It may be hard to swallow for amateur swimmers, but keeping your fingers firmly together to create an oar-style effect is not the best technique.
Instead, counter-intuitive as it seems, keeping the fingers slightly apart like a fork apparently makes a swimmer faster.
A study claims that an ‘invisible web’ of water is created by spread fingers, allowing swimmers to propel themselves with more force – and that the technique is already used by the professionals.
‘It is a counter-intuitive idea, the fact that you should paddle with a fork, not with an oar,’ said researcher Adrian Bejan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
The reason is that when a solid object moves through a fluid, the layer of fluid that touches the surface ‘sticks’ and gets dragged along with the object.
When swimmers spread their fingers just right, each individual digit forms its own layer.
