Pull Buoy: How to Use It, When to Ditch It, and Why You’re Faster With One

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What a pull buoy does

A pull buoy is a figure-eight or two-cylinder foam float that sits between your upper thighs. It does two things: it lifts your hips and legs to the surface, and it stops you kicking. The result is a body position most adult swimmers can’t hold on their own and all of the propulsion coming from the arms.

That’s why so many swimmers love it, sometimes as an admission of guilt, sometimes as a proud statement of fact. Swimming with a buoy feels easy and fast. The question is whether it’s making you a better swimmer, and the answer depends entirely on how you use it.

Why you’re faster with a pull buoy (and what it tells you)

If your times with a buoy are significantly faster than without, you’re not alone. It’s common, and it’s information.

The buoy lifts your body position and removes the need to kick, which saves a lot of energy. So a big gap means two things: your legs sink without it, and your kick is costing more than it gives. Both are fixable, and fixing them is worth far more than any amount of buoy swimming.

Here are the five steps we use to close the gap:

1. Hold the body and legs correctly. Lengthen through the spine and switch the core on. Draw the belly button toward the spine and squeeze the glutes lightly, so the body is one connected unit from head to toe.
2. Be a ballerina in a bucket. Kick with reasonably straight legs, from the hips, keeping the kick a little wider than the body line. Floppy ankles, not stiff feet.
3. Use the kick for balance and timing, not propulsion. Stop kicking hard. The kick’s job in distance freestyle is to keep the legs up and connect the stroke.
4. Time the kick with the catch. Catch on the left, kick on the left, at least on every second stroke. This is the connection the buoy was doing for you.
5. Do some pure kicking. Vertical kicking and kicking on your side in every session, to develop the kick evenly in both directions.

Do these for a month and re-test: 200 with buoy, 200 without. The gap should be closing.

Three things a pull buoy is genuinely good for

1. Teaching posture

One of the first things we teach in our clinics is posture: a firm, connected body from head to feet. Shoulders drawn down and back, belly button toward the spine, glutes switched on. Gerry Rodrigues of Tower 26 calls it body tautness. A pull buoy, especially one with a narrow bridge between the two floats, helps you feel that: you have to squeeze and hold the core to keep it in place and keep the body straight.

2. Correcting alignment at the front of the stroke

The goal in swimming is to move forward at the fastest speed for the least effort, and poor alignment wastes energy on movement that doesn’t go forward. With the legs taken care of, you can put all your attention on the front of the stroke: the entry in line with the shoulder, the extension directly forward, the catch and the line of the pull under the body. That lets you fix the root cause of a lot of freestyle faults, not the symptom.

3. Building swim-specific strength (the triathlete’s shortcut)

If you’re a triathlete or open water swimmer with limited pool time, pull buoy and paddles together are a shortcut to upper-body swim strength. The buoy forces the tautness through the torso that lets you generate power from the stroke, and the paddles add load to the catch and pull. When someone tells you never to use a buoy or paddles, it depends what you’re training for. For time-poor triathletes it’s an important part of the week, as long as it doesn’t become the whole week.

How to use a pull buoy properly

• Position: high between the upper thighs, not at the knees. Lower makes it easier to hold and lifts the legs more, which is the opposite of training.
• Squeeze with the core, not the thighs. If you’re gripping it with the inner thighs you’ll cramp and you’ll miss the posture benefit.
• Keep the legs together and still. No kicking. If the legs want to wobble, your core isn’t on.
• Don’t over-rotate. The buoy makes rotation easy, which can turn into rolling. Keep the hips rotating with the shoulders, not past them.
• Breathe normally. The higher body position makes breathing easier; don’t let it become a reason to lift the head.

Buoy at the ankles

A harder variation: hold the buoy between the ankles instead of the thighs. Now the legs are lifted but the hips are not, so you have to hold your own body position through the core while keeping the legs completely still. Humbling and very effective for sinking hips.

Pull buoy sets that build something

The pattern in all three: buoy work followed immediately by swimming without it, so the feeling transfers. Buoy-only sets feel great and change little. If you don’t know your CSS pace, the CSS calculator will give it to you from a 400 and a 200.

When not to use a pull buoy

• As your default swim. If more than about a quarter of your weekly distance is with a buoy, it’s hiding problems rather than fixing them.
• To avoid learning to kick. The buoy does your kick’s job. If you never swim without it, the kick never develops.
• With a shoulder niggle, combined with paddles. Buoy plus paddles loads the shoulder more than any other combination. Drop the paddles first.
• If you race in a wetsuit and think it makes the buoy irrelevant. A wetsuit lifts the legs the way a buoy does, which is exactly why wetsuit swimmers who train with a buoy all winter still have no kick timing in spring.

Used as a tool for posture, alignment and strength, with swimming without it straight after, the pull buoy earns its place in the bag. Used as a float, it’s the reason you’re faster with it than without. For the rest of the equipment question, see our swimming accessories guide, and for the whole speed picture, how to swim faster.

Frequently asked questions

The paddles I pair it with