Paddle stroke mechanics is a very detailed subject and quite complicated for SUP paddlers even compared to kayakers and canoers… canoeists… paddling a canoe.
One question that comes up quite often is “how do I paddle faster?” There’s way more to unpack there than you might think, and it’s too much to get into with a single post. Recently, though, I was asked about stroke length while sprint racing. Now that’s a singular-enough topic to cover in one post.
The “Common Knowledge” to Paddle Faster
Common knowledge is usually 50/50 on truth vs myth or at least truth befuddled by lots of hearsay and hand-me-down information that never gets challenged. The “common knowledge” for sprint racing is you want a very short stroke length to maximize acceleration.
The goal in a sprint race is to accelerate quickly and maximize your power and speed over a very short period of time. You should have no energy left after a sprint race (approximately 1 minute of paddling)
The basis for this common knowledge comes from some reasoning along these lines: Most of your power is generated in the first half of your stroke, so you should just take the first half of your stroke over and over again, but faster.
That’s sort of correct, but is often taken to an extreme that makes it counterproductive, so let’s break it down.
Paddle Stroke and Power
Every paddle stroke has four basic phases: the Catch, the Power, the Release, and the Recovery. The first three interact with the water, the Recovery takes place in the air.
Whenever we have pressure against our paddle blade we are generating power and speed. If you are applying pressure on the power face, you are going forward, if you are applying pressure on the back, you are going backward. Assuming you have a modicum of paddling technique under your belt, if you plot the amount of power you generate over the time of your paddle stroke you’ll get a graph that looks something like this:
You can see that during the Catch, the amount of power you apply quickly increases as you drive the paddle blade into the water and begin to pull against it. The Power phase generates the bulk of the power, and then slowly drops off as you still generate some amount of power all the way through to the end of your Release.
The total power output of the stroke is equal to the area under the curve (keep that in mind for later).
Most of the power of your paddle stroke, and thus speed, comes from the first 2/3 of the stroke. But, if you try to clip off the last part of your stroke you are going to run into a few issues.
First, it will never be an instant release. You’ll always reduce pressure on your blade (and power output) before releasing the blade from the water. Second, this can hamper the overall ergonomics and body mechanics of your paddle stroke.
Shortening Your Stroke – Wrong and Right
There are two ways to shorten your paddle stroke – the wrong way and the right way. I’m kidding, but there are better and worse ways, as well as techniques that don’t impact your stroke length at all!
The beginning sprint racer is often inclined to take aggressively short strokes thinking they are getting more instant power at the front of their stroke, and doing it faster in such a way that gives a higher total power output per minute than taking longer, fuller strokes. But this paddler frequently makes their stroke far too short.
Shortening your stroke too aggressively creates an imbalance in the amount of energy you are using and the amount of power and speed you are generating. Super-short strokes have several drawbacks:
- Poor ratio of time generating speed to time resetting your stroke
- Too much vertical movement causing your board to bounce and/or flex
- Excessive energy store depletion
- Uncomfortable ergonomics and reduction in power through body mechanics
In this example of the excessively shortened stroke, you can see that the Catch has the same general curve as the paddle blade enters the water and the paddler begins to pull. But now we’ve got a very short power phase that almost immediately enters the release phase.
While we might have shortened the total time required to take the stroke by almost half, we’ve even further reduced the amount of power generated. We’re taking twice as many strokes per minute, but each stroke is only generating 25% as much power. This may work for the first few strokes of a race to help overcome your standing inertia, but it creates a net loss in speed through the course of the race. That doesn’t take into account the issues of mechanics and bounce, either.
The key is to shorten your stroke by a more conservative amount. Rather than shortening it by 30% or more, thinking about shortening it about 15% instead.
In this example of a moderately shortened stroke we’ve shortened the full stroke length by about 15%. But we’ve retained a greater amount of total power and kept the Power phase as long as possible by primarily cutting the stroke length earlier in the Release phase. Now we are taking more strokes per minute, but still generating nearly the same amount of power per stroke.
Shortening Your Stroke Part II – The Recovery
One of the most effective things we can do to shorten our paddle stroke is to focus on the Recovery phase. This is the biggest time and speed suck in the whole stroke.
Any time we aren’t putting pressure on the power face of our paddles we are slowing down. So one of the best, and technically easiest things to do is move through the Recovery phase faster to start the next stroke faster.
I say “technically” easier because training your body to move through the Recovery faster takes time, and this is easier done with a shorter paddle shaft to avoid accidentally tripping the blade in the water as you aren’t going to be raising back up to a vertical body position during the sprint.
Here’s what it looks like if you are able to halve the time it takes you to Recover your paddle and start your next stroke:
In the same amount of time you can take 33% more paddle strokes. That’s 33% more power output per minute. Now that’s fast. Is it realistic? Halving your recovery time might be a little ambitious, but for the sake of illustration here on a blog you can see what an impact it can make. Even if you are able to shave off 10% of your Recovery time, that’s one extra stroke for every 10 you take.
Paddle Faster With A Longer Stroke
Wait. You just spent all that time telling me to shorten my stroke to go faster? What’s this nonsense about lengthening my stroke now?
There are two answers here, but only one is related to sprinting, so for pretending to care about brevity, I’m going to stick to that one.
When you watch a professional SUP Sprint race you will see the vast majority of paddlers using a strongly staggered, or split, stance. There are a few reasons to do this in a sprint race.
First, the split stance increases the size of the “stability triangle” with your paddle and both feet, making it easier to use a narrower board while making big body movements.
Second, the split stance changes your paddling ergonomics to allow for a faster recovery without lifting your upper body as high.
Third, using a split stance with a shorter paddle allows you to keep your paddle in the Power phase of your stroke longer and gives you a little more leverage against the paddle.
The downsides of this stance are that it only works when paddling on one side of the board. If you need to change sides with your paddle you will need to switch stances either completely or at least back to a neutral stance, otherwise you’ll end up with less stability, an excessively short stroke, no additional leverage, and an uncomfortable body mechanic.
The second answer to this question is a topic for another article – using the full power of your paddle stroke far maximizing efficiency over distance.