Connor Baxter on Stroke Technique and Paddle Length

[UKRiverSurfers]

Sounds silly but try it yourself Area10. Next paddle, be aware of where you finish without actually looking at it and when you finish at your feet and move the blade outwards the blade will always look like its exiting behind. Th holy way to actually get it to exit at your feet in relation to the blade movement is actually exit before your feet and then you get the silly short stroke that has been referred to. So - It is purely just an illusion

[UKRiverSurfers]

Not sure what that date is in relation to the vid i saw. You can actually see that yes he is passing his feet and even powering past his feet. But simply if he does it like me, he'll go faster

[Area 10]

Not sure what that date is in relation to the vid i saw. You can actually see that yes he is passing his feet and even powering past his feet. But simply if he does it like me, he'll go faster

Ok, well that claim would be like me telling my kids that if only I was given the chance I could be F1 World Champion, after winning an indoor karting session yesterday. Put your money where your mouth is and do a few races, then. Show us what all that perfect technique brings you

It is true that the movement of the blade when out of the water distorts the perception of where it is. But this is not true for when the blade is still fully sunk in the water, which is what I was talking about.

[Area 10]

Those are all great videos and observations, but are from 2011-2013.  The question is, where are we today?

Well, that is what this thread is about. If you can find good footage from the last few months of the top people paddling then please post it. We may need to wait until the season starts to see any changes but my guess is that the stroke will continue to be driven by increased movement of the body in general, utilising all possible muscle sets, which is kinda what Connor was getting at, but that rotation and movement of the hips is replacing leaning forward (also Connor, but I'm sure others will show it more elegantly in technical terms - Connor's has never been the prettiest technique to watch).

[UKRiverSurfers]

AKA - trunk rotation

[Bean]

Connor's has never been the prettiest technique to watch).

Perhaps not, but we can't argue the results.

I think about how technique has changed over the last 40 years in x-country ski racing.  It's not as stylish as it was back in the day, but it sure has become more efficient.

[mrbig]

Yep. Not a beauty contest. Not figure skating. Fastest person wins every time..

[Beasho]

Good news is I have learned . . . . . not to paddle past my feet

All the arguing aside we try to AT LEAST depower at that point.  When I see people during the summer in Connecticut paddling to the tail of the board with a little FLIP of water at the end it drives me crazy.

I am not racing but trying to maximize speed for wave catching on bigger, faster waves.  When really working to get into a fast wave I can feel my paddle going further than I would like but I am paddling in the 10 to 19 mph range JUST TO CATCH THE WAVE (TRACE has proven that I can hit 15 to 18+ mph and still miss a wave).   

At these speeds it's very difficult (maybe impossible) to maintain the quick turnover necessary to reach and pull just to my feet.  You guys figure it out and I will adapt.

[Bean]

Sounds like you could benefit from employing the asymmetric paddle stroke technique (as illustrate recently by PB.)

[PonoBill]

I'm really not all that dogmatic about not letting the paddle go past the feet, though if people don't try for that, they don't start getting a better technique. Performance in competitions isn't determined just by better technique. That's true in almost every man-powered sport. At the peak will be people who overwhelm poor technique with pure power (in this case, power to weight) and conditioning. It's the middle, and the folks moving up from there, where technique matters. And when the pack starts catching the flyers in the front, the only thing that can keep them there is technical improvement.

When I first started racing years ago I was pitifully slow. Then I did some sessions with Dave Kalama and he taught me better technique. Suddenly I was in the front pack. Not winning, but capable of strong showings. Still too heavy, still too big, still not in great shape. But when no one else knew how to paddle a standup board, I rocked. I could beat paddlers like Karen Wrenn in long flatwater races. Then everyone started getting better technique and I drifted backwards. No surprise there. But it illustrated to me exactly what good technique was all about.  I'll never beat Connor again (I did once, when he was 13), but I'm at the top of the charts for fat geezers with bad knees and shoulders.

