There are thousands of different stretches for swimmers. If you google “stretches for swimmers,” thousands of different articles show up. Stretching may not always be helpful for swimmers, due to the fact that swimmers tend to be hypermobile. But in certain situations, stretching for swimmers may be beneficial. If one of the muscles around your shoulder become tight and impacts the range of motion needed for an efficient and fast swimming stroke, then stretching is absolutely warranted. This blog post will go over three effective stretches for swimmers.
The Three Stretches That This Blog Will Cover…
- Prayer Stretch
- Banded Lat Stretch
- Childs Pose
How Do You Know If You Need To Stretch in the First Place?
In a previous blog post, I took a deep dive on mobility assessments for swimmers. Being able to complete those assessments will help determine if you need to stretch or not. If you want to haven’t reviewed those mobility assessments, I would highly recommend checking them out. Click here to see that post. For these three stretches, the one assessment that would be most important to complete would be the lat length test.
All three of these stretches target the latismuss dorsi (commonly referred to as the lats), which is the powerhouse muscle of swimming. Due to the large role the lats play in propulsion in the water and the repetitive nature of swimming, it is natural for the lats to get fatigued and then get tight as a result. When this occurs, stretching is suitable option to help loosen the lats up again. There are also foam rolling exercises you can do too for your lats, which are included below.
The Three Stretches Swimmers Must Do:
Bench Stretch for Lat and Thoracic Spine
This is a personal favorite of mine and one of the only stretches I will typically recommend to a swimmer. This stretch does an amazing job lengthening the lats while improving thoracic spine mobility. An added bonus is this stretch does not put you in a position that will stretch out the ligaments or the shoulder joint. To make this stretch more intense, you can hold a towel or PVC pipe.
Banded Lat Stretch
The banded lat stretch is another amazing stretch for swimmers. One of the reasons I like to use this with swimmers is that it places your arm and shoulder in a similar to position when you ending the recovery phase/starting your pull when swimming. This kind of specificity helps transfer the mobility gained from outside of the pool to your stroke. My favorite bands for this kind of stretch are thicker resistance bands, which you can find here or through the link below.
Childs Pose
Childs pose is a great alternative to the prayer and banded lat stretch. Why? Because it does not require any equipment. To make the stretch more intense you can move your hands to one side, which will stretch the contralateral lat out more. You can also experiment with placing your feet further apart to get a good hip stretch as well. This stretch I will typically use with a stiffer swimmer, as for some swimmers this may not give that much of stretch.
Bonus: Two of The Best Self Soft Tissue Exercises for Swimmers
Lat Foam Rolling
Many people are familiar with rolling out your lats by rolling up and down. What gives swimmers a better result is actually rolling side to side. After doing 3-5 rotations at one spot, move down to a different portion of the lat muscle and repeat.
Warning: this may be painful at first, but gets less sensitive with time. If you are a swimmer and you do not have a foam roller, getting a foam roller can be one of the best investments you can make for recovery.
Posterior Shoulder
Out of all exercises discussed in this post, this one may be most the useful. One of the common deficits seen with swimmers is a lack of shoulder internal rotation. A swimmer requires full internal range of motion for a powerful and efficient pull. Without full internal rotation, different compensation patterns will happen to make up for this deficit. This can lead to increased stress on the shoulder, leading to impingement, rotator cuff tear, biceps tendonitis, etc.
This is a simple, yet effective, exercise that can be done at home to help improve your range of motion. This is a preferred way of gaining mobility compared to doing the sleeper stretch or horizontal abduction stretch. If you want to learn about other stretches that swimmers should NOT do, check out this blog post.
You can use a tennis ball, lacrosse ball, or myofascial release ball to do this exercise. All three work and are great to use.
Wrap Up:
In many scenario’s, stretching is not helpful for swimmers. An exception to this if there is a specific soft tissue restriction that is negatively impacting your ability to get into positions needed for an optimal swimming stroke. Often times the muscle that needs stretching is the lats, which can be stretched using the three stretches above.
Mobility work should not be guess work.
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