Tuesday, March 13, 2007

I Have No Idea What's Wrong With My Arm

My arm is still hurting today. I think I pushed it too hard last night by doing the 90 laps. I was going to go swimming tonight, but now I'm thinking I should just walk home from work for exercise.

I've been doing research online this morning, and I can't figure out what's wrong. There are two distinct arm injuries common to swimmers, and I don't seem to have either of them. Swimmers Shoulder is caused by overuse and poor technique. Also by breathing on one side exclusively. The pain is in the shoulder and radiates to the clavicle. While I do breathe exclusively on my right side (I need to work on that), the pain isn't in my shoulder. I've also been told I have good technique so I don't think my technique is straining my arm.

The other possibility is Swimmers Elbow (like tennis elbow), which is caused by overuse. However, from what I can tell on the sites, the pain of that is mostly in the lower arm and affects the ability to grip things. That isn't my problem either.

The pain I'm having is in the exterior muscle of the upper arm, down near my elbow. It only hurts when I swim, although it's sore today because of my workout last night.

I've never had this issue before and I've been swimming for years. When I started back several weeks ago, I progressed slowly through 40, then 50, 60, 70, 80 and now 90 laps per workout session. I used to swim 120 laps at times and was hoping to get back up to that. This is just really frustrating.

2 comments:

Salma Gundi said...

Hey, I work with a triathalon athlete, and she was talking about "tight triceps" today. I have no idea if this will help you or not, but here's a link I found after googling:

http://www.trinewbies.com/Article2.asp?ArticleID=34

best wishes to you.

i i eee said...

Sounds like a mystery. I'm sorry, injuries are the worst -especially when you're just getting your stride.