“Big Picture” Approach to Technique Part 3 – Using Big Muscles and Body Weight

You’ll recall that when I introduced the concept of a “big picture” approach to looking at technique rather than focusing on isolated details of body positions and joint angles, I mentioned using big muscles preferentially over smaller muscles and using body weight whenever possible as two separate elements of this approach. Most of what I’ve covered already in the last couple of posts, which looked at securing the blade and maintaining blade angle, also helps facilitate the use of big muscles and body weight. However there are still a few tips I haven’t shared yet that are really helpful. Let’s consider using big muscles and using your body weight together as these tips are pretty useful for enhancing your ability to do both.

One thing needs to be understood before moving forward with this discussion: if you can’t secure your blade properly and pull yourself by the paddle while maintaining positive blade angle as long as possible, you’re going to have a really hard time engaging your big muscles effectively and getting your body weight onto your paddle. Everything is sort of interconnected, and the idea of finding connection with your blade against the water is sort of foundational to everything else. If you haven’t already read parts 1 and 2 of this series, please go and read them first before proceeding further here.

Get your weight forward at the catch

One of the things I always thought about in my C1 days was getting everything forward in the stroke. I don’t mean just reaching forward, but instead getting into a position where it felt like a notable amount of my body weight was forward, outside my base of support, and on top of the paddle at the catch. As I pulled the stroke I tried to stay on top of the paddle and never really got into what could be considered a “sitting back” position because I was always springing my hips forward at the exit with my upper body following right behind, quickly getting into a position where I’d feel like I could be on top of the paddle at the next catch.

We should be trying to do something similar on our SUP boards. One of the most common mistakes that people make when they’re stand up paddling is that they reach forward by rotating their hips and shoulders and leaning forward at the waist, while at the same time sticking their bum out behind them to counter balance the weight that is going forward. While their upper body is bending forward, they’re lower body looks like it is getting ready to sit down in a chair. The net result of this is that their weight stays balanced over their base of support (which is their feet) and isn’t available to load onto the blade immediately at the catch. No matter how far they end up reaching, they really don’t load the paddle effectively until the blade is closer to their feet and they can comfortably transfer weight from their base of support onto the paddle. While I suppose some weight on the blade is better than nothing, the reality is they’ve left it too late to provide anything that makes a truly effective contribution to moving their board forward.

What you should try to do instead is keep your hips forward as much as you can while you reach, and at the very least keep them over your feet. You’re not just rotating your paddling side hip forward like we’ve talked about in previous discussions, but you’re actually trying to get your hips as a whole forward of your base of support. If you do this, suddenly you’ll find all the rotation that you’ve got from your hips and shoulders is in front of your feet. And any bending you do at the waist is going to put even more of your upper body in front of your base of support as well. You’ll actually feel a little unstable, like you’re going to topple forward right from your feet. However instead of falling forward into the water or face first onto your board, you’re going to be falling onto your paddle, which is just about to enter the water after all the great rotation and bending at the waist you’ve just done.

One of the easiest ways for me to tell if I am doing this well is to feel how much pressure my heels are exerting on the board as I extend towards the catch. I want them to feel like they are floating above the board as I enter the water. Although they’re probably still touching the board it feels like they are actually coming off the board and my weight is shifting onto my toes.

Remember, we’re interested in using our body weight as much as possible in the stroke and using big muscles preferentially over small muscles. Obviously, if we can get our weight forward and outside of our base of support and onto the blade we’ll be using our body weight right from the moment we catch. But how does this facilitate the use of big muscles?

Consider for a minute all of the joints we move in our paddling motion. The hips are the largest and most heavily muscled of all of them. We’ve already established in the last couple of posts that they are essential for effectively pulling yourself by your secured paddle. In fact they initiate both the pulling and the exit phases of the stroke and drive the entire movement. This important role of the hips isn’t unique to the paddling motion. Consider a golf swing, tennis serve or any just about any other sport motion. The hips are absolutely critical. But if they aren’t in proper position to be effectively used when our blade enters the water, how are they going to be able to drive the motion?

You’ll recall that one of the most common mistakes people make is “sitting in a chair” with their hips instead of keeping them forward at the catch. If your hips are forward when your blade enters the water they’re in position to be used immediately to contribute to the pulling motion by un-rotating or thrusting back. But if they’re already back to start with, behind your feet when your blade enters the water because you’re “sitting in a chair”, how can they be engaged to generate force? They aren’t available in this case because they are already where they should be when you finish your pull.

I strongly suggest practicing the “Tippy Toe Drill”, which is drill number seven in “Some Useful Technique Drills for SUP”, to help you learn to get your weight forward at the catch. Find some calm, very flat water to start with so that balance is not an issue. This will make it easier for you feel that moment of instability just before you catch. It will also allow you to feel how the blade supports your body weight and keeps you from falling over as it enters the water. Like riding a bike this drill is easier to perform when your board has a little speed, as it will make it more stable. So get your board moving first and then start doing the drill. Once you’ve really locked into the feeling in flat water you can try it in progressively rougher conditions.

