IMPACT OF COMMERCIALLY MANUFACTURED AND HANDCRAFTED HAND PADDLES ON MALE SWIMMERS’ PERFORMANCE: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24191/mjssr.v22i1.9202Keywords:
Swimming Performance, Hand Paddles, Front Crawl, Adolescent Swimmers, Endurance Training, Sprint Swimming, Training ToolsAbstract
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 short-distance (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 within-subject 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.
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