Swimmer's Shoulder Shirt

Here is my foray into the fashion design/physical therapy arena :-).  As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm prone to swimmer's shoulder.  In fact it sidelined me from doing an Olympic distance tri in my first season.  Since then, I do the minimum amount of swimming possible to complete the swim portion of my triathlons with ease.  I would love to swim more because I'm pretty slow, but when I swim more, my shoulders start to ache.

Enter the swimmer's shoulder shirt.  While sitting on the couch, not wanting to hold a bag of frozen corn on each shoulder, I came up with the idea to take an old t-shirt and sew pockets over the shoulder area to hold heat packs and bags of ice.  The thought being then I can sit on the couch in the evening and have both hands free to catch up on blogs and twitter.  So I grabbed a couple old t-shirts, put one on and held a ziplock bag on each shoulder and drew an outline of where I wanted the pockets.  I should have measured because as you will see, the pockets aren't symmetrical :-).

After my workout Tuesday night, I decided to try it out.  I now present the swimmer shoulder shirt :-).

The plan was to alternate between heat and cold, ending on cold.

Crooked grin :-) Never noticed the paint on the door trim.

Laughing at how ridiculous this is :-)

The result?  Partial success.  I was indeed able to watch TV, blog, twitter, etc while my shoulders got some heating and cooling.  The shirt was too loose so the heat wasn't as hot as it could have been.  I had to press on the pockets to really get my shoulders to warm up.  Same with the cooling.  The shirt was kind of baggy so the weight of the ice makes the pockets drop forward.  I need to find a tight fitting shirt and repeat, maybe an old compression top.

So much for my debut.  Hopefully you got a chuckle out of this if nothing else.