Keep your weight outside the board during the pull

If you’ve done a good job at the catch of really trying to spear the blade into the water with an appropriate, positive blade angle, you’ll find that your shoulders should be “stacked”. In other words, your bottom arm shoulder should be lower and closer to the water than your top arm shoulder. Just rotating your hips and shoulders alone won’t produce stacked shoulders, it’s the effort you make to continue to stretch forward with your paddling side hip and shoulder until the blade tip enters the water that really makes the difference. It causes you to bend at the waist in such way that your paddling side is closer to the water than your top arm side.

If you’ve effectively got your weight forward at the catch like I’ve described above, a good portion of your body weight will already be loaded onto the blade after the catch. What you want to do now is continue to load even more onto the blade in the pull, and the shoulders stacked position helps make that possible.

If you stand in front of a full length mirror and reach forward like you’re trying to spear the paddle into the water properly, you’ll notice that most of your upper body is sort of over the spot where the paddling side rail of your board would be. It certainly isn’t nicely centered between your feet in what would be the middle of your board. Now pick up your paddle and get into the same position, leaning on your paddle as if it were supported in the water. Notice how much of your body weight you can lean onto your paddle and how much more this allows you to engage your upper body and core muscles than when you just cautiously keep your weight centered between your feet.

In the catch you got into an unstable position just before grabbing the water and found that the blade took your body weight. Now you need to see how much more weight you can load on your blade in the pull when you think about getting your weight outside the paddling side rail and onto the paddle.

When you’re paddling this weight should be loaded on the blade from the catch right through the pull to the point where the blade is vertical and just before you start to unload by bringing your hips forward, straightening up and bringing your weight back onto the board. Remember to keep your top hand pressure down the shaft through the unloading process right to the exit.

You can practice getting weight outside the board and onto the blade in the pull by doing the loading drill in "Some Useful Technique Drills for SUP". Getting body weight outside the board and onto the paddle not only helps you generate force from gravity instead of just muscle, but also takes weight off the board making it sit slightly higher in the water. That makes it easier for you to pull it through the water. If you do a good job of accelerating the board off of the exit, it will stay on top the water through the recovery, making the next catch and pull easier. This will translate into increased speed. However you’ll need to experiment to find the optimal amount of weight that you should load onto the paddle. Too much and the stroke can feel heavy and unsustainable for a long race. I find it far easier to get someone to unload a little weight and make their stroke lighter, than it is to get them to load more when they aren’t familiar with what it feels like to have the paddle take their body weight, so don’t worry if you get the feeling of a really heavy, hard to pull stroke while doing this drill. It’s a good thing, and you can always lighten it up later.

Drive your inside knee towards the nose of the board in the pull

This is a little trick I learned in C1 and have applied to SUP. Basically I’m just focusing on my inside knee to help drive my paddling side hip back during the initial stages of the pull.

There is a definite pattern of bending and straightening of your legs when paddling SUP, not unlike what you see kayak paddlers doing or, in a more extreme case, cyclists. As you rotate forward to catch, your paddling side leg is bent more at the knee and your inside leg is straighter. As you catch and begin to pull, your paddling side hip drives the motion by torqueing back which causes your paddling side leg to straighten and inside leg to bend. This cycle repeats itself stroke after stroke.

I’m not sure that thinking of driving my inside knee towards the nose of the board is adding any force to my pull. It feels like it is, but it may just be my imagination. What I can definitely say is that it helps me ensure that my paddling side hip torques back forcefully against the loaded paddle. Thinking of driving my inside knee towards the nose is a great cue to help me engage my hips properly. I’ve also noticed that because I bend my legs to help get the paddle deeper in the water and find more load, it’s a good cue for that as well. If I can’t feel my knee noticeably driving towards the nose of the board it’s a good bet I’m not loading the blade as much as I want to.

Establish a “circle of power” with your paddle

Using big muscles preferentially over smaller muscles means using the muscles of the hips, core, legs, back, chest and shoulders in preference to the smaller muscles of the arms. However you’re going to have to connect the force generated by those big muscles to the paddle somehow and that’s where your arms come in. You should look at them as connecting rods that link the larger muscle groups to the paddle instead of major contributors themselves.

