hard uses a lot of calcium, but I have no basis for thinking that is related. I'd be interested in any thoughts on its cause, remedies, etc. It's a minor annoyance, but striking for me since I've never had problems of this nature ever before. Thoughts? Experiences? Solutions? I have experienced the same problems but has affected my vocal cords so that they "spasm" and close after 75 meters of freestyle leaving me gasping for air. I am now taking sprays for post nasal drip and Dexilant for acid reflex but so far not working. My current ENT will arrange a CAT scan of the pharynx and esophagas to see what is going on.

Since this thread resurfaced, I thought I would supply a follow-up. When I originally wrote this I had completed my first year back into swimming, and had trained hard for the entire year. I made a lot of progress, and swam some of my fastest times around this point. But I suspect my core muscles were not yet as strong as they would become. After a semi-forced period of somewhat lower-intensity swimming last year (2010), due to other life complications, I am back training hard again. My core muscles are stronger and, thanks to some clinics by SwimWorks (Brad Burnham - our college coach and one of our Masters group coaches), my form has gotten a lot cleaner. I am now swimming sets in workouts that are much faster than anything I've done before in Masters, and pushing at least as hard as I was when I wrote the original post. The tag line in all of this is that I haven't suffered anything close to the acid reflux I had earlier. I wonder if I was using my non-core abdominal muscles to try to accomplish things my core muscles weren't capable of (or possibly shouldn't have been doing due to not-so-great form), and in the process putting that large pressure on my stomach's sphincter muscle. It's just a guess, but there have been very few substantive changes in my swim routines otherwise. Regardless, I am back to having virtually no acid reflux issues.:)

www.reflux1.com/.../48 Hard to imagine Mark Spitz in his heyday lacked core strength, but who knows? The conventional wisdom not too long ago was that ulcers were caused by stress. Now it's generally accepted that many, if not most, are the result of bacterial infection--though some are probably also caused by NSAIDs. The fact that Dale's GERD disappeared is interesting, and it's possible that core training had something to do with it. Then again, that could just be a spurious correlation, and something else changed during the time off that is the real reason for improvement. In any event, glad to hear you are doing okay now!

Dale, that is an interesting theory. My son and daughter both have acid reflux which is aggravated by training. I didn't think of the core muscles being involved. I may have to add something to their training. Thanks for posting an update.

Remember, that was just a guess --- trying to correlate a single change with something that has changed in the interim. It could have nothing to do with it whatsoever. Just because I'm at a loss to think of anything else that could be responsible doesn't mean you should trust my guess. It's still a guess.:agree: As usual Mike, I'd trust your own intuition with respect to your son's training before I'd give much weight to my guess!:)