An athlete told me, pleased with himself, that he was ten seconds per hundred faster with a pull buoy in.

He meant it as a good thing. He thought it showed his arms were strong.

What it actually showed was that his legs were sinking so badly that a piece of foam between his thighs was worth ten seconds a hundred, which is an enormous amount, and that every length he swam without one was being run with the handbrake on.

The gap between your buoy pace and your normal pace is not a strength measurement. It is your drag, quantified.

What the Buoy Is Actually Doing

It floats your hips. That is the whole mechanism, and it is worth being precise about it because it changes how you should read the result.

With your hips up, your body is horizontal, your frontal area drops, and drag falls sharply. You are also no longer spending anything on kicking, which frees up oxygen.

So a buoy is not primarily testing your pull. It is temporarily giving you the body position you cannot yet hold on your own, and then letting you swim with it.

Which means the buoy is a measuring instrument before it is a training tool. Swim four hundreds, two with and two without, and take the difference. Two or three seconds per hundred is normal. Eight or ten means your body position is your limiter, and no amount of pull work will fix that, because the buoy is doing the thing you need to learn to do.

Why It Becomes a Crutch

Because swimming with it feels wonderful.

You are faster, it is easier, you hold better technique because you are not fighting your own legs, and the whole session is more enjoyable. So athletes drift toward using it for larger and larger portions of their swimming, and I have met people doing sixty percent of their volume with one in.

What they are doing is practising a stroke they cannot perform. Every length with the buoy is a length not spent learning to hold your hips up, and the gap between buoy pace and race pace quietly widens over years.

And then race day arrives, they put on a wetsuit which does something similar, swim reasonably, and conclude the pool sessions were working. They were working. They were working on the wrong thing.

How I Actually Use One

Three legitimate jobs, and none of them is most of your session.

To isolate the catch, briefly. Removing the kick lets you put all your attention on what the arms are doing, which is genuinely useful for technique work. Short sets, with a clear focus, and then straight back to full stroke to see whether it transferred.

To keep swimming through a lower body injury. If you cannot kick because of a knee or an ankle, a buoy keeps you in the water, and that is worth a great deal.

And to add shoulder load deliberately, with paddles, in a controlled dose. That is a strength stimulus with real value and real risk, and it should be programmed rather than habitual.

Beyond that, I want people swimming whole strokes. Perhaps ten to fifteen percent of a session with a buoy. Not half.

The Uncomfortable Version of the Test

If your buoy gap is large, the fix is not more pulling. It is the boring body position work.

Look down rather than forward, so the head stops levering the hips under. Exhale continuously so the ribcage stays relaxed and the breath does not lift you. Press lightly through the chest to use buoyancy rather than fight it. And check whether your ankles can point at all, because a runner's stiff ankles turn the kick into a brake regardless of effort.

That work is slow, it feels like going backwards, and it is the only thing that closes the gap. Nobody enjoys it, which is precisely why the buoy is so popular.

The Bottom Line

Do the four hundreds and find your number. Two or three seconds is fine. Eight or ten is a diagnosis.

Then keep the buoy for isolating the catch, training through injury, or loading the shoulders on purpose, and swim the rest of your session with your own legs, badly, until they are not bad any more.