If your arms are going to be effective connectors they have to remain rigid enough to transfer everything to the paddle. If you try to pull with your arms in any way during the pulling phase or let them go slack, there will be a break in transmission of power from the big muscles to the paddle. This is the last thing you want. One thing I’ve always visualized is a “circle of power” that runs from my top hand up my top arm, across my shoulders to the my bottom arm, down my bottom arm to my bottom hand, and then up the paddle shaft to my top hand. I try to imagine it’s a chain that is stretched tight all the way around rather than slack at any point in the circle. While it is imperative that your shoulders and arms be relaxed as much as possible, you need to contract the stabilizing muscles along that chain just enough to keep it rigid. Of course the paddle shaft, being made of carbon fiber, will stay very rigid on its own.

If you can do this you’ll do a very good job of transferring force generated from your big muscles to the paddle, and there won’t be any force lost. The only exception to not flexing your arms while you’re pulling is the slight bend you add to your bottom arm to help save paddle angle towards the end of the pull. But this bending is done gradually and with keeping an intact circle of power in mind. It should in no way diminish your ability to connect your big muscles to the paddle at that point in the stroke.

In the recovery, of course, everything relaxes and the “circle of power” disappears. However as you’re bringing the paddle forward for the next stroke you’re making all the preparatory movements necessary to reestablish it the moment the blade contacts the water.

Try to link every movement to your paddle

There’s a concept in biomechanics called “summation of forces”. Basically it says that the more joints that are involved in a movement, the more total force will be produced because the force generated by one joint is added to that produced by the next and so on. The trick is that the movements have to be performed in the correct sequence and without pauses or gaps that compromise the flow of the movement. When one joint has contributed most of it’s force to a movement, the next joint has to jump in at the correct time to keep the movement going and add its contribution.

Think of sport movements like a baseball pitch or tennis serve. The athlete’s entire body is involved in the motion. If a pitcher could throw a 95 mph fastball without the big windup don’t you think he would? Instead, the only hope he has of throwing that hard is by putting everything he has into it and using every major joint in his body. We’ve got to do the same on our SUP boards. We need to maximize the contribution to our stroke of every muscle crossing every joint.

We all have to find the way to do that which is optimal, and we’ll all do it slightly differently. The stroke is so complex that I have difficulty describing exactly how I link every movement I make to the paddle. What I can say is that I find it a lot easier to be aware of all the little things my body is doing if I can feel some resistance against which it’s working. Loading weight on the blade and using big muscles preferentially over small muscles is a great way to feel more resistance against your paddle. Searching for a paddling motion that is fluid and rhythmical against that resistance is what is key. Unfortunately, sometimes when you work on technique to excess and do a lot of drills you end up with a motion that is a little disjointed and mechanical. You end up working so hard on separate elements of your stroke that you lose sight of how to fit it all together. I want to emphasize the importance of the whole rather than all the component pieces.

As you become more aware of your feel for the water and the muscles which you engage, you should become better at feeling how everything fits together while you’re paddling and how various muscles connect to the paddle. For this reason I don’t advocate doing drills for more than about twenty minutes a session. You’ve got to spend time paddling with flow and focusing on the whole, not just on a bunch of component pieces of your stroke.

Next…

In the last three posts we’ve pretty much covered the entire “active” part of the stroke that propels your board forward. I’ve given you lots of tips and ideas that should enhance your force producing movements, your ability to connect them to the paddle, and your ability to connect the paddle to the water. In the last part of this series I’ll look at putting it all together and give you some tips and training ideas that can help you learn to relax while paddling, paddle more fluidly and rhythmically, and maintain board run between strokes.

“Big Picture” Approach to Technique Part 2 – Maintaining Positive Blade Angle as Long as Possible

You’ll recall when I introduced the “Big Picture” approach to looking at technique that the second thing I mentioned was maintaining a positive to vertical blade angle as long as possible in the stroke. This builds on what I discussed last week in Part 1 – securing your blade in the water and pulling yourself past the paddle. If you can secure your blade effectively, you’ll pull yourself a lot further past the blade every stroke if you’re able to maintain a positive to vertical blade angle than you will if you quickly lose that positive angle. While it is inevitable that you’ll end up with your blade past vertical and at a negative angle during the late stages of the stroke, the more you can do with a positive angle the better.

Let’s take a look at some things you can do to maximize the positive blade angle in your stroke and some of the common errors that lead to a negative angle occurring too soon. You’ll find that some of the things discussed in the last post that are useful in maintaining connection help with maintaining positive blade angle as well. In actual fact, the more connected you are, the more likely it is that you’ll be doing a good job of paddling with a positive blade angle. Similarly, the better you are at maintaining positive blade angle, the more likely it is that you will be able to find superior connection. The two are that closely related.

