Reply To: injuries

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#2239
Matt
Participant

My $0.02. Traditional training, in general, creates more longer-term injuries than what I’ve seen with pace-pace dominant training. I have one season of RP based training with my team. 7+ using traditional training.

The emergence of an injury seems to happen more quickly and sharply in RP training. One day/set everything is fine. Perhaps a small annoyance. Next day…boom. Real injury pain. In traditional training I think the injured state creeps up more slowly. Much easier to ignore or not even notice the small delta day-to-day. I believe this creates a tendency to not give legit injury pain the weight it deserves and thus I have this conversation:

Coach my shoulder is killing me.
Ok. How long has it been hurting?
Well…over a week, but it got really bad today.
Why didn’t you say something earlier?
*shrug*Didn’t seem that bad.

By the time the swimmer’s injury threshold is crossed they have been in a “worse than good” state for a much longer period of time as compared with RP training. This season using RP it seems more likely I’ll hear that injury pain has been there for a day or two at most.

I feel like injuries go away more quickly this season too, but I don’t have any stats or even a good anecdote for that. It makes sense that if injuries are being identified earlier they’ll heal more quickly, but take this with a grain of salt.

Outright mechanical skill has a huge effect too. No great insight here. The worse the technique the more likely I’ll see an injury. Here again I see a common characteristic of RP training where consequences occur more quickly and sharply than with traditional training. On the up side this forces the need to change earlier. On the down side those that don’t have enough ability to overcome bad muscle memory tend to get stuck and don’t progress at nearly the rate of their counterparts. Again, nothing super insightful here. The difference I’ve noted is those who can’t correct technique appear to suffer the consequences to a greater degree with RP than with traditional training.

Matt