Newbie who started swimming late Feb./early March. Currently working my way though week 5 of the guppy program. The front of my left shoulder is sore – think of the front of the deltoid leading down into the bicep. It was sore a bit when I first started swimming, then was fine, but this week it has flared up again.
I’m wondering if it something in my stroke causing it. I breathe primarily to my right, though I’m working on breathing to the left as well (it just feels awful when I do). I don’t feel any pain there when I do breathe left, and there’s zero pain in my right shoulder, so I’m thinking I doing something weird when I take that breath stroke. Any thoughts? I know I should find an actual swim coach to get some lessons but things were going pretty good until this week so I haven’t searched around for one (I’m in Contra Costa county, East Bay if anyone wants to offer up a name).
breathing to the right, you are putting too much stress on left shoulder, likely due to lack of fitness and/or poor technique for swimming, though hard to tell without a video. I would recommend you stop before it gets worse/back down on intensity, time, and work on improving technique. This could hopefully just be muscle strain, or may be something more serious like rotator cuff/anterior impingement issues that are common in swimmers. Without seeing a video of your stroke, some general advice is make sure your upper body rotates adequately, that you are not overreaching in the front if you lack the flexibility, that you do not pull down with straight arm, but rather with a bent arm/higher elbow, and that you enter the water with your forearm/hand more supinated, rather than pronated (hand should be parallel to water - when hand is facing out/thumb entry/ there is increased stress on the shoulder). Ice the shoulder after swimming, and start doing scapular stabilization exercises. May want to consider getting a swim coach or a few lessons. Good luck.
You’re probably pressing down when you breathe to your right and breathing late (breathing late forces you to press down on the left in order to establish support). Also, if you don’t breathe bilaterally, you’re literally doubling the load on, in your case, your left shoulder. Zero pain in your right shoulder is probably because you don’t breathe left often unless your mechanics just happen to be much better when you breathe to that side and it just feels weird to you.
If your shoulder is sore, at a relatively low volume, then yes it is something you are doing with your stroke that is causing it. Probably using it to much and at ‘bad angles’. One way you can address this is by increasing your rotation, so that you do more of the work with the twisting of your torso and less with your shoulder articulation.
This is a great issue to address through some video by the way. Shoulder pain is usually pretty simply to both diagnose and treat in cases like yours.
That’s the classic “swimmers shoulder”: a sore, tight, overworked deltoid. Give it two or three days of rest, ice, maybe some ibuprofen. Once it’s settled down, loosen it up with some massage: get a lacrosse ball between your shoulder and a wall. Do some light stretching. Ease back into swimming. Make the stretching and massage a regular thing …whatever frequency you find appropriate.
I agree with TriBiker (although it’s important not to overuse the ibuprofen). Another muscle to self-treat with the ball is your infraspinatus. The infraspinatus is on your shoulder blade (scapula) and it inserts into the tip of your shoulder. It is one of the rotator cuff muscles. The action of this muscle is to pull your arm back, so every stroke you do in the water is contracting this muscle, and since you do it with power, the odds are very high that it gets over-strained and shortens. As that happens it’s putting pressure onto the rotator cuff. The analogy I use is pulling your hair and your scalp hurts. In the same way, when the infraspinatus muscle is tight it causes shoulder pain. The nice part of learning how to treat your own muscles is that you can make it a normal part of your exercise program, so they are treated every day. Then you can go to a professional massage therapist when you feel you want a general “overhaul” to relax all of the muscle fibers.
Had a similar problem about 2 years ago. Read up on swimmer’s shoulder and forced myself to learn to breathe bilaterally. Used a pull buoy for awhile until I got used to it. Seemed to help relieve the pain.
Also had a private lesson…as someone else noted, I was pushing down on my arm to take a breath. Worked on establishing a better / stronger catch at the beginning of my stroke and that prevented future issues.
Did you ever find a source/solution for this pain?
I’m experiencing almost exactly what you describe - pain only on the top/outside of the left shoulder down to the top of the bicep. It flared up as I’ve joined a master’s program and started swimming at higher volume/intensity in the last two months. I do a bit of bilateral breathing, but mostly on the right side only, like you.