The catch

• Make sure you get adequate rotation from your shoulders and hips. If you are reaching far enough it will be because you’ve got good rotation from your shoulders and hips. We discussed this in the last post and used drills 1 through 4 from “Some Useful Technique Drills for SUP”  to help with connection at the catch. The fact of the matter is that if you’re reaching far enough and gathering water behind your blade effectively you are going to have a suitably positive blade angle. One of the biggest errors you can make which negatively affects your ability to maintain blade angle through the stroke is not getting enough of a positive blade angle (in other words not reaching enough) to start with. If you’re lacking rotation, and therefore lacking reach, you’ll have a smaller positive blade angle at the catch that will disappear much more quickly as you begin to pull. The more reach you have to start with, the longer you’ll be able to maintain positive blade angle during the pull.
  
  Having said that, it isn’t simply a case of more is better with reach and rotation. If you attempt to reach too far it encourages a number of errors that diminish your ability to maintain appropriate connection or effectively engage big muscles in your stroke. The trick is to reach the optimal amount. Lets take a look at a couple of things to avoid in your attempt to find reach.
  
  If you bend your top arm too much you’ll increase the positive angle of your blade at the catch and the blade will likely enter the water further forward than otherwise. However once you bend your top arm at the elbow more than about 10 degrees, you’ll find that the pressure you can apply with your top hand down the paddle shaft decreases. This will diminish your ability to maintain connection through the stroke. It also increases the likelihood that you’ll straighten your arm out during the pull, which means that you’ll in effect be punching forward with your top hand rather than exerting downward pressure. Not only does this diminish your ability to maintain connection, it actually decreases the length of time you’ll be able to maintain positive blade angle as the paddle will end up pivoting around your bottom hand, going to a negative angle more quickly, rather than travelling at a positive angle for a longer period of time.
  
  You can easily experiment with this on land. If you have access to a pulley machine at the gym, try doing a one-arm press-down and play with different angles at the elbow as you try it. You’ll quickly find the optimal angle at which you are strongest. It will likely be somewhere around 10 degrees. You can also experiment in front of a full-length mirror. Hold your paddle normally with your bottom hand and experiment with bending your top arm at different angles as you pretend to pull a stroke. You’ll find that you have a greater positive paddle angle the more you bend your top arm. But watch what happens if your top arm straightens during the pull. You’ll see that rather than travelling at a positive blade angle that allows the big muscles of your torso and hips to be involved in applying force on the blade through the stroke, the paddle instead quickly passes through vertical to a negative angle by pivoting around your bottom hand.
  
  The other mistake people often make in their search for more reach is that they over-rotate. Just like with top arm angle, there is an optimal amount of rotation for each of us. Too little and we don’t put ourselves into position to effectively use our hips and torso during the stroke and our stroke will simply be too short. Too much and we put ourselves into a position at the catch where it is difficult to effectively generate sufficient power. Remember we want to get onto our paddle and generate as much power as we can as quickly and dynamically as possible at the catch. What’s the point of trying to reach a little further if it impedes our ability to do that?
  
  You’ll have to experiment a bit to find what is optimal rotation (and therefore reach) for you. Just be aware that one of the most common mistakes is that people don’t rotate enough, and if that is your problem it will definitely be limiting how long you are able to maintain positive blade angle in your stroke.



• When engaging your hips make sure to hold your top shoulder back. This is a bit tricky and is something you shouldn’t take too literally or it can mess you up. Basically, what you don’t want to do is engage your hips and have your shoulders un-rotate with them so that you lose all your rotation immediately. Your hips should lead the motion and your shoulders follow, but you should try to spread the de-rotation of your shoulders out through the stroke. I find the easiest way to do this is to think about holding my top shoulder back and focus instead on pressing down with the top hand. My shoulders end up un-rotating appropriately during the pull and I am able to maintain blade angle well. If I don’t concentrate on this I find it is easy to punch forward with my top shoulder, leading to a very rapid loss of rotation and positive angle before I’ve even really started the pull.

The pull

• Spread your de-rotation out over the stroke. Building on the last point above, you want to think about distributing the de-rotation of your hips and shoulders out over the entire first half of your stroke. Your hips are going to move most dynamically and will lose their rotation more quickly than your shoulders, but for both you don’t want to have done everything in the catch and have nothing left to use during the pull. Remember, positive angle is preferable to a negative angle for moving the board forward, but the optimal angle is when the blade passes through vertical. You want to be passing through vertical when everything – body weight on the blade, force generated from your hips, force generated by your shoulders, and force generated by top hand pressure – is at it’s maximum. It’s going to take some time and experimenting to find out exactly where this point is in the stroke for the way you paddle, but the key is to make sure that your blade is passing through vertical when all these forces are approaching maximum. If you don’t think about spreading your de-rotation out through the stroke you’ll find you have a negative blade angle at this critical point and you’ll be getting less out of it than you should be.



