On Fri, Jul 21, 2000 at 08:21:20AM -0400, Bill Hansen wrote: > People tell me that straight elbows and shoulders overhead, or way out to the > sides, are invitations to sudden orthopedic disaster by way of a dislocated > shoulder. Having seen that happen a couple of times, I believe it. Amen brother! A few years ago, I was sitting at the starting gate of a slalom race, and watched the paddler who'd started before me do that to himself about 4 gates into the race. Ouch. A conceptual way to teach yourself *not* to do this (as it was taught to me): Imagine that you have a box attached to your chest, roughly 2.5 feet along each side. -->Keep your hands in the box.<-- If you have a need to put one of your hands "over there", for example, behind your right hip, then rotate your torso so that the box rotates, so that you can put your hand over there and *still* keep it in the box. (Make sure that your other hand stays in the box, too.) It's really hard to hurt yourself (well, okay, hard to hurt yourself by tearing out a shoulder) if you do this. It forces you to paddle in such a way that there tends to be a lot of slack in elbows and shoulders, and well, slack is good. ;-) ---Rsk Rich Kulawiec rsk_at_gsp.org *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - All postings copyright the author and not to be reproduced/forwarded outside PaddleWise without author's permission Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Fri Jul 21 2000 - 08:21:52 PDT
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