Words:
Elaine Farquharson

Photos:
James Farquharson,
trek6500 – Adobe Stock, photolifepnw – Adobe Stock, Ammit – Adobe Stock

Elaine’s details

www.dorsethealthand
wellbeing.co.uk or www.dorsetsupcoachingand
guiding.co.uk Big thanks to Dagger UK, for their help

Spinal alignment

Couch potato paddling

We think of sitting down as a restful sedentary posture, but it is not. As paddlers, we need core strength, proprioception, spinal agility and explosive power more than most other athletes and sports people.

So what is a dynamic, healthy spinal posture, and why is it so important? Our spines have an s-shaped spinal curve. In this neutral posture, the load on our joints and the pressure on our discs are evenly distributed, ensuring that our structures remain healthy.

Most importantly, we prevent the development of structural changes like disc prolapse, which is a disc bulge or facet joint enlargement, both of which cause spinal pain and stiffness and can narrow the exit holes for nerves and, even worse, your spinal cord.

It’s hard to keep an S-shape in sitting as it is a flexion dominant posture, and it’s easy to round the shoulders, slouch the lower back and drop through the spine. In sitting, the body’s dominant tone is flexor muscle biased, so you have to support your position or strengthen it to maintain the stronger, more extended s-shape.

Did you know sitting properly allows the whole thoracic ring to work better?
This improves your breathing, makes your intercostals for chest expansion and tidal volume more efficient and improves race performance. We can also rotate better through the trunk, allowing us to have more power through the thoracic spine for the stroke to be efficient.

We have explosive muscles in the abdomen called obliques and bigger powerful muscles in our trunk called the latissimus dorsi. We use these to move us, but also the contraction of these muscles stabilise us through our core. These global stabilisers have an advantage over our power muscles because they can work for longer periods of time without fatigue, hence why coaches want you to use your body to paddle not just your arms.

The pelvis in sitting is like the foundations of a house. If it’s wonky, so too will everything else above it. I like to think of the pelvis as a ball in water that can adjust and move relatively in 3D space to have an infinite number of sitting positions. However, the alignment and orientation can make all the difference to your stability and ability to brace, recover, or even steer during forward paddling. Even more importantly, it will affect the trim on the vessel, and if you’re paddling in a team like OC6, it can throw out the stroke of others or even cause you to hoolie more. So a good coach will place you in positions to balance out the team.

The pressure under your sitting bones must be comfortable. Your skin, clothing and seat are incredibly important. The amount of people who injure themselves running from an old trainer rubbing is untrue, and it’s precisely the same principle to have a comfy seat in paddling. Even if there’s a little crumple in your clothing under one buttock, it can make a massive difference to your balance and performance, which, to be honest, won’t matter too much if you’re a weekend warrior just taking your quick Sunday club paddle but it will if you’re planning to race the Devizes to Westminster without fatigue or injury.

So to find roughly pelvic neutral in your craft, whilst sitting, pop your thumbs in your belly button and fingers on the pubic bone; the hands should be vertical in orientation. This gives you a gentle curve in your lower back. The anterior iliac spines, or in lay terms, pelvic bones, should face forward like spotlights on a car. Both should be comfortably at the same height. The ribs should be soft; you shouldn’t be able to get your fingers underneath them, but the shoulders shouldn’t slouch to be soft. We should be able to keep the frame of the shoulders open, chest up and neck long.

All too often, though, due to the demands of daily life, we are stiff here, and this can load up our necks if we jump into a kayak cold after a long drive for our weekend adventures. So make your desk work for you, improve your core, do mobility exercises regularly so that you have the base training for your fun paddling times. Couch potato sitting will educate your muscles to become lazy, so sofa time might even mean more capsize time.

Sit well even at home

This was proven in science by measuring the muscle core strength before and after slouching, and even after five minutes of slouching, control had decreased. If you spend all week with these habits, it will affect your performance.