I think it's kind of obvious that we don't really know what perfect paddle technique is for standup paddling. We think it's some adaptation of proper canoe technique, but as long as we keep standing up and using paddles as long as we are, that won't really be true. There hasn't been much in the way of disciplined study to determine what's best. Technique is changing, but it's pretty random and doesn't include much in the way of body mechanics. I think a lot of the young guns are going to have short careers, truncated by joint and back problems.

I wouldn't be surprised to see someone wrap a leg around a paddle and blow everyone away.

[starman]

I was out last night screwing around with my stroke and observed two things;

One was if I try to sprint and and really torque with my core I can't help but pull until the paddle is at my feet but the release is when my hand is at my hip and the paddle blade has zero load but behind my feet. I then can pull the "sword from it's sheath" per the DK technique.

Second was paying attention to the angle of the paddle shaft in relation to the water. If I worked on trying to keep the paddle shaft close to 90deg then loading the blade to my feet made perfect sense. If the angle got too steep then it made perfect sense to pull the blade out sooner as I would reach the "shovel" angle much sooner. Meaning I would have to shorten the power so that the paddle has no load once at my feet for the release.

I'll have to remember to put my GPS in my pocket to then see if there is any actual change in speed when I make a change to the stroke.

[pdxmike]

I think it's kind of obvious that we don't really know what perfect paddle technique is for standup paddling. We think it's some adaptation of proper canoe technique, but as long as we keep standing up and using paddles as long as we are, that won't really be true. There hasn't been much in the way of disciplined study to determine what's best. Technique is changing, but it's pretty random and doesn't include much in the way of body mechanics. I think a lot of the young guns are going to have short careers, truncated by joint and back problems.

I wouldn't be surprised to see someone wrap a leg around a paddle and blow everyone away.

This is exactly why we need stroke rules in racing to keep people from changing the stroke into something too different than how it is now!   

You're exactly right--who knows what the stroke will look like as people come along who are not locked into their thinking of what it "should" look like?  The Fosbury flop in high jumping is an example.  People high-jumped for decades without thinking of that.  Even the rules, which already narrowed down what was possible, allowed that totally different technique.

Another was the butterfly stroke in swimming.  It's a very new stroke.  There's no practical use for it other than competition and looking cool--it's slower than crawl, but more tiring.  It was started by people swimming breaststroke (which does have practical purposes) who realized you could go a lot faster by recovering your arms above water, and it still met all of breaststrokes rules about symmetrical pull and kick, etc.  It was made a separate stroke because it made standard breaststroke obsolete for competition--too slow in comparison.  But people swam breaststroke for decades before someone realized the rules allowed fly.

Point is that even in cases of sports that were much more mature, and with much tighter rules than paddling (really the only rule is you have to stand) people popped up out of the blue and almost overnight made the conventional technique totally obsolete.

[TeachSB]

I feel that I have to cone back to the idea of "cues"in coaching. A cue is an instruction that helps people to visualize how they should move. It is NOT a technical description of the movement. For example... When people learn to squat they are sometimes told cues to help them learn the movement like, "chest up" or "push your knees out."  Both of these cues help people to activate the right muscles and perform with proper technique. Neither of them should be taken to extremes or considered the "holy grail" of the movement though that happens all the time on the Internet. You can't really point your chest at the ceiling while squatting but thinking about it can keep your back straight.

I think "don't pull past your feet" is just a cue. It is what paddlers think about or even what they imagine themselves doing as they paddle (like Ukriversurfers said). It isn't EXACTLY what they are doing but as PB mentioned if you don't tell people this while they are learning then they paddle WAY too long. That doesn't make it dogma.

[SUPJorge]

Well put Teach.

[UKRiverSurfers]

Yeah - nicely put.. I prefer the term 'key point' though. As without the key, you can't unlock the desired result.

Often - a technique that isn't good will be used at a beginner level just to get the understanding across.