Solo Swimmers

plan your workout. if you don't have a plan, you don't have a clue, this goes for life outside the pool as well. i plan for the whole week carry a small white board with your workout written. this formalized things and will make you more accountable. you'll have a better chance of completing what you set out to do. Welcome to my Solo Swimmers thread, Dave! :welcome:It's nice to have you here. Thanks for offering your tips; you listed some excellent ones. I, too, use a white board; however I use it to keep track of what I have done (including my splits) rather than write down what I am going to do. Although you make good points about making yourself more accountable and planning out your week, there is a very good reason NOT to stick to your planned workout or feel guilty about it if you don't: AVOIDING INJURY. I'm sure King Frog (Allen Stark) will agree with me on that point. As a world-record 200 breaststroker, the last thing he would want to do is continue with a USRPT breaststroke set if he feels a twinge in one of his frog legs. Being a frog myself (but nowhere near his caliber!), I have to be very careful. I had hip surgery five years ago, and if I feel any twinge on my right side when I swim ANY stroke, I will immediately stop and change my set. Sometimes, I will change in mid-pool, and just keep going with the set as just breaststroke pull or feet first scull. I will adjust my interval, but and just keep going. If I still feel any pain, I will STOP. There have been some days I had great intentions of training a specific workout; however, I had to make changes on the fly. Speaking of fly, I do 60 military-style push-ups (Although, I can't quite get my chin all the way to the floor on them, so I'm working on it!), three times per week. On some mornings following those push-ups, my shoulders can't handle swimming fly. On other days, I feel perfectly able to do a USRPT set of fly and put in 500 yards of it before I quit. I don't let myself off the hook though. I stay accountable by always having substitution sets in mind to plug in when I need to avoid injury. The most important thing to keep in mind is to stay INJURY-FREE! The best way to do that is train all four strokes and have a good variety of drills in your memory bank to draw from if you need to eliminate kick or pull. Doing these things will keep you in the water, as will being flexible to change things up in the middle of a workout. Listen to your body! :agree:

Started with Masters about a year ago after a 40 year break from swimming. Took the last year to work on my strokes and steadily increase my yardage. I swim at 5:30 am so I don't swim "with" a group however I do catch up with other masters on the weekend and they will provide you with stroke tips that you miss from your horizontal plane. Now I am doing intervals (recently inspired by a meet) Some things I have learned by being on my own as well as tips from others are: warm up to swim, don't swim to warm up - do dry land to lubricate the shoulders, hips and knees along with some stretches when you find yourself dreading getting in the water, just act like it is your wudu, and be thankful you have the opportunity to swim consider it a blessing actually do a little water warm up (I do about 200 just to start pushing the lactic acid out of the muscle) plan your workout. if you don't have a plan, you don't have a clue, this goes for life outside the pool as well. i plan for the whole week mix up your workouts, don't get burnt out. carry a small white board with your workout written. this formalized things and will make you more accountable. you'll have a better chance of completing what you set out to do. pick a thing to concentrate on while doing a set (turns, finishing stroke, head position that kind of stuff) get it on white board do a warm down of some sort even if its just goofing off and pushing yourself off the bottom of the pool. think how you had fun as a kid. hot shower helps too.

Can I rant? I mean, not for pool temperature or for the amusing noodlers, but just for the whole last several months. Grr, I can't catch a break. Summer was tough, took a couple of months to get back in the groove once the kids were in school, and the older ones went back to 5:00AM practice, which is great for me so long as 67Queen isn't working overnight (physician), because I take them, then go across the street to the gym, and do my workout. Started to get back in the groove, and had to head out of town in October, to Mexico for a wedding. And got sick. Darn sick. Real sick. Out for 2 weeks with fever, lost 9 pounds, etc. So then I start eventually working my way back up to being able to do a normal workout (thanks for the advice I recieved on the forum, BTW!). Took me to about.....the Christmas season and break and all of that. WHich seriously disrupted my routine. And then I started having to hang around the kids practice in the mornings, either to set up the equipment I had made for the team (I basically built the team power towers, since the commercially available ones are so expensive), or to deal with team issues, as I've been on the board for a few years, and the President was out of town. Seemed to FINALLY get past that a couple of weeks ago. So I try to get back in, immediately delayed. At any rate, I up the yardage, normally average 3000 a day, and just went to about 3700 for a few days to try to kick start things. AND......ended up with a bum elbow, kind of like "tennis elbow." I'm sure it is because I tried to push it a little harder than I should have since I had not been able to train as regularly as normal. Anyway, RICE and ibuprofen. Talk to one of the kids' coaches, suggests I'll be fine, just don't to backstroke. So I try, but I feel it halfway through a set. Gets more painful. Back off, modify interval and just kick out the remainder of the main set. Next day, I do 4/2/4 swim/kick/pull for warm up. Then 16X25 UDK's with fins. Been trying to work on improving my upkick rather than just relying on the down. So I alternate on stomach, right side, left side, back, four times through. Do 20 50's sprint kick for a main set. All this so my elbow can heal. Now my freakin' lower back is killing me. Icing helps, ibuprofen. Standing KILLS me. I am guessing it may have been the UDK set, not sure. To make it worse, I have been planning on trying out one of the local Masters teams this week. WOn't go every day due to the schedule, but met the coach at a HS meet last weekend, and talked about checking it out. Now I'm out of shape, and have a bum back. Grr....like I said, I just had to rant (of course, if anyone has had a lower back problem resulting from swimming, or has any insight into what I did, I'd love to hear so I won't do it, again.

