Is Your Swimming Technique Risking Your Shoulder Health?

How our newly patented Stroke Insights℗ are helping swimmers swim pain-free.

Hey swimmers,

Before we kick off today’s blog about an issue that studies have shown may affect as many as 91% of us regular swimmers¹, it would be remiss of me not to mention what has been getting me up at 3am this week with the simply amazing swimming that has been on TV has been this week - have you caught any of it and what have been your favourite Olympic events? Let us know in the comments:

Here’s my pick of the Top-3 swim-related topics in Paris this week:

1. As mentioned in the blog 2 weeks ago², the currents in the Seine proved very challenging for the triathletes in Wednesday’s men and women’s triathlon. The current wasn’t quite the 12km/h purported it could have been, but was in excess of 4km/h. Despite this the men still averaged just under 1:21/100m with Alession Crociani 🇮🇹 leading the men out of the water and Flora Duffy 🇧🇲 leading out in an average pace of exactly 1:28/100m. This was at least 0:10/100m slower than you would expect and the tactics I mentioned in the blog and also on Instagram during the race³ really played out in favour of the stronger, more tactically astute swimmers. The events were won by Cassandre Beaugrand 🇫🇷 and Alex Yee 🇬🇧 both of whom made the lead pack in the swim.

2. Daniel Wiffen 🇮🇪, who’s exclusive interview featured on the blog in February⁴, won the men’s 800 freestyle with the exact same technique he described when he spoke to me about his plans 6 months ago. It’s worth a revisit of that one, especially with how to develop a 2-beat kick yourself (and also why not to depending on the rest of your stroke!).

3. It’s only natural that I have a soft spot for Katie Ledecky 🇺🇸 - whilst you might assume that’s because she’s the all-time greatest female distance swimmer in the pool, it’s actually for two other reasons entirely: 1) she immediately superseded my favourite female pool swimmer of all time, Rebecca Adlington 🇬🇧 in London 2012; 2) she has an almost identical leg kick and stroke rate to my favourite female marathon swimmer, Shelley Taylor-Smith 🇦🇺

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Is Your Swimming Technique Risking Your Shoulder Health?

We have a tongue-in-cheek saying in our house about our ‘perfect’ family business(es) with myself as a swim coach and Michelle as a physiotherapist:

“Paul injures people and Michelle fixes them!”

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth!

Over the past 20 years, Michelle’s influence on my coaching has been instrumental in being able to develop a system of knowledge, skills and resources to ensure that the 1,000s of swimmers we have each worked with can enjoy healthy, injury-free swimming for their entire lives.

As we all grow older, being able to enjoy some form of cardiac exercise is super important for our health and mental well-being and despite the adage that:

“Swimming is a sport you can enjoy for your entire life due to it’s non-weight-bearing nature!”

…suddenly feeling a niggle in your shoulder, neck, back or elbow enough to cause a cessation from swimming for any period can feel like a disaster. Fret not though, there’s usually a rhyme and a reason as to why this is the case. Our whole “cause and effect” approach to swim stroke correction was born out of the self-same process that most physios will go through when trying to identify the cause of your niggling woes: low, sinky legs? Head too high; scissor kick? Cross-over in front of your head. Lack of propulsive effeciency? Straight arm catch. The list goes on.

When it comes to swimming-related injuries there are 2 types of swimmer: 1) those with very obvious technical flaws; 2) those that you have to dig a little deeper to diagnose. Those who fall into the first group have 3 primary causes:

Patented Technology to Help Diagnose Your Issues

A little over a year ago on 14 June 2023, we were awarded a British Patent for our “System & Method for Coaching a Swimmer”⁵ for the technology that we’ve built into wearable devices to be able to quickly and easily detect the above 3 issues and recommend ways in which you can rectify these issues. If you have an Apple Watch⁶ yourself, you can easily check for these issues using our patented Swim Smooth Guru, just like I did with a junior swimmer earlier this week who’d been complaining of a sore right shoulder:

Nothing Beats Real, Human Swim Smooth Coaching

Of course, you might not have an Apple Watch or you might fall into the category of the second type of swimmer (those with less obvious flaws), in which case our ultimate recommendation would always be to check in with one of our expert coaches who cannot only diagnose your issues definitively, but also help you fix the issue and create a plan to ensure you stay injury free! Technology can be great, but nothing beats real, human coaching - here at Swim Smooth, we’re perfectly positioned to utilise insightful technology with the empathy of an expert coach “in the loop”:

Soon to-be-announced Coach Ed Collins, Herefordshire, UK with swimmer

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1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6961642/

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5. https://www.ipo.gov.uk/p-ipsum/Case/PublicationNumber/GB2597336

6. We have been asked a LOT, “when is this technology coming to my Garmin watch” and the original answer was, “Garmin hadn’t unlocked the ability to access the data to allow us to present this”, however, now they have - the bigger challenge now is one of funding to bring this to the market. Let us know if you want this on your Garmin or if you want to help us make a real difference in the swimming world?