Wetsuis

This article need not be long. The answer of "how much rubber" should be in your wetsuit is simple, quantifiable, and demonstrable.

In almost every case, the more the rubber, the faster the suit. Furthermore, you can remove the "almost" if you're talking about arms only. There is no—none, nada, zero, nil, not one—example of a person for whom a sleeveless wetsuit is faster (or even as fast) as a long-arm wetsuit.

Forget the "feel of the water" sensation you pure swimmers feel you
"need." I like the feel of the road when I run, but I'm faster in my car.

Forget the "need" for a wetsuit that allows you to swim with your natural stroke. Forget needing the most comfortable style of wetsuit in order to swim to your optimal level. Forget all that. Fullsuits are faster.

Over a period of 15 years I tested hundreds of people in the water. Good swimmers and bad. Triathletes and pure swimmers. Never was there one example of a person who swam faster in a sleeveless wetsuit—not one in all those years. That includes repeat pool swims as well as flume tests (sort of a wind tunnel in water).

But there is one caveat. They all swam in QR wetsuits. Very frankly when I ran that company we made the world's best wetsuits (with no disrespect for Aquaman, which gave us a serious run for our money), and with 14 or 16 sizes (or however many we had) there was no case of a decent athlete we couldn't fit. So the caveat is, the suit has to be made well, be of a high quality, with a good pattern, and it had to be the correct fit. It's easy to make a longjohn (sleeveless suit) and if it doesn't fit you properly you can sort of fake it. Not so with a fullsuit.

There was occasionally—and in fact this was a very rare instance, but not unheard of—a swimmer who swam faster in a suit with short legs. In fact, the less amount of rubber there was below the waist, the faster this type of swimmer would go. The fastest suit for a swimmer like this would have a bikini-cut below the waist, yet with long arms. Failing that, a short (like a bike short) cut with long arms would've been the way to go.

What sort of swimmer is this? Certainly an accomplished swimmer, but even then the best swimmers almost always required long-legged suits. It is my guess that these very few swimmers were those who were backstroke (or at the very least IM) specialists, back when they were pure swimmers. Backstroke is not freestyle flipped upside down. A huge component of propulsion comes from the legs in backstroke. It has been my experience that when a lot of backstrokers swim freestyle they do so with a very vigorous scissor kick. My suspicion is that for this narrow group of swimmers a full-length suit impedes their ability to get their legs into the water when kicking (rubber around one's legs will impede their thrust into the water).

There is no company that makes a suit for a swimmer like that. If there was such a wetsuit style, almost no one would buy it, because there are so few swimmers who'd be better off with such a suit. I've probably met less than ten in my entire tenure as a wetsuit guy.

If you still believe that a sleeveless suit is better for you, I can say with conviction that fast fullsuits are like fine women—you just haven't met the right fullsuit yet, and you'll know it when you meet it.

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