When Can You Swim, Dive or Work Out After Rhinoplasty?

How long should I wait after rhinoplasty to go snorkeling, scuba diving, swimming, go in salt water? Well, a couple of things. One, there are a lot of incisions done in the nose. Whether it's open or closed doesn't make a difference. There are tons of incisions inside the nose. If you are going to a well-chlorinated swimming pool in your own house and you trust it, then you can probably submerge your face as soon as about six weeks or so after surgery.

If you go into a public pool, if you go into a lake or an ocean, there have been cases of people that have never even had surgery where some kind of parasite, an amoeba, goes in the nose, travels up to the brain and causes brain infections. Don't do that. Can you go neck down into the water and just casually swim without truly submerging yourself? Yes. But snorkeling, scuba diving, and really submerging yourself after rhinoplasty should be delayed for about six months. That's the safety part, as far as health and infections.

There's a second component and a third component. The second component: as the nose is healing, you don't want to be wearing goggles or snorkels that are really pressing down on it. It's going to crush the nose. We don't want that to happen. So you really want to delay that as long as possible. But if you have to do it, you have to do it. Most people don't have to wear goggles on their nose, so I'd wait about a year or so to do that.

Now there's a third component, and that's swelling. We want you to kind of be a couch potato for about a month to three months after surgery. That doesn't mean you're literally sitting on the couch. That doesn't mean you're in bed popping pain pills. After a week you're up and about. You go to work, you go to school, you go socializing, you go to dinner, you go to movies, you do stuff. But things that raise your pulse, things that raise your blood pressure, things that raise your cardiac output, things that make you flush more. Think about it. When you go to the gym, when you go for a run, you flush more, you get more red, veins start popping. All that stuff creates more swelling. We really want to delay that for as long as possible. I say at least a month, but preferably about three months or so.

So look at it this way. If you're wearing special, hard, pressured goggles on your face, wait about a year. But if you just want to swim with goggles that don't create that much pressure on your nose, and you want to submerge yourself in a lake or an ocean, wait about six months. But if your swelling is not too bad and you look great, especially if you have thin skin and the swelling is coming down faster, and you want to go for a casual swim, you can probably do it as soon as four to six weeks. But it's always best to wait longer.