New Article: Rowing Injuries - Understanding, Preventing, and Managing
A detailed overview of rowing injury prevention and management
This is Part 1 of a 4-part series on rowing injuries. I am not a medical professional and this is not medical advice. A strength coach cannot diagnose injuries or prescribe treatment or rehabilitation programs or exercises. I focus on two things in this series. The first is what we know about rowing injuries from published research, specifically risk factors and strategies to reduce risk exposure. The second is trainable factors to manage injury when it occurs, specifically what we CAN do without interfering with the rehab and healing process as advised by a medical professional.
I spent most of the winter developing an “Athlete Health Initiative” with the Craftsbury GRP. My closest colleague, dietitian Megan Chacosky, and I have been working with the idea that our biggest challenge is keeping athletes healthy to at least sustain, if not thrive on, a high-performance training load. If we can do that, the athletes and sport coaches can handle the rest! Helping athletes be a “full go” for training session after training session, week after week, season after season, year after year, Olympic cycle after cycle, has positive individual and systemic effects. We want to help make Craftsbury the healthiest place to pursue high-performance endurance sport.
This has given me the opportunity to get back into injury research and compile materials to address the “healthier” side of my website tagline: rowing stronger, faster, healthier, and for longer! My new article provides the overview of the process of overcoming rowing injuries. Stay tuned for guides to low back pain and rib stress injuries coming up next.
Read now at RowingStronger.com.
Table of Contents:
Get Qualified Professional Help
Biopsychosocial Understanding of Pain and Injury
Training or Competing Through Pain
Short-Term Rowing Injuries: Offloading and Reducing Pain
Longer-Term Rowing Injuries: Rehabilitation and Modified Training
Returning to Training and Performance
Wrap-Up and Specific Guides to Low Back Pain and Rib Stress Injuries
Key Points: The best rowing injury prevention and management occurs with an interdisciplinary program including the athlete, rowing coach, strength coach, physical therapist, physician, dietitian, sport psychologist, and potentially more if available. Understanding and reducing pain requires a biopsychosocial model that considers biomedical, psychological, and social elements of training and outside life, as well as rowing-specific knowledge. We improve injury recovery outcomes when we can preserve fitness, strength, and muscle mass through pain-free forms of cross-training and strength training while healing, whether for a short-term or longer-term rowing injury. Rowers returning from injury should use specific training strategies to achieve approximately a 1:1 return timeline, spending as much time returning to full training as the rower was away or doing modified training. A gradual return progression to full training and performance improves recovery outcomes and reduces risk of reinjury or other injury.
Read on: https://rowingstronger.com/2024/05/19/rowing-injuries-understanding-preventing-managing/
