How to Avoid & Care for Competitive Rowing Injuries

Video Transcript

" Hi! I'm Anna Marie and I am a Canadian Olympic rower and I am here on behalf of expertvillage.com. In this clip, I'm are going to talk a little bit about injuries. Some of these injuries you probably already had even if you are just starting into competitive rowing. The first one I am going to talk about is the infamous rower's hands. When you started rowing, you probably started to get sore hands with blisters and open sores and all that kind of stuff. It is very important that you look after your hands. After all, you use them all day anyway. If you do start to get open sores or blisters on your hands, be sure to cover them up when you row. Make sure you have some sort of antibiotic ointment to keep over them especially at night when you are not rowing and a stalk of band aids; these will come in big time handy. Sometimes if your hands are very sore and you got band aids all over them and you are about to head out for a row, the band aids might fall off right away. Sometimes those little mini mitts, those little stretch mitts, those one size fits all, they can really help to keep the bandages on. It can be difficult to hold onto the oar but it is kind of a toss up situation. You have to figure out if it is going to worth to try and keep the band aids on or to just try to suck it up and keep going. Another injury that is quite common in rowers, is called and slide bite and it is when the slides of your boat dig into your calf muscles. You can get cuts and scars on your calf muscles and sometimes they take a very long time to heal. A good solution to that is putting a band aid on it and then placing the top of a sock over your calf. So threading it through your foot so that it rests over the sock. That will not only keep the band aid on it will also help prevent the sore from opening up again. Some more serious type of injuries that are quite common with competitive rowers can be rib stress fracture, tendinitis in the wrist of shoulders, lower back problems and even upper back problems. A lot of these things can be solved by doing vary good core work so making sure your stomach is strengthened and also by making sure that your breathing is happening at the correct time the rowing stroke. Sometimes taking a big breath in as you are about take a stroke can put a lot of stress onto the ribs and the core muscles. So by making sure you are able to breathe out by you are exerting the effort in the rowing stroke and that your core's are nice and tight and strong during the rowing stroke, will help to prevent a lot of those type of injuries like low back injuries and rib stress fractures. For tendinitis, just make sure that you are stretching as much as you can and your keeping an eye on how your body is feeling when you are rowing and when you are training. "