Finger paddles - Recommendations

Finger and hand paddles are designed to improve the strength of your stroke and make you aware of the smallest technique mistakes in your stroke. 

When you attach these plates, whether it's finger or hand paddles, you make the surface of your hands larger than normal and thus increase the possible pressure you can put on the water. This is widely used to improve the strength of the arm stroke. 

On the other hand, when you have this extra pressure on the water, you'll also be able to more easily detect errors or optimisation opportunities for your arm stroke - especially during insertion and underwater. When launching, your hands may sweep out to the side by mistake or your high elbow underwater may come out too wide. In these cases, the paddle will move away from the surface of your hand, and you will become aware of it. 

Finger paddles are mostly used for crawl swimming, but can also be used for breaststroke, backstroke, and butterfly. However, this requires some experience with the last three. 

Although the function of finger paddles and hand paddles is the same, there are distinct and important differences, as the names indicate. In short, a hand paddle covers the entire hand down to the wrist and beyond the fingers, while a finger paddle only covers the fingers and not the palm of the hand. This affects how much water you pull with each stroke. Therefore, hand paddles provide the greatest propulsion, but are also significantly harder to swim with. For this reason, we do not recommend using finger paddles until you are 11 years old / an able swimmer and hand paddles until you are 15 years old / a strong swimmer. Otherwise, use can lead to serious injuries.