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tennis tom
USA
4749 Posts |
 Posted - 06/20/2004 : 10:48:46
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I've been doing some swimming lately and it feels pretty good after all the pounding on the hard courts. I do about 12-20 laps and consider it my yoga for the day. It feels pretty good. I do a lap of crawl and then a lap of backstoke. I can really stretch (oops) out.
I was thinking that I can't recall any comments from or about swimmers on this board. Is there something about swimming that prevents TMS? |
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kat.mcara
New Zealand
2 Posts |
Posted - 06/20/2004 : 14:35:26
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Good to see you're enjoying swimming TT. My experience was not so good unfortunately.
I started swimmiing a couple of years ago when I had a painful knee that stopped me from running. I only did about 20 mins and i stopped at the end of each length (my arms are not strong due to what I then thought was RSI/OOS). I was so pleased that i seemed to be able to do this without hurting my forearms (main site of RSI) and knee. After a couple of months however I developed catching in my shoulders. I reduced the number of lengths I did but kept swimming. Unfortunately it got so bad in my right shoulder that I had to force the arm over until it snapped at the shoulder with each stroke. It became painful to do this and I could hear the snap under water. Both shoulders began to hurt constantly and I had quit swimming.
It took a few weeks for the pain to subside but I find that my shoulders catch and then clunk back into place quite loudly. I have always had clicky joints but then a lot of people do and don't have any pain.
Anyway, I got quite upset with the swimming thing. I had stopped cycling about 10 years ago due to pain in my arms that was blamed on my job at the time. Cycling had been to my life what tennis is to Tom's. My doctor thinks that my upper body is unbalanced due to the long distance cycling I used to do (hunched forward over aerobars for hours at a time = overstreched uppper back/shoulder blades, shortened muscles in front of shoulder) and this has pulled my shoulders out of line, hence the problems swimming.
I have a typical TMS personality and it all makes so much sense to me but so do the physical explanations I have been given by various people. One thing that keeps me coming back to the TMS work is that I used it to successfully reduce hayfever last summer and that is the first summer in about 15 years I have not had to take allergy medication. Hayfever to me had always been something I thought just happened to me and I had no control over it whatsoever so I was ecstatic when I found I didn't need to suffer from it anymore. I still got the occasional sneeze and sniffle but no the awful attacks I used to get and certainly not enough to warrant taking medication.
Now if I could just do the same with the pain....
My goal is to one day be able to do a short triathlon (swim, bike, run). I have competed in the past but only as a cyclist or runner in a team event and that was before the pain started.
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polly
127 Posts |
Posted - 06/20/2004 : 19:02:22
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Tom,
I have found the pool to be VERY beneficial. I go out every night and do an hour or so of walking and swimming. It's helping me a lot.
I hate to mix subjects, but last week I was in agony and had a cortisone shot. I was at the MD's office and he offered and I took it. I have horrifying pain in my hip and groin. It sometimes goes into spasm and I'm literally locked. I felt like a traitor, but I needed any form of relief. I get the feeling it was more placebo than anything else, but the bottom line is that I am walking better. I also can not deal with the pain all the time. I've come a long way, but it's a struggle. I've been doing the water workouts regardless of how I felt.
And, btw, it didn't really hurt to get the shot. I was numbed first.
Polly |
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Fox
USA
496 Posts |
Posted - 06/21/2004 : 08:26:04
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| I tried swimming laps for 30 minutes nonstop after work - with a variety of strokes - two times a week for about 6 months. (This was 6 months after my anterior spinal fusion.) Each time, my sciatica felt better throughout the evening, but it was back to base line by the next day. I also got a nice "swimmer's high" similar to the "runner's high" that I used to get when I ran 6 miles a day. The swimming experience was very similar to running (60 minutes) or hitting/kicking the heavy bag for 30 minutes -- temporary relief and temporary dramatic elevation of mood. I only stopped the swimming because the chlorine in the water started causing itching (of course, this may have been TMS conditioning) .......As for cortisone injections, I had three in the spine for sciatica and had a day or two of improvement each time, and then I was back to baseline. Maybe it would work better, however, for the hip. |
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Do Swimmers Suffer Less TMS?
