[Muscular imbalance in elite swimmers and the resulting sports damage of the lumbar spine and knee joints].

Elite swimmers often show typical sportspecific lesions, the cause of which is thought to be technical faults, overtraining, or wrong use of training equipment. In order to look for additional causes in the development of these sports lesions, 46 male and female elite swimmers of the 1st and 2nd swimming division (1. and 2. Bundesliga) were examined orthopaedically. Especially by using Janda's "Functional Muscular Diagnostics", specific muscular imbalances can be found. This paper demonstrates a relation between these muscular imbalances and the typical sports lesions of the locomotor system.