This study investigated the effect of different sizes of hand paddles on bilateral propulsive force difference (BFD) in the crawl stroke. Fourteen male swimmers (Age: 20.0 ± 3.7 years, 100-m best time: 53.70 ± 0.87 s) were submitted to the following test protocol: 2 x 10 s maximal efforts in the fully tethered swimming, repeated in five conditions: free swimming (FREE), with small (PP, 280 cm²), medium (PM, 352 cm²), large (PG, 462 cm²) and extra-large paddles (PGG, 552 cm²). Stronger (STR) and weaker (WKR) strokes were those which presented the higher and lower mean peak force values in four non-consecutive strokes, respectively. BFD was expressed by the percentage difference between STR and WKR. STR and WKR were significantly different in all the situations (FREE: 30.2 x 25.4 kgf; PP: 31.6 x 26.9 kgf; PM: 33.0 x 29.0 kgf; PG: 34.5 x 30.3 kgf; PGG: 36.0 x 31.6 kgf). No specific paddle size changed BFD significantly. A significant reduction occurred when the lower individual values of BFD obtained with hand paddles, independently of their size, were compared to those found in FREE (14.9% x 7.4%). The present results showed that the artificial enlargement of hands can acutely reduce the bilateral force difference in competitive swimmers. However, the best size of paddles should be individually chosen.
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