Swimmer’s shoulder in young athlete: Rehabilitation with emphasis on manual therapy and stabilization of shoulder complex

Abstract

Competitive swimmers swim10e14kmperday six to sevendays per week, which corresponds to 2500 rotations of the shoulder per day. The combination of these repetitive movements with a large rangeofmotionof the jointmakes the shouldermoreprone to injury in this sport (Stockeret al.,1995; Pink andTibone, 2000;Weldon and Richardson, 2001; Lynch et al., 2010).Wolf et al. (2009) investigated a university swim team over five seasons and found that 71% of the athletes became injured in this period,with the shoulder accounting for 35.4% of all injuries. Another study involving young highperformance athletes reports that 91% of the 80 athletes analyzed had shoulder pain (Sein et al., 2010). “Swimmer’s shoulder” was first described by Kennedy and Hawkins (1974), who defined the condition as a painful presentation due to repetitive impingement of the shoulder in swimmers. Swimmer’s shoulder does not have an established clinical diagnosis, but rather is a syndrome that may be due to subacromial impingement, tendinopathy of the rotator cuff and long portion of the biceps brachii, shoulder instability, labral tear or acromion-clavicle injury