swimming freestyle with one arm

Gil, one last thing I may add if you don't mind. Carefully design rehab workouts. You don't have to avoid completely swimming using your injured arm though. Using it could be part of the rehab. Here's an example of a carefully design rehab swim workout for someone that has rotator's cuff niggles: Wup (Dry) Arm circles Upper body stretching Wup (Wet) 100 Free very easy nice and smooth. No pressure on the catch (**important**) 100 kick backstroke. Have fun SDKing during this 2x50m BreastStroke pulling / Fly or FreeStyle kicking. No pressure during the pulling. Just move the hands but don't put too much weight doing this Main Set Drill (Wet) Rest: 10-20sec 8x25 sculling with flutter kick (the kick will help you maintaining warm body temperature) 8x50 @ 25m backstroke kicking / 25m 0-Arm kicking 8x50 @ 25m 0-Arm kicking / 25m 1-Arm kicking 4x50 (VERY EASY) @ 25m 1-Arm (injured arm this time) / 25m very soft full stroke More breaststroke pulling/flutter kicking or SDK may be added. *** stroke pulling is good to reinforce back (scapula) region muscles. Avoid backstroke pulling which tends to squeeze these small muscles even more than if you were free style pulling. Main Set Drill (Dry) using swim cords (that's the most important set of the whole workout) Use swim cords to perform internal/external rotation exercises. These greatly help reinforcing your rotator's cuff muscles. They should be performed with arm flexed as well as arm extended like shown in the first 4 exercises of the post below: www.tritalk.co.uk/.../viewtopic.php Then go home, put some ice and come back as early as possible for another workout. As your shoulder gets better, add more 1-arm using the arm that is injured. This approach is similar to performing physio in the pool. It involves adding just a tiny bit of stress to the injured side in order to make the rehab persistent. It also involves drilling a lot to hopefully get rid of the technical flaws that may have led to this injury. 1-Arm is perfect to achieve this goal.

Gil, one last thing I may add if you don't mind. Carefully design rehab workouts. You don't have to avoid completely swimming using your injured arm though. Using it could be part of the rehab. Here's an example of a carefully design rehab swim workout for someone that has rotator's cuff niggles: Wup (Dry) Arm circles Upper body stretching Wup (Wet) 100 Free very easy nice and smooth. No pressure on the catch (**important**) 100 kick backstroke. Have fun SDKing during this 2x50m BreastStroke pulling / Fly or FreeStyle kicking. No pressure during the pulling. Just move the hands but don't put too much weight doing this Main Set Drill (Wet) Rest: 10-20sec 8x25 sculling with flutter kick (the kick will help you maintaining warm body temperature) 8x50 @ 25m backstroke kicking / 25m 0-Arm kicking 8x50 @ 25m 0-Arm kicking / 25m 1-Arm kicking 4x50 (VERY EASY) @ 25m 1-Arm (injured arm this time) / 25m very soft full stroke More breaststroke pulling/flutter kicking or SDK may be added. *** stroke pulling is good to reinforce back (scapula) region muscles. Avoid backstroke pulling which tends to squeeze these small muscles even more than if you were free style pulling. Main Set Drill (Dry) using swim cords (that's the most important set of the whole workout) Use swim cords to perform internal/external rotation exercises. These greatly help reinforcing your rotator's cuff muscles. They should be performed with arm flexed as well as arm extended like shown in the first 4 exercises of the post below: www.tritalk.co.uk/.../viewtopic.php Then go home, put some ice and come back as early as possible for another workout. As your shoulder gets better, add more 1-arm using the arm that is injured. This approach is similar to performing physio in the pool. It involves adding just a tiny bit of stress to the injured side in order to make the rehab persistent. It also involves drilling a lot to hopefully get rid of the technical flaws that may have led to this injury. 1-Arm is perfect to achieve this goal.