. At any rate, I up the yardage, normally average 3000 a day, and just went to about 3700 for a few days to try to kick start things. That strikes me as a bad idea. If I miss a few workouts - for any reason - I always slow down a little, ease off a little to start. I'll do that even if missing comes from things seemingly beyond my control, unexpected pool closings, emergency calls at work, whatever. It goes double if there was something inside myself that made me miss (sickness, laziness, bad scheduling, whatever.) For me, it's because the best practice is the most sustainable. It used to be that if I started doing workouts that were too hard, I would get lower back pain, even though my back seems to be remarkably resilient. The worst happened when I had just gotten a job in renal research and I was half convinced that some chemical in the lab was smashing both of my kidneys. The normal golden back hygiene practices might help - stretch your hamstrings, do some ab/core exercises and do some walking. No magic there by any mean, but it works better than expensive/invasive treatments.

Now my freakin' lower back is killing me. Icing helps, ibuprofen. Standing KILLS me. I am guessing it may have been the UDK set, not sure Okay, so it turns out.....I'm just broken. After a few days, I thought I'd get a massage. Wife (physician) has a partner whose wife is a PhD level PT at a pretty well known sports medicine group. At any rate, I go there, and I've got serious movement limitations. Thought they'd just rub down my back, but I got to be show and tell for the whole staff. They had 3 people come marvel at my condition. I joked that I was about as flexible as a 2X4, and let's say that didn't do it justice. Apparently I have so little hip flexibility that I compensate when I walk by arching my back slightly. They had a different PT who looks like the Aquaman actor (Jason Mamoa?) try to break me, but he couldn't. So I've got weeks of PT, and they actually sent me to a chiropractor to see if he can break me. Let's just say if given teh choice of a back to back 200 fly and 400 IM long course rather than the chiropractor, I'd rather do the swims. Now, I thought Aquaman was big. But this guy is like ANdre the Giant. And he proceeded to try to yank my right leg off. Didn't come out, but it popped. Yeah, that hurt. And I mean, it REALLY freakin' hurt. Like lights out hurt. As in literally, things went dark - I thought he turned out the lights in the room. I don't know what it was all about, but about the time I recovered, he moved to the next part. Then he made my legs do something resembling a pretzel, and then took revenge on me for all the times I used to jump on the bed as a kid. It hurt so darn much I was laughing. He was joking it was good I was his last appointment before lunch because I would have scared off all of his remaining clients. I told him I assumed he didn't rely much on referrals. And I get to keep going back. Good thing I on't run, as apparenlty my left leg is about a half inch longer than my right. It was probably 5-6" shorter before he yanked it. Who knew the optic nerve ran through the hip socket? Anyway, the PT side of things told me to stay out of the water for 10 days. And gave me stretching exercises to do. WHich is kind of like asking a steel i-beam to stretch, but I get to give it the ole college try.

I understand the frustration. I have the opposite problem, extreme joint laxity. I once dislocated my shoulder doing an open turn at a meet. Overuse gets to my shoulders and knees quickly and I have to be very careful. Unfortunately I am not always very careful and it has been a long time since I could go through an entire training cycle without time off. I have tried your idea of doing extra to get back in shape faster, that never ends well for me. Rest when you need to rest and ease back into it when you can. It is very frustrating, but Masters Swimming is about the long haul. I tell myself it is not as important how I am doing now, as how I will do in the 100-104 age group.

That there is about the clearest indication that stretching is the thing that could make a difference. It was intended to be a bit of humor, but flexibility has a genetic aspect to it, and it was made quite clear that none of this PT or stretching is going to make me flexible, but it will help. Interestingly, my rigidity is all in my lower body. Most of the typical pre-swimming stretching that is done does not target the areas of my body that need stretching. Interesting, though, that I've been swimming for almost 3 years, and never had this issue.

. And gave me stretching exercises to do. WHich is kind of like asking a steel i-beam to stretch That there is about the clearest indication that stretching is the thing that could make a difference.

Yikes, 67! :afraid:You're probably feeling 67 (or 77... or 97???) after all that! I'm sorry to hear you are going through all that. PT is an EXCELLENT idea. Just make sure you keep doing those exercises for the rest of your life, ok? I'm still doing the PT exercises I learned after my '87 back surgery, '03 TOS surgery, and '14 hip surgery. None of those surgeries were a result of swimming (or other sport) injuries, by the way. Add stretching to your routine, too. Dynamic stretching before, and static stretching after you swim will get you more flexible and keep you flexible, which will help prevent injury. Good luck! :bighug:

Hey, Solo Swimmers! I hope you are adhering to the social distancing recommendations issued by the CDC. I don't want to read any COVID-19 obituaries on the Forums! Let's all stay safe through this, so we can all be healthy and swim again someday. Meanwhile, not being able to swim doesn't mean not being able to exercise. This is the time to get healthy and strong for the future. Here is a post I wrote on another thread in response to a request by Renie for my current workout routine. In the post, I provide plenty of links to resources: forums.usms.org/showthread.php