Injury to Swimmers - bad luck, bad athletes or bad management?

Biography

Peter Blanch has worked in elite sport for almost 30 years. Early in his career he was involved with teams in the VFL (Victorian Football League) before it became the AFL, the NSL (National Soccer League) before it became the A league and the NBL back when Australian basketball was on television. For twenty years he worked at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra working with numerous programs but specifically basketball, cycling, triathlon and swimming. During this time he attended three Olympics, five Commonwealth Games and numerous other International competitions. A lot of this time was spent as a clinician but along the way he has also been involved in research with a Masters degree in three dimensional motion in swimming, over 40 peer-reviewed publications, adjunct positions at three universities and

numerous national and international conference presentations. Over the last two years he has taken the role of Sports Science and Sports Medicine Manager for Cricket Australia with one of his major KPIs being the reduction of injuries to fast bowlers.

Synopsis

Due to the high repetitious workload of swimming training, overuse injuries especially of the shoulder are a costly problem for swimming. Due to different logistical reasons long term injury surveillance in swimming has not been achieved and research is often around perceived risk factors examined retrospectively and/or cross-sectionally. The identified risk factors often place ‘the blame’ for injury on some sort of athlete inadequacy (genetic, flexibility, strength, technique). However the most consistent findings that occur in the literature related to injury are to do with training volume and structure. Training ramped up too quickly, taken too high or maintained at monotonous levels are all related to injury. This of course places considerable responsibility on the coach. The basic recording of injury history and injury costs associated with measurement of the load athletes are placed under is fundamental information required for swimming to advance in the area of injury prevention.