• Try to get everything done early. This may seem counterintuitive if we’ve just talked about spreading your de-rotation out over the entire stroke but basically what I’m suggesting here is that you think about being dynamic and aggressive with the work you do against the water, right from the catch and through the pull. Even though you’re trying to spread your de-rotation out over the entire stroke, the last thing you want to do is do it slowly. If you try to be aggressively dynamic and get the pulling done early you’ll find that you are likely to have more of a positive angle through the pulling phase than if you are less dynamic and committed to an aggressive stroke. You can use reference points on your board (or put some on your board using tape) to help remind you of where you should be entering the water, burying your blade, reaching a vertical angle with your blade, and initiating your exit.



• Use top hand pressure to not only stabilize the blade in the water but to maintain paddle angle. By now I’m sure you are realizing just how important top hand pressure is during the stroke. Remember, this pressure comes from the muscles of your upper back, chest and your entire shoulder girdle as opposed to the relatively small muscles of your deltoids and rotator cuff and is transmitted to the paddle through your top arm, which acts as a connecting rod to the paddle.
  
  
  As you are loading your paddle during the pull you’ll want to think about pressing directly down the paddle shaft with your top hand and using that pressure to help you begin to come up with the stroke as your blade passes through vertical and you begin to unload the paddle. It is almost as if you push off of the stabilized and supported paddle to push yourself into an upright position as you unload, rather than use the small, postural muscles of your low back to stand more upright.
  
  
  While many would consider this unloading to be part of the exit, you need to start thinking about it in the pull. When you’re paddling well you always have to be mentally one step ahead of what you’re doing in your stroke because it is impossible to think of something and then immediately do it when you’re paddling. If you’re paddling properly, and have your muscles and body weight effectively applied to the blade in a dynamic motion, it takes a fraction of a second to get them to start unloading after they’ve been committed to loading the paddle. You actually need to be setting up the exit in the second half of the pulling phase, and top hand pressure is crucial for this.
  
  
  Tommy Buday recently released a video that I am sure you can find on YouTube in which he talks about trying to pull your body to the paddle in the late stages of the pull to initiate your exit. This can also be an effective way to look at this part of the stroke, although I think you’ll find what Tommy suggests easiest to do with really solid top hand pressure.


• Don’t go too deep. Although I’ve talked a lot about increasing connection and load on the blade by going a little deeper into the water, there’s a limit to what is effective. The deeper you go, the more likely it is that your body will get a little behind your blade and you’ll be late coming up and have a bit more of a negative angle relative to your body position. This is a common issue that I have to deal with, and arises because I feel I often have more to gain from the extra connection going a little deeper gives me than I do from maintaining a more positive angle at the end of the stroke.
  
  Like most things in paddling it is a trade off. The gear I’m trying to use and the conditions I’m paddling in are what determine how deep I tend to go. Experimentation with different loads and stroke rates is the only way to determine what is optimal for you, and you really aren’t a complete paddler if you don’t have at least a couple of “gears” that you feel are optimal.
  
  
  

The exit

• You’re going to have a negative blade angle in the exit. Don’t stress about it. Just make sure it doesn’t get too negative. In “More Thoughts on SUP Technique” I demonstrated that pulling the blade past your feet with a negative angle isn’t disastrous with regards to making your board go fast. Your board is still accelerating, even though the blade is at a negative angle and is behind you. In my opinion, trying too hard to get the blade out of the water before your feet and limiting negative blade angle at this stage of the stroke likely means you’ll be limiting the amount of load you get on the paddle in the pulling phase of your stroke. I think that getting appropriate load in the pulling phase should be most important and you really don’t want to limit it in any way, so I’ve always been okay with pulling a little past your feet. If you see any of the top paddlers in the world in action you’ll notice they all pull past their feet to some degree, so let’s get the notion out of our heads that this is wrong.
  
  What is wrong is pulling too far past your feet and letting the blade angle get too negative. Not only are there diminishing returns in terms of the acceleration you can provide to your board at this point of your stroke, if you get too negative a blade angle you’ll end up slowing your board down by increasing the pitch of your board as a result of pulling the tail into the water. So the key here is to just make sure the blade angle doesn’t get too negative.
  
  If you’ve done a good job of trying to get everything done early in the pull, and if you’ve maintained good top hand pressure and have pushed yourself upright by pressing down the paddle shaft as you’ve begun your unloading then you’ll almost automatically be executing your exit in an appropriate spot. Your blade will of course be at a negative angle, but not excessively so. Just maintain top hand pressure till the last possible moment as you reload your hips forward, straighten your legs and pop the blade out of the water.

• Bend your bottom arm a little towards the exit. For good reason, it has been pretty well established that it is best to reach and then pull with a straight bottom or paddling side arm. It ensures that you’re getting maximum reach and that you aren’t pulling with your biceps and instead are using the big muscles of your back and hips. Remember, your arms should be viewed simply as connecting rods through which the big muscles apply force to the paddle.
  
