My thoughts as a guy that uses a less powerful paddle:

Less power gives a higher stroke rate, which gives more opportunities for correction and fine tuning of the strokes. With a big blade locked up in the water you have that one stroke, it's a good one, but it doesn't give as much opportunity to adjust the strokes as you approach a line.

More power gives you that one big saving stroke, and sometimes in really high water situations it takes one big stroke to overcome the river's grip on your boat. Such as in holding a ferry angle in a super powerful surge of current...a big blade will help make that hold.

The two ways to vary overall power are blade size and paddle length. It's important to note that even a two cm difference in paddle length can have what I feel is a 15-20% perceived difference in overall power.

My bet is that with werners and such, a person of average muscularity would best benefit from choosing one of the smaller blades in the lineup and adjusting the power by choosing a longer length if necessary.

In the world of wood paddles, one gets to choose where in the stroke the blade is most powerful. With a curved power face on the blade (like werner, AT, etc) the power comes on earlier in the stroke. This is described as the "catch" phase. So, curved faces roll nicely, brace strong (harder on shoulders), and so forth. These faces give the power earlier in the stroke. In wood paddles, you can get your paddle with a flat profile, aka "trik style". What the flat face does is move the power from the beginning of the stroke to be strongest in the middle and end of the stroke. The blade enters the water with a soft catch, but by mid stroke has really gotten powerful. The effect decreases the crispness of braces and rolls. But, this softness in the early stroke phase is really nice to your shoulders. But, you give up a bit of bracing and rolling crispness. You do gain a sweet boof stroke anchor since boofs require a strong middle and finish to the stroke. Trik style flat blades do boof well even though they don't feel initially as powerful.

Overall, the power necessary is somewhat about style. There are hand paddlers that run very hard water with less power than even a wimpy kayak paddle. Folks with large muscles can generally make use of more powerful a paddle. And, those are the same folks that can sometimes use brute force to bully their way out of a bad situation. I'm relatively small without big muscles, so I rely more on finess and boat angles to stay out of trouble. And I use a less powerful paddle to allow me to easily pull through the water at a kinder and higher stroke rate.

If you want to develop a better high rate cadence, a sea kayak is a sweet place to do so. Spend some time watching youtube viceos for olympic sprint kayak technique to get the form for a higher stroke rate.

High rate paddling is more like running while low rate paddling with a big blade is more like hiking uphill with a heavy backpack. This running motion doesn't come naturally, and is hard to develop in the river environment. If you stick with a smaller blade, some work on high rate paddling will develop this skill. The youtube videos on flatwater stroke technique are great.

Well, that's about all I have....take it easy. Jim

Edited by warlickone - 05 Mar 2012 at 11:10am

I like the big blades because I can leave my paddle in the water longer and make all kinds of corrections without have to make multiple strokes. It is a personal prefernce, but I find myself having way more bracing success and less injury because I am reaching out less and keeping the blade close into my boat.

With seakayaking, I am a high angle paddler and I find the big blades allow me to run at a slower cadence and actually relax a bit more than my other small bladed longer paddle. Plus I can put the power to it when needed in heavy currents and windy situations. It is all trial and error and personal prefernce though.

The only way to find out what works for you is to try differnt paddles over time and see what works.