Highly Recommended

1. Finis Freestyler Paddles – if you only purchase one pair of paddles, our recommendation is for the ‘Freestylers’ by Finis. These paddles work to improve your hand entry and alignment in the water and are designed to fall off your hand if used incorrectly giving you immediate feedback about your stroke.
   
2. Finis Tempo Trainer Pro and Wetronome – being able to accurately control your stroke rate in the pool and pace yourself well are two key swimming skills that do not come naturally to many swimmers. You programme these small ‘beepers’ andthen put them under your swim cap when you swim; they then beep a target pace per 100 m to you (a beep for every time that you should be at each 25 m marker) or in stroke rate mode, a beep for every single stroke. This sounds very basic but the power of these devices cannot be over-estimated. Firstly, they help to motivate you through training sets and also let you focus on the swimming rather than watching the clock all the time. At the same time they develop your pacing skills, which is a huge advantage in races as nearly every swimmer starts too fast and then slows down – by pacing things correctly you will perform much better overall. In fact you may set some PBs the very first time you swim with one in lap-interval mode for just that reason! In stroke rate mode they give you subtle control over your swimming, allowing you to lift or lower your stroke rate to find the efficiency sweet spots in your stroke. For more information see www.swimsmooth.com/wetronome and www.swimsmooth.com/tempotrainer.