  However as you approach the exit in the late stages of the pull, it makes sense to bend your paddling side arm a little as it will actually help you maintain blade angle through the exit. It doesn’t mean you stop pulling with your big muscles and begin using your biceps exclusively. You can compare it to doing a one-arm row in the gym, where you are using your lats almost exclusively even though you are bending your arm as you do it. It turns out that by bending our bottom arm slightly at this stage in the stroke we can maintain a few more degrees of blade angle than if we can if we continue to have a straight arm. Our big muscles are still engaged; the path of the paddle is just slightly adjusted, delaying its arrival to a big negative position. This is an especially useful trick to use if, like me, you are heavily loaded in the pulling phase and likely to find your body a little late coming up at the end of the stroke because of it.

What’s next?

To this point we’ve looked at securing the blade in the water and pulling yourself past the paddle as well as paddling with a positive blade angle as much as possible. The two are interrelated and it is hard to do one well without doing the other well at the same time. Conversely, it is easy to mess one up if you do the other poorly, so it is really important to work at both.

Next we’ll want to look at tips for using big muscles preferentially over small muscles in the SUP stroke. We’ll be revisiting many of the points made in these last two posts to do that, but there are few extra things we can look at that will help us do this effectively. Stay tuned for more…

“Big Picture” Approach to Technique Part 1 – Securing your Blade in the Water and Pulling Yourself Past the Paddle

I’ve been busy racing the last couple of weeks and so haven’t posted in a while. You’ll remember in the last post I made, I discussed how taking a “big picture” approach to technique is a more preferable first step than getting right into considering body positions, joint angles, etc. While eventually you’ll need to consider this level of detail, it is much more effective to consider technique on a larger scale initially than micromanaging every minute aspect of the stroke. I explained that we’re all different and are all going to take a slightly different approach to moving the board based on our own unique physical characteristics and level of fitness. I introduced seven key elements of technique that you should try to address effectively in a way that best works for you based on those characteristics and your fitness level, and promised to look at each one more closely in future posts. Today I’d like to start with the first and most important one – securing your paddle blade in the water and pulling yourself past the paddle.

If you’re focusing on pulling your blade through the water then you are taking the exact wrong approach to paddling. Instead, you should be thinking of pulling yourself by the paddle. The aim of the first approach is to just pull the paddle towards you. It results in some forward movement by coincidence. The aim of the second approach is to move your board forward maximally each stroke, using the paddle as a tool to do that. To me the difference couldn’t be more obvious.

If you’re going to pull yourself by the paddle effectively you first need to gather water on your blade as it enters the water at the catch and then hold that water on your blade and work against it through the stroke. You need to be able to actually visualize this and be able to distinguish the difference between working with the blade against the water and pulling the blade through the water. You also need to train yourself to “feel” the water you’ve gathered behind your blade. If you reached out and grabbed something with your hand I have no doubt you’d feel it. What you need to learn to do is make the paddle an extension of your body so that as your blade is entering the water you actually feel the water gather against your paddle just like you would if it were your hand. You should feel this in the fingers of your pulling hand and with your entire body as the paddle begins to support your body weight. Then as you start to work against the water to move the board forward you should feel the water on the paddle blade in all the muscles up your paddling side arm and into your shoulders, back and core, and up your top arm into your shoulders, back and core. Your arms should simply act like connecting rods which attach the paddle to your torso and ultimately to your hips and legs, and your entire body can then be engaged in pulling the board past your planted paddle. Sounds easy, right?

Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. A lot of one’s ability to feel the water is innate. When you first send kids on the water in kayaks at a canoe club, you’ll see some who try to move the boat past the paddle naturally. They take slow strokes and the boat seems to move a long way every stroke. You can actually see a connection between the paddle blades and the biggest muscles in their little bodies. You’ll see others that just try to move the paddle, with no real sense of connection to anything. Their paddle blades move quickly through the water, splash a lot, and their boat hardly moves anywhere. The kids in the first group are ready to move to learning more about technique. The ones in the second group have to learn how to feel the water first. It is the single most difficult thing to teach, and some paddlers never really master it.

Let’s take a look at some of the things you can do throughout your stroke to increase your feel for the water. We can also take a look at some of the things that prevent you from doing it well and suggest some corrections for the most common mistakes.

The catch

• Make sure the blade is actually moving forward as it enters the water. Think of the way a swimmer’s hands enter the water when they are swimming freestyle. Their hands don’t slap down onto the water, but instead sort of spear forward into the water, gathering water behind them. If you’ve spent any time paddling a prone board you’ll have been doing the same thing. Imagine doing this with your paddle blade instead of your hands and you’re half way there.
  
  One of the analogies I like to use is reaching into a big bucket of movie theatre popcorn with your hand and trying to grab as much as you can each time. Imagine you’re trying to do the same thing with your paddle blade and the water is the popcorn.
  
