I live in a place where I don’t get to use a wetsuit very much, usually from November to April, otherwise, we are usually not wetsuit legal.
Like most (I imagine), when I started doing triathlons and realized that one of my races would be wetsuit legal, I looked for the cheapest way to get into the wetsuit game. That was about 4 years ago. In an earlier part of my life, I thought I was a decent swimmer. At very least, I swam lots for teams and had good technique (even if I wasn’t super fast).
I never could get used to the wetsuit. It fit well, I swam OK in it, but it always constricted my shoulders. I just figured that the constriction was part of swimming in a wetsuit.
The old cheap suit began to be more patch than suit over the last season (coming apart in the arm pits mostly), so I decided it was time to get something new, and hopefully something better.
Like many of us here often do, I emailed Emilio over at De Soto and gave him some background and some measurements and asked for some advice. In typical fashion, he told me what product and size to order and then he told me if it didn’t work, send it back and try another size/product.
I settled on the T1 First Wave Bib john and the T1 Concept 5 pullover.
When the suit arrived my initial feelings were not great. Standing in my living room, this thing felt way too tight. I felt as constricted as I did in the old cheap suit.
I got back on the email with Emilio and he noted that I shouldn’t worry and that once I got in the water and swam, everything would be good to go, and if it wasn’t, just send the thing back, no questions, no problems.
So I finally got to swim in the suit this weekend. I am more than satisfied.
I could write a lot about the suit (2 piece versus 1 piece, increased shoulder flexibility, etc), but I think most of that has been covered on here time and again. What I haven’t seen and will thus point out is that the sleeves on the Concept 5 are actually 5mm thick from below the shoulders down to the wrists. So you still get the shoulder flexibility (2mm), but you get a 1cm wider arm to pull width versus your naked arm (or a 6 mm wide paddle versus a typical 2mm armed wetsuit).
The elbows are a little hard to move compared to the old wetsuit, but based on how I felt moving through the water, that was a reasonable trade off for having the “bigger paddles.”
I am an engineer and always tend to put things quantitatively to avoid bias, so the way I am looking at this, conservatively, if you have a 30 cm long arm and are adding 6 mm width to it, you end up with 18 extra square cm of area on each arm. That has got to be significant. Granted the material is flexible and not rigid, so perhaps some of that area is lost to deflection, but whatever is left is still more.
Not surprising, when I was done swimming, I felt like I had just done a paddle pull / buoy session.
Your mileage may vary, but in my case, I think I just bought some speed on the swim this season.