Really quick... The best way to reduce strain on your wrists is to point your fingers forward on the top half of every stroke, and relax your grip on the bottom half of every stroke. I think the wrist problems arise from gripping too tight on a straight shaft paddle. Bent shaft paddles another way to eliminate the wrist problem if you simply cannot learn to relax your stroke. I once had to use a 200cm unfeathered whitewater paddle on a sea kayak trip because I had broken my greenland stick. I have an Pygmy Arctic Tern, which has a 23" beam. I found that the paddle was simply too short to reach very far forward during the catch phase of the stroke. Since the catch is the most important part of the forward stroke, I felt like I was losing 25% of paddling power right at the very start. However I was able to compensate for this just fine by using the sliding stroke to effectively increase the length of the paddle on every stroke. Thank god for greenland paddling techniques! The disadvantage of a bent-shaft paddle is that the sliding stroke is much harder to perform. Cheers, Kevin *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Wed May 09 2001 - 09:41:59 PDT
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