I’ve been a commute cyclist since 1992, biking between several hundred and a couple thousand miles a year, mostly in 15-30 minute chunks. I’ve also been a lap swimmer since the mid-80s. In October of 2010 I was diagnosed and treated for a sacroiliac sprain, which basically means that one of my pelvic bones had gotten stuck, rotated backwards compared to the bottom of my spine, called the sacrum. Part of the treatment was refraining from all exercise except walking for several months, while the joint healed. A big change. In January I started adding exercises back in, and last month I started biking and swimming again, slow and careful.
In the meantime, I had been paying close attention to my posture, and doing a lot of physiotherapy for my spine and hips. My experience the effects of biking and swimming is quite different than it used to be. The bikes that I’ve tried now feel badly designed. They make me lean forward too far, hunch my shoulders, round my upper back, and jut my neck forward. And after biking even a few minutes, my low back feels all crunched up, especially in the L5/S1 region, and my psoas muscles feel tight. Swimming feels good while I’m doing it, but afterwards my shoulders are rounded forward and my thoracic curve is exacerbated. Both exercises feel like they are working against the progress I’ve made with my posture.
Can anyone recommend some stretches or exercises to specifically counteract the negative effects of swimming or biking? (I mostly swim freestyle/crawl.) I’d appreciate the help!
Nathen's Miraculous Escape 
April 13, 2011 at 12:01 pm
Try contacting Egoscue and
Gokhale with your questions.
Yeah, when you look at bicyclists, they are doing all the wrong things, posture-wise. Maybe the old-fashioned (“dorky”) way of bike riding would promote better posture. (?)
April 13, 2011 at 12:28 pm
Two things to try in the water…spend some time floating, both on your front and on your back. Stretch in the water while you are doing this. My experience is that the better I align myself the easier it is to float without my feet sinking. This really helps me to decompress. Also try doing half the swim on your back; some full stroke, some kick only. All this will take longer, so you have to adjust your mileage (yardage or whatever). For me, good swimming is about achieving good posture in the water.
When I bought my last bike the guys in the shop worked on getting all the various heights and lengths right(they took pictures as they were working so that I could see, as well as feel what was happening) It was mostly about raising the seat (and sliding it back slightly) in relation to the handle bar height. As I recall, the handlebar height affected my neck and the seat my back. Simple stuff but effective.
April 13, 2011 at 12:45 pm
It might be interesting to experiment with rowing – I think the shoulders stay pretty still, but the stroke engages muscles that pull the chest open and the shoulders back instead of forward and down.
Have you read The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design by Galen Cranz? She’s an Alexander Technique instructor with a long tai chi and yoga background, and a teacher in Berkeley’s dept. of architecture. Along with some fun design and anthropology stuff she talks a lot about how to find chairs and sitting postures that let the hips rest at more than a 90 degree angle – hard to do in our current era of chairs designed with no thought for posture.