Vietnam National Swimming Championships 2026: 131 Injuries in Nine Months of 'Swimming for the Metres'

Hai Phong, the afternoon of 19 July 2026. The men's 400-metre freestyle final at the national swimming championships. Nguyen Van Thang in lane four went through the first 100 metres in 1:06.8 and the 200 in 2:22.4, exactly the rhythm he had held all season. By the 300-metre mark his right elbow had begun to drop below the line of his shoulder. Over the last twenty metres the stroke length shortened visibly from the stands. He still finished, in 4:58.1, seventeen seconds slower than his own time last March.

The organisers' results sheet recorded one figure. Nobody added that behind it lay eleven consecutive weeks of rising training volume with not a single unloading week.

Six squads, fifty-two swimmers, one target

The 2026-2026 season was the first in which squads were handed volume targets in metres, counted by the week. Those targets rested on a very easy principle to remember: to swim fast, you must swim a lot. The strongest squads converged on a formula of two sessions a day, six days a week, plus one dry-land session.

Our monitoring group covered 52 swimmers from six squads: Hanoi, Hai Phong, Quang Ninh, Nam Dinh, Thanh Hoa and Ho Chi Minh City. Recording ran for nine months, from October 2026 to the end of June 2026. Every session was logged in three columns: volume, intensity, and the state of the body before entering the water.

The result: 131 injury and overload cases, counted by incident, across 52 swimmers. On average, each athlete had to stop or cut back training two and a half times for physical reasons. For a swimming base still so young, that figure is enough to reopen the question of how a training plan should be built.

The decisive number is not the volume, it is the rate of increase

Breaking the 131 cases down by site: shoulder and rotator cuff 41; knee 33, almost all of them from the breaststroke group; lower back 27; ankle and small joints 18; the remainder were ear infections, skin infections and respiratory problems.

Sorted by rate of volume increase, the picture changes completely.

Group of 22 swimmers with weekly increases above 20 per cent sustained for three weeks or more: 17 cases, or 77 per cent.

Group of 30 swimmers holding increases at 10 per cent or below, with one rest day a week: 9 cases, or 30 per cent.

Total seasonal volume for the two groups differed little. The difference lay in the path taken from October to June.

One squad in Quang Ninh pushed from 18 to 27 kilometres a week over three straight weeks. By the fourth week, four of six male swimmers had shoulder pain in freestyle. A squad in Hai Phong held at 18 kilometres, adding only one session a week, and dropping the load for one day every ten days. Seven swimmers, one case.

At Lach Tray I learned to read injuries from the first numbers. The lesson there was concrete: volume only breaks a body when it rises faster than tendons, joints and bursae can adapt.

What the results sheet does not say

A convenient explanation circulates in coaching circles: our athletes are weak because they swim too few metres. That explanation is right in the early stage and wrong in the later one. For a new swimmer, going from 10 to 20 kilometres a week produces measurable, uncontested improvement. But once the level reaches 25 kilometres, most of the extra metres do not turn into speed; they turn into tendinitis.

The number is silent, but its sequence always knows how to tell a story. In the 131 cases of the past season, what stands out is where they sit on the time axis. Nearly two thirds appeared in the third and fourth week of a loading cycle, exactly when the load should have come down.

An empty pool, a golden rule bent, and the body pays. With no one supervising, swimmers add a few hundred metres to prove they are diligent; with no one on the stopwatch, the warm-up is cut in half; with no one reminding them, the cool-down is dropped altogether. No single session is enough to break a shoulder. Three months of ignoring small details is.

Tran Minh Khoa, the doctor following the Hai Phong group, logged one telling detail: of the 18 cases of ankle and small-joint pain, 14 occurred in sessions run without a timekeeper, that is, sessions where pace was left entirely to the swimmer's own perception.

The gap is measured in tenths of a second

This year's world swimming championships are being held in Madrid, Spain, from 13 to 23 August. At that level, the margin between a finals place and going home is measured in tenths of a second, and each of those tenths is built from thousands of hours of training that is controlled, measured and rested. Vietnam will compete at the tenth Asian Games in Seoul at the end of September. If the lesson of 2026-2026 is not drawn, we will keep seeing swimmers who swim enough metres but not enough speed.

The test lies in the unloading week

Every fall has a graph, and every graph has a break point. The body is a closed system, but data is the key that opens it. For the coming season, the test lies in one very small place: which squad will dare to schedule an unloading week in the middle of a cycle, and dare to keep it when the results sheet has not yet turned pretty?