Smart Hands Are Better Than Dumb Plastic

The rap on hand paddles is pretty simple: You put them on and suddenly feel as if you can really grab the water and move it powerfully. Paddles are usually emphasized as a power tool (and the bigger the paddle, the better—or so the theory goes). You use the extra surface area to muscle the water. But unless you have a perfect stroke, muscling the water with paddles is mainly a good way to improve your chances of shoulder injury. And if you’re lucky enough to avoid injury, once you take them off, you feel like you’re trying to row with a Popsicle stick. What could be good about that?

As with pull buoys, there is one small exception. You might occasionally don small paddles for a few superslow laps with a narrow focus on how they may help your hand learn to pierce the water … or slide weightlessly forward a looong way … or anchor for the catch. Then remove them and, as suggested above for buoy use, try to recreate that sensation without the paddles. Unless you can subtract at least two strokes with the paddles on, they’re not helping you at all.

For intelligent hands that can teach you to work with water like an artist, consider fistgloves®. Fistgloves have proven so indispensable as an aid to teaching TI-style swimming that we give a pair to every student at TI Weekend Workshops. We like them because they turn any swimmer into a problem solver and the solution you come up with will help you hold the water like never before.

The problem fistgloves® present is: How do you hold on to the water when you have nothing to hold on with? By squeezing the hands into a tight, latex-wrapped fist, fistgloves® turn a broad, flat surface into a rubber nub. On the first few lengths, your hands slip helplessly through the water. But gradually, you find one molecule of water to hold on to, partly by using your forearm for purchase, partly by simply learning to be more patient. Just by making the catch with exquisite patience and attention, you will eventually learn to get the water to resist your gloved hands just a little bit. With practice you can learn to do remarkable things with the slightest resistance. So much so that by continuing to stroke patiently, the gloved-swimming sensation will gradually come to feel almost “normal.” After a while, you may even wonder if you’re wearing a glove. Measure how much control you’re gaining by counting strokes per length and playing Swimming Golf.

The real magic, of course, happens when you peel the gloves off. Suddenly, your previously ordinary-feeling hand seems huge, as if you had a dinner-plate-sized paddle at the end of your arm and holding on to the water turns out to be a piece of cake.

Why are fistgloves® better than paddles for teaching feel of the water? Because paddles do exactly the opposite. Swimmers figure they’ll learn how it feels to have “big hands,” and that once the paddles come off they’ll remember the sensation they’re aiming for. While the paddles are on, you do of course feel much more able to hold the water. But when the paddles come off? You feel like someone rowing with a Popsicle stick. Your hands seem dumb, ineffectual. So we sometimes call fistgloves® the “unpaddles,” because after using fistgloves® your hands seem smarter, not dumber.

The simplest and best way to use fistgloves® is to wear them for the first twenty to twenty-five minutes of every practice, whatever you may be doing during that time. Every lap will help your balance and finesse. When you take them off you’ll swim with far more intuition the rest of the way. Or, during a 60-minute practice, you might wear them for 20 minutes, remove them for 10, put them on again for 20 minutes and swim without them for 10.