As long as I’m talking about rolling here I thought I would share this clip that we shot this summer.
A great exercise for teaching yourself how to roll a kayak is to find something to hold onto that is relatively near the surface of the water and then lower yourself into the water and practice turning the boat over with your hips.
The idea is to leave your body in the water for as long as possible and let most of the motion come from your hips. Pressing your head to your shoulder can help remind you to lead with your hips and let the body follow. When you’re doing this right the boat will come up effortlessly but as soon as you do it wrong you will notice you are pulling a lot more with your arm.
The most important thing to this type of practice is to STOP PRACTICING the moment you notice you’re getting tired and starting to pull on your arm. You’re looking to burn in a really clean neural pathway here and bad repetitions create alternate pathways that your brain will access in a real life rolling scenario causing your waist muscles to pull in opposite directions which is what makes rolling hard.
Once it feels almost effortless to turn the boat over with your hips you can practice letting yourself further and further under the water and finally using less and less fingers on the handhold.
Once you can turn the boat over with two fingers in two seconds you have more than enough hip motion to turn a kayak over with a paddle.
Next find a float a friend or an object to support the paddle so your brain feels like it can trust it and do the same exercises remembering to STOP practicing the moment you notice you are pulling harder on the paddle and not using your hips.
Finally switch to the paddle unsupported.
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This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
