The case for keeping your fingers together

If you spend a lot of time reading triathlon literature, chances are you have read some confusing and conflicting information on what you should be doing with your fingers in the freestyle pull.  One train of thought is to keep your fingers together to ensure no water slips through the hands.  Another train of thought says that you swim faster if you relax the fingers and leave a little space between them.  You might wonder, what is right?  This article seeks an answer to this question.

The theory behind both concepts makes some sense.  If you keep the fingers together, you reduce the possibility of water seeping through.  And the less water that seeps through, the more power you gain from the pull because you grab more water.  But keeping those fingers together comes at a cost.  After a hard swim, your hand muscles are as sore as any other muscle in the body.  The different theory is that the effort to keep those fingers together mitigates any gain in speed.  Just because you open a gap between your fingers does not mean you have a sieve in your hands.  The surface tension between the water and your skin creates a barrier so that water does not completely pass.  So both ideas have their theoretical merits.  But which ideal wins?

To answer this question, an experiment was conducted to determine if there is any difference in speed when pulling with loose fingers (allowing a small gap) versus tight fingers (holding the fingers together by constant muscular force).  A series of 25-yard sprints was completed by the author (Duane Dobko), with 4 repetitions pulling with fingers together, and 4 repetitions pulling with fingers apart, all swum as fast as possible.  All repeats were started in the water (no dive), and were timed by stopwatch to 0.00 resolution.  A statistical analysis was completed to evaluate differences and predict effects on swimming performance in common swim distances in triathlon.  The results are shown in the Figure.

The results show that swimming with fingers together was faster than with fingers apart.  The difference was small (approximately 1.5% difference by time), but was statistically significant to 95% confidence (p-value less than .05).  The slowest repeat with fingers together (10.75 seconds) was faster than the fastest repeat with fingers apart (10.80 seconds).  You can expect an improvement of about 12 seconds in a half-mile sprint distance swim if you keep the fingers together.  In a 2.4 mile iron-distance swim, you can expect that improvement to be slightly more than one minute.

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Time differences of a few seconds up to a full minute might not seem like much.  But the price is right when you compare it to the benefits of expensive gear.  For non-wetsuit races, the most expensive swim-suits out there are making you about 3% faster, and so a 1.5% improvement gets you half way there at no cost.  Your fingers may be more tired after the swim if you keep them together, but their use is limited in the rest of the race.  All you have to do is hold the handle bars on the bike.  So there is no reason to save the muscles in your fingers for a later portion of the race.

The results of this experiment say that keeping your fingers together during the freestyle pull is the way to go.  It doesn’t matter if you are an elite athlete where every second counts or a novice looking for that first finish.  Nobody wants to pass up a 15-60 second gain at no cost in dollars or exertion.  There is no argument for letting the fingers go apart, unless you don’t care how fast you are going.  Most competitive swimmers talk about how their hands hurt after a long workout because they have been working so hard to keep the fingers tight and grab water.  Triathletes can get the same benefit if they keep their fingers tight, too.  Until next time, happy training.