Tips for Buying a Swim Suit for Competitive Swimmers

Posted by Alex on June 20th, 2018

You’ve worked hard, done all the meters and yards, mastered your nutrition, fixed your bad sleeping habits, and sharpened your skills through the taper and specific phases of your training. And now, it’s time to drop the hammer on your personal best times in competition.

But first, you need to pick yourself up a racing suit in order to maximize all of your hard work. Here are some tips for picking the best swim jammers.

The sizing. Here’s where things get truly confusing for swimmers, particularly those who are new to the sport. The sizing on tech suits and jammers is different than the size of training suits that you would normally wear. Make sure that you properly measure your hips and waist and use the sizing charts for the particular brand and suit that you are checking out. To make things more confusing the tech suit manufacturers (Speedo, Arena, FINIS, etc) measure out their suits a little bit differently, so get your measurements and line them up against the specific chart. Better yet, get your butt down to the local swim shop and try them on to be sure.

It should be hard to get into. One of the big benefits of tech suits is that they provide a high degree of compression. What is the point of compression, you might be wondering? To apply pressure against your largest muscles to encourage blood flow and even force you to keep your core engaged. The thinking behind compression is that you are going to recover faster with the increased blood flow. Compression means that it’s going to be really tight and snug to get into, so don’t be stunned to see that it takes you 5-15 minutes to wrestle your way into the suit.

Take care of your suit, it will take care of you. The tech suit is a big investment. While men don’t have the same hilariously high price tags of female racing suits, which run upwards of 0 for the high-end suits, most of the elite jammers still cost between 0 and 0. To make things worse, the suits are exceptionally fragile and delicate. The water repellant material that is one of the big features of the suits is usually made of elastane or Lycra, which degrades quickly from exposure to pool chemicals (such as chlorine), as well as open to being ripped or torn by snagging it on something. While most jammers won’t last more than a half dozen competitions, there are some things you can do to elongate the life of that expensive suit. Washing it with cool water after you wear it is the simplest thing you can do. Don’t wash it with soap or shampoos or any other chemical liquid. Wrap up the suit in a towel, instead of balling it up and throwing it into the depth of your mesh swim bag after racing. And wear it for the big moments in competition, not the lazy in-season meets where nothing is on the line, or even worse, during training.