I can tell you from unpleasant experience that Rick is right on the
money: the shoulder is a very unstable joint, and you have very little
strength when your arm is extended. And there is another issue too, I
think: the more your arm is extended, the greater the leverage on the
joint. The result is that it is very hard to keep your shoulder parts
where they belong if you encounter substantial force when your arm is
extended. And when you don't keep them where they belong, the joint is
not a forgiving one. I learned this the hard way, in a whitewater
accident (not a high brace) that forced me to have rotator cuff
decompression surgery and weeks of PT, after a year of painful efforts
to solve the problem without surgery.

Maybe there are times when an elbow-down high brace doesn't work. But
it is really worth keeping your shoulder protected whenever you can,
with whatever form works for you.



Brian Nystrom wrote the following on 8/7/2006 5:55 PM:
Rick wrote:
The extended arm exposes one of the weakest joints in the body to a
lot of risk and, worse, is a weaker position for controlling the boat.
Yes, it will work (until the forces on the lever exceed the abilty of
the joint to bear the stresses), but will it work better than a brace
done with the elbow tucked into the top of the hip and the power side
of the blade on the wave? The answer to that is absolutely not.

Once the wrists go above the head, the shoulder joint actually loses
both strength and flexibility. You can test this while sitting in your
chair. Extend your arms fully over your head and try to slide your
wrists to either side (without twisting the torso). It is almost
impossible to move more that a few inches in this position. Put the
wrists at shoulder height and do the same motion and, voila, your
range of motion has increased considerably, from a few inches to a few
feet. More importantly, the muscles have considerably more mechanical
advantage from this position, so not only is the shoulder protected,
you actually have more available power to apply to the paddle. Note
that most of the side-to-side motion available to the shoulder joint
disappears when the elbows go above the shoulder. Both flexibility and
power are lost as the elbows move closer to a locked position above
the shoulders.

The problem with this is that it's very limiting (I'm talking sea kayak
use here). It's useless on beam waves much above head height unless
bongo-sliding out of control is your idea of a good time in big waves
(sure, sometimes it's a blast, but not on rocky coast or in areas where
the waves are dumping). What I prefer to do if I want to maintain my
position is to reach up, pierce the wave face with the paddle and dig it
into the back side of the wave. I let the boat flow with the wave and I
end up essentially horizontal as the wave crest passes under the boat.
Once the wave releases the boat, it only takes a quick snap to be
upright again. Although my arms are extended during this maneuver, there
is very little stress on them or my shoulders and what there is in
inline with my torso.

This is about as far from the ACA/BCU high brace technique as one can
get and I don't claim that it's safe, but it's saved my ass from getting
slammed into rocks a couple of times.