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How to successfully return to the pool
If you introduce your arms and shoulders to the movements and stresses of swimming, you won’t be in for a nasty surprise when you return to the water.
Article: Regina Senften, NZZ / 6.3.21
For a long time, recreational swimmers had to do without their sport. Now there is light on the horizon. Be it because the indoor pools are gradually being allowed to reopen their doors for popular sports or because the water temperatures in local waters will soon make swimming possible again – at least if you wrap yourself in a full-body wetsuit.
In both cases, it is high time to get the body back in tune with the specific movements and stresses of swimming after a long break from the water. You might argue: You can’t forget how to swim! Quite right. However, a longer period without water combined with a lack of movement when working from home inevitably leads to certain parts of the body becoming rusty.
If you don’t get to grips with this, after the first jubilant meters in the long-awaited water, you risk overuse injuries or injuries to the shoulders, which could possibly cloud the coming swimming season.
Crawl, breaststroke, backstroke or dolphin swimming consist to a large extent of so-called overhead movements. This means that force is applied above shoulder height. Such movements are currently rare in our everyday lives. If you haven’t kept your body in shape with serious home training in recent months, you should get your muscles, tendons and ligaments in your arms and shoulders used to overhead movements again with the following exercises.
Slow movement, little weight
Mobilization and strengthening exercises can easily be carried out with everyday objects if small dumbbells are not available: PET drinks bottles (0.3 or 0.5 l, later 0.75 l and more), aluminum or tin cans are equally suitable, as long as they fit well in the hand.
First comes a short warm-up without equipment: stepping or tight marching with arms in place, swinging arms, circling shoulders, rotating the spine. Then, in the first few weeks of reacclimatization, the aim is to perform slow arm and shoulder movements in an upright, hip-width stance with really light weights in your hands. To begin with, the weights should ideally not move much further than shoulder height.
A variety of arm movement patterns are now permitted, or rather encouraged, which are performed slowly and as smoothly as possible in front of and next to the body; synchronized, offset, side by side or one after the other. Let your imagination run wild: use the weights in your hands to draw figure eights in the air in front of your body or circles, question marks, letters, intertwining circles, imaginary pushing, shoving or wiping.
The only important thing is to perform each selected small pattern slowly twelve times (around 90 seconds), keeping your torso straight and still, actively pulling your shoulders down and keeping your head in line with your spine. After each pattern, take a break of around 30 seconds and then move on to the next sequence of movements. Just 15 different patterns of twelve repetitions each will really work your arm, shoulder and core muscles.
Increase moderately, curb ambition
The next training step involves movement patterns above shoulder height and above the head: pushing weights towards the ceiling, waving above your head, adopting Popeye positions, bobbing your wings like a bird with outstretched arms, playing traffic cop, or finally drawing swimming movements such as breaststroke, crawl or dolphin in the air. The more varied and creative, the better.
The same applies here: if the arms with weights are working slowly above the head, the whole torso is tensed, the shoulders are not raised and the head remains straight. Don’t develop any false ambition now, but on the contrary, curb it and increase the weights moderately after ten training sessions at the earliest. In mass sports, one day of small strength training should be followed by a day of strength break.
The advantage of such exercise programs is that you can easily do them at home or in the great outdoors. Those who make an effort to work cleanly and calmly will be rewarded after a short time with the wonderful feeling of activated shoulder and arm muscles. Then it will hopefully only be a matter of time before the supple, mobilized, pre-strengthened shoulders can show what they can do in the water.
