New: Guides to Low Back Pain and Rib Stress Injury
What rowers and coaches need to know to avoid, manage, and build beyond these common rowing injuries
This is Part 2 of the rowing injury series. If you missed Part 1, catch up on my latest article here, “Rowing Injuries: Understanding, Preventing, and Managing,” for the detailed general overview of rowing injury prevention, management, and return strategies.
It’s been on my to-do list for a while to update my 2018 “Research on Low Back Pain and Rib Stress Injuries” article. This winter, I took lead on these two injuries with the Green Racing Project medical team to produce practical, athlete-focused guides to injuries, illnesses, and other common disruptions to health and training. I’ve modified the documents for online publication and posted them both on my website at the links below.
Rowing Low Back Pain: What Rowers and Coaches Need to Know
Rowing Rib Stress Injuries: What Rowers and Coaches Need to Know
My 2018 article was a version of a paper I wrote in grad school biomechanics class. It’s very detailed on the research (up to 2018) for readers who want an in-depth understanding of the injury mechanisms, rowing-specific training and performance factors, and what rowers, coaches, and strength coaches can do to reduce risk of injury. I also presented on this at the 2019 “Joy of Sculling” conference, with the link to the presentation recording in that article.
I’ve called my new guides “What Rowers and Coaches Need to Know.” We go briefly over injury mechanisms and risk factors, and then focus on training and strength training strategies for reducing risk of injury, modifying training while injured, and returning from injury to full training and performance. My goal is that these will be more useful for the average coach or rower who wants a more actionable resource to guide training before, during, and after injury. Both papers have a one-page cover sheet as well summarizing the main points in a flowchart.
I spent the weekend at Craftsbury with my friend and rowing physical therapist Dr. Lisa Lowe. If you don’t know her already, Lisa is a “triple-threat” professional: a physical therapist, rower herself, and rowing coach. She has a PT-oriented guide to low back pain already up on her website (PowerhousePhysio.com) and is finishing one for rib stress injuries that will be available shortly. I’ll update in my next post. For now I’ve just linked the low back pain one in my article. I’m not a medical professional, so I can’t provide medical advice, diagnose injuries, or prescribe treatment and rehabilitation. Lisa can do all this and more, and it was great working through both of these injuries with her.
As always, I welcome your questions and comments on the articles, here on Substack, or via email. I’ll have some summaries of these in my next post to tie all of this together in Part 3 of 4, before concluding with a post of general tips to reduce risk of injury.