Often we are unable to get our pelvis in neutral due to hamstring tightness or sciatica. If it’s the latter, do not try to stretch it out. You will make it worse; please see a professional. Tightness becomes especially problematic in an outrigger, surf skis, marathon or sprint kayak where you are more long sitting. So if you’re tight, you will need a wider hip alignment or a slight wedge to the seat to assist your forward tilt and prevent the pelvis from staying in posterior tilt.

I have seen several paddlers in my career who developed stress fractures in training because they were too tight and forcing a more prolonged sitting posture just to be in a narrower craft. Their pelvic tilt could not come forward at the catch due to the tightness, so they hinged at the lumbo-sacral region instead. It is much better to sort out the seat and leg posture and get some treatment to prevent this, as developing a stress fracture takes a long time to recover from.

So far, we have talked about neutral, but we don’t want to stay rigid like this because we want a dynamic sitting posture. So we need to move out of our sitting base of support with control and strength. To do this, we also need good control of our slings.

We have anterior, posterior and lateral slings. In sitting, the anterior stops us overarching our back too far, which is essential on a drop or impact, lateral stops us side bending and flopping into a capsize, and the posterior keeps our lordosis so that we don’t slouch when we get tired. If we are weak in these, it is favourable to have excellent back support and a more stable craft. Perhaps get some pilates or core training but definitely opt to paddle on easier waters and pace your abilities.

So if we think of our kayak or canoe as an aeroplane, it moves in three dominant directions up/down called pitch, side to side called yaw, and we roll; that one is obvious. We all have a great capsize story!

We need to think of the paddling box, our neutral to control pitch. When going over a drop, we need to bring that forward so that the resultant inertia stops you from leaning back. It’s more than just reaching forward; it’s the ability to tilt that pelvis forward and keep the obliques (tummy muscles) and hip flexors strong so that we don’t lean back or overarch the spine.

Your leg braces will make all the difference here and in width to your seat. Having a good fitting backrest that is strong enough to protect the back against these inertias is crucial on white water or surf to stop hyperextension. We want to keep the pitch as neutral as possible during flat water to avoid losing energy with micro stalling; we want to glide instead.

To control roll, we need to balance well in sitting, even with our eyes closed. We need to be symmetrical, but we also need to balance on one sitting bone when needed and have the lateral control of our body to hold that balance point. To do this, we would again need a good fitting set of thigh braces in white water, but in outrigger and marathon, it comes down to lots of lateral balance training drills and practice, e.g. lifting the armour in OC, paddling with eyes closed in open water, brace and support strokes, learning to move the craft sideways and practising on both sides, not just your favourite. Ideally, do this in a more stable craft first and build up, don’t go too narrow too soon, compromising the paddling technique.

Yaw is more tricky to consider. It’s mainly due to the paddle stroke and how we transmit the forces through the body to the footplates or seat. For example, the sweep stroke is a classic example of a yaw move. Let’s take a beginner; they can sometimes have a lovely power stroke and can generate lots of forward momentum through the water however fail to turn. If the spinal posture becomes floppy during the sweep, they give away their energy into the movement give.

For example, if they are over rotating their body, side bending or make their arms go like spaghetti, they absorb the energy created instead of transferring it to the craft. If, however they keep the box of the body strong by using their slings and controlling their S-shape, they can allow the wind up to transmit from the paddle through the body and down to their feet, resulting in the nose of the kayak or canoe to turn away from their paddle.

So we’ve learnt that really to be a good paddler, everything we do influences our technique, especially our sitting posture. Enjoying our weekend adventures or winning our next race is not all about time paddling forward. It’s also about core, balance, moving in all directions, moving in/out of our base of support, being comfortable sitting, and having flexibility for the type of board, kayak and canoe we wish to use. That’s right; I did say board because SUP isn’t always about standing; there are times when we need to sit and be a dynamic paddler here too.

Enjoy folks!