(Swim) Fins to the Left, (Swim) Fins to the Right

Just an ode to my good friend Jimmy Buffett! Fins are a swimmers best friend (that is, if you enjoy training with your legs). Back in the day, my mom would send me off to practice with the long scuba fins she found at Goodwill. They didn’t work well. I couldn’t push off the walls and the blades felt like they were made of fiberglass. #ITB #inthebag

I became a serious swimmer around my sophomore year of high school. My coach only required one pair of fins. These were of the long blade variety but because I trained a lot of breaststroke, my knees were constantly in pain. When I moved on to college, my coach provided us with Zoomers. These fins, made by Finis, have a short blade and increase ankle mobility and foot flexibility. The yellow variety are the ones I'm using now. The red variety has more rigidity and the blue type are flimsy. These improved my kick speed and power more than any other fin. And, I could finally push off walls with power.

After graduating college and officially retiring from competition, I started to swim for exercise. Remember my breaststroke knees? They were in pain again! One of my friends (a masters swimmer named Tom) brought in a pair of fins he was using. These fins, called the TYR split fin (currently out of production so I’ll be lobbying to get it back), was perfect for training with knee pain. The best solution I’ve found is a combination of the Zoomers and the splitfin from Speedo called the Biofuse fin. It takes the technology from both and wraps it up in one.

When using fins, I challenge you do these three things. First, create power by moving your feet approximately the depth of a shoebox. Narrow kicks are faster and produce more power. Second, bending your knees a bit is not a bad thing (contrary to what I hear some coaches say). When you kick a soccer ball, what do you do? You bend your knee! And finally, use fins in your warm-up. Most swimmers are upper-body dominant and thus, need to get the legs warm so they can use them more during training. The legs also have larger muscles which require more warm-up.

Get your own pair of Zoomers

or Biofuse fins here– you don’t want to buy these used after someone else’s feet have been in them.