from Aqua Knuckles
When you swim with your fingers slightly spread, you improve the force you can produce with your pull and you swim faster. Your pull becomes more powerful and you pull more water. The water around your fingers moves with your hand and simulates bigger hands. In essence, your slightly spread fingers and the water around them create a webbing effect in order to give you human paddles.
When most of us were taught how to swim, we were told to tightly close our fingers as we moved through the water. Competitive swimmers want to get through the water as fast as possible. If you slightly spread your fingers, you will get to the wall faster. It’s very tough for swimmers to break the “tightly closed fingers” habit…whether they’re seven or seventy. Aqua Knuckles helps swimmers create muscle memory for open finger swimming.
John O’Grady – Founder, Aqua Knuckles
John has been a competitive swimmer for nearly 40 years and is a real student of the sport. His love of the water has seen him through age-group swimming, high school teams, Divisions I and II college teams and masters swimming. He has competed in open water competitions in the Atlantic Ocean and has practiced in the English Channel. It is hard to find this guy out of the water! Currently raising his large family of competitive swimmers in Southern California, John is an assistant swim coach at a local high school. When he is not in the water or on a pool deck, John runs a boutique media services company focused on creative projects of all kinds for both large and small entities. He enjoys cooking, surfing, travel, photography and spending time with his wife and children.
If you like physics and want to get deep into the fluid dynamics of why spreading your fingers will enable you to swim faster, this video is for you.
Swimming news is courtesy of Aqua Knuckles is a SwimSwam partner.