"If you've got a good stroke, your body won't feel broke!"

Yeah, I know... I could have made my living writing slogans for the Burma Shave billboards if I'd been born a half-century sooner.

But my innate corniness should not diminish the importance of my point: if you find yourself dealing with a lot of nagging injuries, you should take a good, hard look at your stroke.

When I started doing some kayak racing with a wing paddle in the late 1990s, I thought I had a pretty good handle on the forward stroke.  I had studied the photos and diagrams in William T. Endicott's The Barton Mold, and the blades seemed to be doing the right thing in the water as I paddled, so I figured I was good to go.

But in my first couple of years I ran into some problems with wrist tendinitis.  At times the pain was so keen that I couldn't paddle or do much of anything else.

Then I saw the then-new forward stroke video, The Brent Reitz Forward Stroke Clinic.  In the video Brent discusses a common mistake people make in their strokes that causes tendinitis, and recommends what he calls the "Chicken Wing": as you finish a stroke on one side and withdraw the blade from the water to begin a stroke on the other side, you should raise not just your hand, but your entire forearm including the elbow, as you do so.  I took Brent's advice and incorporated this simple change into my stroke, and I never got wrist tendinitis again.

For the next few seasons I trained hard and raced pretty well without any injuries that kept me out of the boat.  But I was not always free of pain.  The most common discomfort was soreness and stiffness and pinched-nerve feelings in my shoulders and neck.  I was frustrated by all that but sort of resigned myself to the idea that these ailments were simply my price of admission to the sport I loved.

Meanwhile, I continued to ponder my stroke.  A couple of times I asked Greg Barton, when he was in town for the Outdoors, Inc., Canoe and Kayak Race, how my stroke looked.  He told me it wasn't bad, but cautioned me to rotate fully and not use my arms too much.

In the summer of 2005, after my biggest races were over, I made a conscious decision to increase my rotation to the extent I was capable.  For a few weeks or even months paddling was quite uncomfortable as I tried to internalize this unfamiliar motion.  But eventually I got used to it and now I don't know how to paddle any other way.

I don't know if this alteration to my stroke improved my competitive results at all--it seems like I have continued to finish about where I always have in my races, and my times have remained roughly the same.  But my shoulder and neck pain has all but disappeared.  I think the less-complete rotation I had been doing had concentrated the work in my upper back and shoulders, whereas now the work is better distributed throughout my torso.

This topic came back to my attention last week when I suddenly found myself with one of those old shoulder knots.  I thought to myself, "I'll bet this is the result of paddling my K1."  As I have described in recent posts, my stability in that boat is pretty dicey at this point, and I haven't been able to relax and rotate fully.  The episode has reinforced my belief that my improved stroke has eliminated most of my shoulder and neck pain.  Not a bad return on my investment even if I do wish I were faster.  I advise anybody with nagging pain to look over everything that he or she is doing with the paddle: there's probably a flaw in there somewhere that can be fixed.