  In “Some Useful Technique Drills for SUP”, I shared a number of drills I use which help enhance certain elements of the stroke. You should refer to it throughout this post. Drills 1 through 4 are really useful for this aspect of the stroke and you should perform them sequentially to get maximum benefit.
  
  The most common error is pulling the paddle blade back in the process of catching, which means the blade will be doing the exact opposite of “spearing” into the water. This most commonly happens because the paddler reaches too far in the set up and can’t continue to reach forward as their blade lowers to meet the water. I call this “air catching”, and the best way to fix this mistake is to ensure you are not overreaching in the set up and instead are just reaching with a casual rotation during the set up and then continue to rotate shoulders and hips forward as the blade tip lowers to meet the water. As I rotate forward to meet the water, my paddling side leg bends more at the knee and my inside leg straightens a bit, and as my paddling side legs bends I become aware of increasing flexion of my paddling side ankle. My heels also get a little lighter in their contact with the board. I’m actually reaching forward right from my feet and my paddling side foot in particular. Again drills 1 through 4 will be useful in correcting an “air catch” and drill 7 will be useful for helping you get your heels a little lighter and your weight forward onto the paddle.



• As you’re gathering water behind your blade you need to start working against it to move yourself forward. Because it’s all about moving our board forward, we never really have time to “plant” our paddle and then “pull”. You’ll actually be slowing your board down when you plant your paddle if there is a lag before you pull because if the blade doesn’t immediately work against the water it will instead be acting as a brake. It’s okay to start with a definite “plant” and then “pull” while you’re learning, however as you get more advanced you should aim to reduce the lag between the two until the gathering of water behind your blade and the start of work against it happens almost simultaneously. The catch drill and catch paddling really can help with this.



• As soon as you have water gathered on your blade you need good top hand pressure, directed down the paddle shaft to ensure you hold onto that water. This top hand pressure is hugely important. If you’ve planted and secured your blade in the water this pressure will keep the blade secure as you work against the water to pull yourself forward. One of the biggest errors a sprint canoe paddler can make is pulling too much from the bottom shoulder because of a passive top hand.
  
  You shouldn’t be punching forward with the top shoulder/hand, but instead should be directing pressure straight down the middle of the paddle shaft. Be sure to make the top hand pressure come from the big muscles of your back, shoulder and chest, rather than from just the deltoids and rotator cuff muscles of your shoulder. Remember, your arms are just connectors between the paddle and the big muscles of your torso, core and hips.



• Eliminate any tension in your muscles and try to be as relaxed as you can. If you are tense, are gripping your paddle too tightly, or are tight in your shoulders and neck you won’t be able to feel the water properly and won’t be able to tell if you’ve loaded your blade effectively or not. Proprioceptors in your muscles give you feedback about the load you have on your paddle blade. However for them to do their job they need to identify the load placed on your muscles from the paddle blade. If all of your muscles are tense these proprioceptors won’t be able to distinguish that load from the background noise created by those tense muscles.



• Engage your hips to initiate your stroke. A big part of connection comes from the speed at which we work against the water. If we work slowly against the water, our board will accelerate less than if we work really dynamically and explosively against it. Your hips and legs represent the largest, most powerful muscles that we can use to accelerate our board. We need to ensure that the blade is secured in the water first, but once we have secured it our hips and, to a lesser extent, our legs should provide the bulk of the impulse against the secured paddle. It is extremely important that your hips stay forward until the blade has been planted and secured, but once it has they should drive back explosively, connected to your paddle through your torso and arms.
  
  Obviously you’ll have to do some homework before you should try using them explosively. If you rush this process it’s likely you’ll end up pulling the blade through the water rather than the board past the paddle. However once you’re confident you have a good connection with the water and are moving your board past the paddle by using your hips, you should little-by-little work at increasing the speed at which you apply your hips and legs to the stroke. Eventually you’ll have a really connected, explosively dynamic stroke.

The pull

• Maximize connection through the pull by learning how to fully load your paddle during the pull. We’ll talk more about this when we talk about using body weight during the stroke but basically, if you’ve got your paddle well connected to the water you should be able to “climb on top of your paddle” with your body weight during the pull, thus getting weight off of your board. This in turn makes your board a little lighter and allows it to sit slightly higher in the water, which then makes it easier to pull through the water. It also allows you to gain benefit from your body weight and add that to what you’re applying to the paddle with your muscles as you work against the water.
  
