Impact of commercially manufactured and handcrafted hand paddles on male swimmers’ performance: a comparative analysis

Swimming has been well known to have a lot of physical, psychological, and social health benefits, and as such, physical training props like hand paddles both company-made and handcrafted are frequently employed to improve performance. The current research was to evaluate the impact of commercially produced hand paddles and handcrafted paddles on shortdistance (50 m) and endurance-based (400 m) swimming among adolescent male swimmers. Twenty competitive 13-17-year-old swimmers were involved in a quasi-experimental withinsubject design. The swimmers were put through a series of two tests: a 50 m and a 400 m front crawl in two conditions, using company-made paddles and handcrafted paddles. Trials were randomised and separated by a sufficient rest (24 h 50 m; 48 h 400 m). Paired-samples t-tests were used to analyse performance times. Findings revealed that in the 400 m test, paddles made by the company had a significant improvement in performance over that of paddles made by the hands (496 ± 73.9 s vs. 506 ± 73.2 s; t(19) = 2.28, p < .05) but the 50 m test did not show any significant difference (50.6 ± 4.8 s vs. 53.5 ± 5.3 s; t(19) = 1.90, p = .073). The results indicate that commercially produced paddles can offer a performance benefit in endurance swimming but not in short-sprint performance. The findings are of practical applications to coaches and athletes in the choice of training tools in a certain performance goal.