Nausea while swimming

Pool and open water?

Fresh and salt on the OWS?

I overcame this problem after many tries. First I tried ginger- crystalized, chews, tea...etc it seemed to work for a while, then BAM sick again.
Tried ear plugs, motion sickness pills, you name it I tried it.
The thing that helped me was loosening my goggle straps. They were too tight. Really loosened them to the point where the suction was the only thing keeping them on my face.
I swim with earplugs still, but have done away with the ginger. Different things work for different people.
Good luck, I know how much it sucks.

thank you, the problem occurs both in swimming pool and in open water.
I tried 3 different goggles but nothing changes.
I was reading about the bloating stomach issues and it seems my case 'cause i start feeling my stomach inflate and start burping a lot

Oh nausea while swimming is the worst. I am prone to motion sickness and when I started training for triathlons I frequently got nauseated while swimming. I've tried all the things you listed and some worked some of the time. But in the end for the most part for me I'll say that spending more time swimming - being in better shape swimming has helped the most. As long as I don't skip

Then again I will say I'm not sure I would take my own advice because I admit did get nauseated during my Ironman swim in June and I have no idea why.

Do you only get nausea swimming crawl? Does it stop if you switch to another style? Have you had a coach watch you swim?

I can only but guess, but I bet that you're moving your head around a lot when you swim, you may not notice this. This can easily happen when you swim crawl and I suppose cause nausea. A number of things may contribute or make it worse:

- your head roll with the body with each stroke
- high stroke rate making the movement faster
- breathing _every_ stroke
- crossing over in the stroke so you roll too much
- lack of fixing on a point
- dehydration and exhaustion (this one probably doesn't apply)

You should dissociate the body roll keeping the head still, we loose mobility as we age, you may need to do some exercises for the neck. Get a good rhythm in your stroke, if it's very fast it will make things worse. I assume you don't, but some do breathe with every stroke when they first start out learning crawl, that means a lot of head turning. If you cross over, that is your hand crosses the long axis during the stroke then it will lead to excessive body roll. The best thing you can do is to get a coach to watch you swim.

In the pool follow the black line, ok, if you're sharing the lane you need to stay to the side of the black line, but fixing your eyes on it may help the motion sickness. For the same reason motion sickness, dizziness and nausea is worse in OWS, there is no black line. If you watch you'll see lot's of people struggling to regain balance when they get out of the water.

BR

thank to you all. i got sick only when i swim in crawl, and yeah supposedly i roll a little too much. i'm trying to fix that with the instructor 'cause it's only 1 year i learnt to swim. i don't practice breathing before starting to swim, maybe i should do. i try avoiding breathing at every stroke cause it makes my head spin (i breathe usually every 3) and sure my head moves too much. i'm trying to concentrate and keep my head still now.
sure i ingest a lot of air, do you think some "anti-air' digestive pills could help?
thank you, i'm trying to get rid of this problem, i'm planning to do my first full ironman in 2015-2016 but first i have to get out of the water alive!

I don't have any experience in that direction, but I wouldn't ever recommend medicine for what I consider to be a problem of technique.

When it comes to swimming, a lot of problems are solved or eased by finding a good rhythm. As for breathing, breathe with the chest, not the diaphragm, and breathe out steadily underwater such that you have exhaled completely when you are ready to breathe in again. It is often recommended to breathe out through the nose to avoid getting water in the nose, but otherwise it doesn't matter.

Back to the nausea, I was thinking for OWS:

Sighting often may reduce the problem, also, if you only have a problem when swimming crawl and the nausea disappears quickly if you switch stroke, then I suggest you try combining different strokes, for example doing breast stroke around the turn buoys - keep a good distance to the buoy to avoid accidentally kicking somebody. It may just break your swim into about 4x500m in stead of one long swim.

I'm only guessing here, I haven't had the problem to the extend you describe. In my case it's not till I get out of the water that I suddenly can't find my legs to stand on.

BR