Avoiding Common Beginner Kayaking Bad Habits

hi everybody it is a spectacular night out here on the deschutes river in bend i'm actually kind of right in town and normally in the summer on a hot day this river is just packed full of innertubers and recreational kayaks especially nowadays with all this demand so i thought tonight maybe i would talk about a few things that i've seen out here and that's basically some bad habits and everyone's having fun and smiling so there's nothing wrong with that but i just thought for some of you that might be new to this and hard to find instruction i might throw out just a few little helpful hints the first one i want to talk about is posture and it is so easy to want to just kick back on all these modern day kayaks nice seat backs and there's nothing wrong with that i saw a lot of folks just doing nice floats and sitting back but if you can sit more upright you're going to enjoy a lot more the dynamic aspects of this sport and be able to engage all the muscle groups of your body and get a little nicer workout and certainly more efficiency and you'll also get more stability so when i sit upright like this whether i adjust the seat back to support or my personal preference is just actually to come off the seat back a little bit when i'm paddling which gives me nice rotation and then kick back on it when i want to relax once i sit up like this you'll actually notice that my weight now is centered a little bit more over the wider spot of the kayak and i see a lot of times that when people kick back now they're putting their weight over kind of the narrower part as the boat tapers and in rougher conditions that's going to make this boat a lot squirrelier and then of course if i sit back like this i can't rotate and that brings me to the second thing i've been seeing out here a lot today and it's again totally fine they're all happy paddling but i think some people will develop wrist injuries and strain that they don't need to develop and that is what i call the pistoning stroke and what i mean by that is when i'm sitting back like this and not upright it really invites me more to reach with my hand and then pull with my arm and you kind of get this pistoning effect like an engine with your arms what that means basically is that i'm using these smaller muscle groups putting a lot more tension on my forearm bicep tricep i'm not engaging my whole body and so it's great to do for just a little while but on a long day of paddling you're going to fatigue a lot more quickly so if i can sit upright then i can introduce a little bit more of that torso rotation stroke and when you get this down or at least start getting it down we all work on the forward stroke for a lifetime you'll start to feel kind of like a gear of a bicycle that i can just keep rolling over and over a couple hints to think about let's form that nice paddlers box that's a nice right angle right here in my arm kind of creating two windows on either side of my head and bring that down that's a good reference some people might want to go a little narrower maybe even a little wider but that's a good starting point i like to think that once i bring that paddler's box down i'm kind of holding a beach ball in here and if there were a beach ball here if there was a beach ball here i wouldn't be able to do that pistoning because it would go flying and that'll encourage me a little bit more for that rotation so we get all that going for us and it's a little bit a lot to think about uh the other thing i really saw out here today when people wanted to chase after their friend with the beer cooler is they start paddling hard maybe they rotate maybe they don't but one thing they were doing was slap entry called pancake entry and as they put their paddle in the water they develop instead of kind of knifing it in it just splats see the water and that's a little exaggerated but any little version of that just reminds me of like hitting my hand against the wooden table over and over and over eventually you're gonna develop some wrist pain so if we are sitting upright and we've got that rotation going for us we can start introducing another element which is to enter the water a little bit smoother or make that catch phase of our stroke a little smoother and that can be done using this opposite elbow coming up kind of like the chicken wing and that slides the paddle in from the side and then i can get a nice good power phase if that's a little difficult for you at first you may even just kind of consider stabbing into the water a little bit at least i'm getting a smoother entry than pancaking in the other thing that's going to allow us to do getting that nice smooth entry up by our toes or ankles is that we're going to get a forward stroke that is a little bit more efficient because it's going to go from our ankles and start coming out at the hip that's going to drive the boat a little bit more forward and then what we might see instead of putting the paddle in around my thigh and pulling it behind me which is actually called the stern sweep so if we can put the paddle with that rotation and the chicken wing coming up and catching and pulling out here our boat's going to drive straight a little bit more forward than if we catch by our thighs or our hips and pull behind us which is going to really have kind of a turning effect on your boat back and forth you'll still go forward but you'll just have a lot less efficient tracking and the last one i want to talk about is just relaxing and letting the boat move so a lot of folks out here maybe first time paddlers and they just kind of get gripped in their boat and they want to keep it perfectly flat well most of these boats most of the kayaks on the market are designed for a little bit of movement because in rougher water it's going to be more stable and then of course there's all sorts of edge turning strokes that we can start to employ so maybe it's a little better to think about the hula hoop days and letting the boat move underneath us as long as my nose my belly button my belt buckle kind of all stays centered and then the boat can lean a fair amount if i do start to go over the last one i caution you to do is to grab your boat to try to stabilize that will just pull your boat even more and so in a future video here i'm going to talk about brace strokes and there's just you know we use the back face of our paddle to catch ourselves and kind of right the boat back to centered position and all of those are just great to start employing it's very similar if we were walking down the street and we put our hand out to catch ourselves if we trip in a kayak if i start to fall instead of grabbing the boat i'd put my paddle out use the back face to write myself so there's just a couple quick tips hope it helps again it's all about happy paddling but if you're new to paddling and you can think about these things you won't have to spend years like i did trying to correct mistakes you learned at a young age all right everybody see out in the water happy paddling

Channel: Happy Paddlin'

Views: 6,876

Rating: 4.9282513 out of 5

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Id: 943QJPx_hjg

Length: 6min 52sec (412 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 13 2021