Shoulder neck pain is a common padding injury. It usually occurs because a paddler develops rounded shoulders as the paddler is paddling with the arms too much. This method of paddling only stretches the upper back muscles and due to the sport being a repetitive sport, the paddler will aggravate the upper back muscles.
To avoid this, we need to sit upright more and squeeze the shoulder blades together and let these upper back muscles relax. In paddling we do not use the upper back muscles to pull the paddle through water, we pull from our hip and rotate our torso, so our torso muscles take the load and pull the paddler forward.