  The big benefit of continuing to load your paddle during the pull is that it helps you maintain, and even increase, connection. Imagine that the water is composed of a column of extremely small water molecules stacked on top of each other in a great number of very thin layers. As soon as the tip of your blade enters the water and works against the water column it disturbs the molecules in that layer. They move away from the face of the blade and fill space on the backside of the blade where a little vacuum has been created. This results in a loss of connection similar to your foot losing traction in deep beach sand or snow. Fortunately, all we need to do is go a little deeper into the water column with our paddle and we’ll find a new, undisturbed layer of water. For a moment we reestablish connection until that layer is disturbed and connection is reduced. We can reestablish connection again by sinking the blade deeper into the water and interacting with another new, undisturbed layer. This happens repeatedly as the blade tip sinks deeper into the water. Once we’ve reached the maximum depth of our stroke, the top of the blade repeats the same process as the blade climbs back up through the water column towards the exit.
  
  I suggest you experiment with the “Loading Drill”. Like all drills it is an exaggeration that in this case should help you find maximal connection through the pulling phase of your stroke. The more you load, the more connected your stroke will be through this phase. If you load too much for your strength, you’ll find the stroke too heavy and unsustainable for long periods. It’s like using a gear that is too big for you on your bike. Playing around with this drill should help you find optimal load and therefore connection for the pulling phase of your stroke.



• Use your legs to help load your paddle. Most people bend at the waist in this part of the stroke to keep their blade buried. Of course we’re talking about doing much more than just burying our blade so we’ll have to do more than just bend at the waist. I strongly suggest bending your legs more as you load your blade to help you get the blade to sink deeper into the water. You’ll find this relieves strain on your lower back while also allowing you to continue to engage your hips and legs which you started to do in the catch. If you do this, your legs will end up giving you a huge boost when you “unload”, straightening them as you spring your hips forward at the exit.



• Maintain top hand pressure. A common mistake in the pulling phase is loss of top hand pressure. It is extremely important to remember to maintain consistent top hand pressure down the paddle shaft through the entire stroke. As soon as you release top hand pressure, your paddle blade is no longer as stabilized and secure in the water, making it more difficult to effectively pull yourself by the paddle.



• Stay relaxed. Remember, for the proprioceptors in your paddling muscles to feel water against the paddle blade your muscles need to be relaxed. You can experience this by paddling with relaxed muscles and then feeling the difference when you intentionally tense up all your muscles and grip the paddle too tightly. You’ll notice a drastically diminished ability to feel water against your paddle blade when your muscles are tense.

The exit

Most people get the idea of pulling yourself to the paddle in the catch and pull. Fewer appreciate that you can actually push yourself past the paddle at the exit. An exit that is properly executed gives your board one last burst of acceleration that helps it better maintain its speed between strokes.
 
• Unload your paddle by bringing your hips forward and straightening your legs. If during the pull your focus was on loading the paddle, in the exit it should be on unloading it. As the blade nears your body and blade angle passes through vertical, you want to prepare for your exit by reloading your hips forward and unbending your legs. It is imperative that these two movements occur while the blade is still supported in the water. In fact these movements should initiate the process of the blade exiting the water. If you can execute these movements against a fully supported blade you’ll be pushing yourself forward off the blade at the exit not unlike the way a cross-country skier pushes themselves forward in the last stages of the double polling motion.
  
  You can try doing the loading drill and focusing on the unloading at the end of the stroke to work on connection at the exit. I’d also suggest doing the “exit drill”. You’ll want to do them rather slowly and carefully initially to make sure you’re synchronizing your movements properly, but ultimately you want to be exploding forward with your hips and as you straighten your legs. Like the rest of the stroke this motion needs to be dynamic. If you’re getting an effective push off the exit you’ll feel like the board is really accelerating or surging off the back of the stroke and maintaining speed between strokes.
  
  The biggest and most common mistake made at this point in the stroke is starting your hip and leg motion after the blade has already exited the water. Not only will this not push your board forward, it will actually break the forward run of your board. You’ll want to continually remind yourself as you’re working on your exit that the forward movement of your hips and unbending of your legs is what initiates the action of lifting your blade out of the water.



• Don’t forget to maintain top hand pressure. If top hand pressure sounds like a recurring theme throughout the stroke then it must be important. Remember top hand pressure directed down the paddle shaft keeps the blade stabilized and supported in the water. It is very common to see paddlers relaxing their top hand pressure in the late stages of the pull meaning that their exit, no matter how well they do the rest of the exit movements, will be soft and ineffective.

Where do we go from here?

In this post I’ve discussed things you can do to effectively secure the paddle blade in the water and to maximize your ability to pull yourself by the paddle throughout the stroke. I’ve described strategies you can try and things you can visualize to help you do this, but ultimately you’ll have to find a way that works for you. They way I accomplish this is different than how Travis Grant does it, and Travis does it differently than Connor Baxter. Once you’ve found a way that seems to work for you, you’ll have to remember it for the next post in which we will focus on maintaining positive blade angle as long as possible, because that will build on your ability to find connection with your paddle. It won’t do you any good to have a positive blade angle through most of your stroke if your blade isn’t well connected. Give these tips a try and stay tuned for more…