fingers together or apart when swimming?

X2 - You actually increase the pulling surface area if your fingers are relaxed and slightly spread apart.

Will wearing aqua gloves help create the muscle memory to keep the fingers apart a bit?  I have a bad habit of keeping fingers together, so I considered the gloves to make me work a bit harder but also train me to keep my fingers a bit apart.

Thoughts?

DEFINITELY fingers together! Maybe I'm just a science nerd, but think of your hand as a paddle. With your fingers together and slightly cupped you are "grabbing" more water to pull yourself forward. By keeping your fingers apart (even slightly) you are essentially grabbing less water and not pulling yourself as far as you could in the water. As a result, you end up exerting the same amount of effort in your pull but not getting as much out of it.

 This is part of why they always say that good form and efficient swimming makes a world of a difference.

Actually, no. Hand should be relaxed and fingers slightly apart. Your pull comes from your whole forearm. Not your hand.

This is what all of my swim coaches have taught.

To get the proper feel, try a closed fist drill.

When you spread your fingers a little, the water flows between them but not smoothly.  It forms little turbulent vorticies that restrict the flow through and provide resistance.  So while having your hand wide isn't as effective as having a paddle the size of your stretched out hand, it still offers more effective surface area then a closed hand. 

Next time you are driving, hold your hand out the window and experiment, or next tiem you are at the pool sitting on the wall, do some stationary sculling with a closed and hand and an open hand and see which is easier to create the whirlpool.

 I go with this one, but add that in hydrodynamics it is not only surface area that determines drag (a good thing for your hand/arm in the pull phase) but also turbulence. I don't know if anyone has ever tested the difference in turbulence between fingers together or loosely apart, but it is probably negligible. Any physicists out there?

tested it this morning.  standing sculling drills.  It could move my arm at a slower speed with the fingers wide and still generate the whirlpool on the top of the water.  Going back and forth between open and closed fingers also had a distinct change in feel.

Seriously, try it.

I know I already responded once, but I'm bored, so thought I would add to it.  I am an engineer and took plenty of hydrology and hyrdodynamic classes.  However, we never tested this particular thing!

I have read that another portion of the phenomona, is the surface tension inherant in fluids - and it made perfect sense.

Try this on for size.  Take piece of screening, for example, if it were streched around a tennis racket, and your tried to swing it through water, I bet you would be VERY surprised how much resistance there is, and a screen is mostly air!  The water wants to "stick" in the gaps, and creates like a webbing effect.  Come to think of it, I bet a tennis racket it self could be hard to swing in the water.  The more viscous the fluid is, the harder it is to qet through the gaps...

Same thing is said to happen in the gaps between your fingers.  Water sort of creates a "web" effect, making a bigger paddle.

Another anology.  If you were to scoop up a big pile of sand, you would probably be better off just opening up the hand a little and letting the sand sort of "bind" to itself between the fingers.  I would wager you could pick up more sand with your finders slighty open and relaxed than all scrunched togther.  Same goes for swimming.  You are trying to "grab" as much water you can.

My wife (formerly Monica Caplan) taught me... fingers together; slightly relaxed - like you are about to shake a person's hand; thumb at right angle to fingers (sticking right out).  That will maximize your surface area as well as leading into a good catch.

Hope this helps,

gordo, more swim tips at gordoworld.com, see gTips

He was sort of fast, no? 

I actually did a lab yesterday in fluid dynamics that answers this question. The force of drag on a cylinder in a fluid is created by the pressure on the cylinder around the entire circumference. In this application we consider the fingers cylinders, and the force of drag is the force that you're pulling against the water with. Pressure is exerted on the palm side of your fingers which is the force you pull with, on the back side a low pressure zone is created due to the separation region behind the fingers. At the same time a thin boundary layer is created around your fingers where the fluid slows due to the friction against your fingers. If you keep your fingers relaxed and slightly apart the boundary layer will act as more surface area for you to pull with than you would have squeezing all your fingers together.

Yep, fingers slightly apart.

In addition, your hand should be flat not cupped.  A cupped hand presents a smaller surface area to the water.  Look at your flat, opened hand.  Now cup it, smaller surface area. No?

Yea!! That's exactly what was going through my mind!!

I am not a physicist (nor a good swimmer for that matter), but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express (no just kidding, I never did that either).  However, I did post the Ian Thorpe video last year when this topic came up because I was surprised by just how wide his fingers were:

 http://youtube.com/watch?v=P31XJ16C4Ag&feature=related

I would think that the speed of one's pull is directly related to how open your fingers ought to be.  If you slowly drag your fingers through the water, you can feel how the water moves easily through even the smallest gap. In contrast, if you are pulling your hand through with maximal surface area at a higher velocity like Ian, more turbulence is created, so that vacuums develop between your fingers. The whole hand basically acts as a paddle.  Bernoulli's principle in action? (velocity is inversely proportionate to pressure)

edited to correct typo