Kayaking 101: How to Forward Stroke, Sweep Stroke, and Edge

more than everybody it's dan from the headwaters tire shop and today we're going to do a simple kayaking 101 instructional video I noticed a lot of people are getting into the sport we're creating a ton of new paddlers and one of the most important things I feel like you can do is take a beginner lesson I know not all of you have a kayak shop around you and on all Kyle's give lessons so what I'm going to attempt to do here is give you a quick introductory to paddling paddle stroke edging if you have a boat already you've been paddling for a while I encourage you to just take a listen and then go out with your own kayak without all your gear without your fishing gear and just put some of these techniques into play I guarantee you're gonna find yourself being more efficient more comfortable and more confident in your kayak for today's lesson I'm gonna be paddling the Crescent kayak light tackle I feel like it was a nice responsive boat does what you tell it to do it's easy to paddle up here you can see my custom camera mount I wanted to get you guys out front enough so you can see what I'm doing from paddle see what I'm doing my feet janky but it'll get the job so my goal today is not to bore you guys with information but to really give you guys some foundational information that should help you in your kayaking so if it's tough you've already heard please bear with me because I want to just start from the beginning start from the basics and lay our education on that so first thing is fit in the kayak that's one thing that you can do from the dock and one thing that can make a huge difference from just hopping in your kayak and going so a couple things I like to think about it's my seat I want to make sure that my my butt is pushed all the way back in that seat so my pelvis can kind of rotate forward and be nice and upright okay from there I can adjust my back band or my backrest make sure it's nice and upright so I'm not slouching back chillin I'm upright I I like to encourage people that are paddling this is a sport we are gonna be active you are gonna get a little bit of a workout and the better posture you have the more efficiently you're gonna be able to propel your kayak across the water second thing is your foot pedals here making sure that you have the ability to press firmly against those foot pedals drive the kayak with the foot pedals and I'm not talking about like a rudder that's not the foot pedals aren't necessarily steering you but what they are offering is a connection to your boat from your feet and then you can push back in your hips and in your back and it gives you a lot of leverage to maneuver in to drive the kayak by pushing through the foot pedals so you want to have a little bit of a bend in your knee don't want your leg straight out because that's gonna put pressure on your lower back you want to be upright a little bit of your knee and have that ability to push and drive through those foot pedals it's a paddle I'm using today as a bending branch's navigator angler it's a new paddle for 2019 and I'm a big fan of the new bigger wooden blades I'm a navigator they just are incredibly buoyant they have a ton of grab really wide to slice through the water and just make paddling all the more fun so first thing we're going to talk about is breaking down the forward stroke how to move your through the water efficiently a lot of people get in their kayaks and they think about it being an arm sport this is what I see a lot of people doing they get in their crack and they're using their power to pull past their boat they're dipping in the water maybe they're putting in at their knees but they're using their arms now it works and the harder you do that you can feel like you're digging you tube and you're really limiting the amount of propulsion you get with every stroke so what I want you guys to think about doing is holding that paddle straight out in front of you okay if I were to put it on my head I'd have about a 90 degree Bend on where I'm holding the paddle so our paddles out in front of us and next thing I want you to practice keeping your head over your center of gravity is rotating okay I'm looking where I want to go but I'm rotating that rotation is the number one thing you need to learn in paddle sports it drives the kayak forward it turns the kayak it's the foundation for everything you're gonna learn because if you're rotating with the paddle you're gonna get a lot more power to that power face to move your kayak either through the water or to turn it et cetera so our paddles out in front of us we've practiced our rotation now what I want you to think about is to catch phase your stroke you want to catch that water up by your front toe so the more I reach forward the more potential power I can get if you think of our bodies being like a spring we're using that torso rotation to wind up the spring I have all this potential energy you can see this knees bent put that paddle in the water I'm going to pull with this bottom hand push with this top hand and drive with my foot okay notice how my chest stays parallel with the paddle next stroke I'm reaching forward I'm catching I'm pushing with my top hand and I'm driving through my legs and that's gonna propel my path or the further I reach the more catch I have all your power comes in that first third of your strokes from your feet to your knees is the majority of your power and potential energy to transfer into the kayak I like to tell people your paddle is just an anchor that's holding onto a piece of water so you can then propel yourself top the paddle the other thing is your exes to talk about your catch phase your power phase where you're pushing and pulling driving the feet gilad phase is exit where's your paddles coming out of the water I see a lot of beginners do this and they're lifting at the inner every stroke they're lifting the paddle out of the water and all this water is pouring off the blade what Alex think about it's about at my tips I want to slice this paddle out of water so I'm gonna reach take my stroke slice the paddle out I like thinking about eating with my elbows it looks sort of robotic at first but what that allows you to do allow the paddle to slice from the water and a lot more for a lot less of your distance suppose if you were picking it up gonna feel like it's less powerful but what you're gonna find is you're actually going to prove faster cross the water and you less energy if you adopt that torso rotation and that was the basics to a forward stroke next thing we're going to talk about is a sweep stroke sweep stroke his attorney stroke design to move our boat left or right okay so if a forward stroke is a fairly vertical stroke right my paddle shaft is is fairly vertical I'm trying to drive the boat forward attorney stroke I'm gonna keep that paddle a lot more parallel to the surface of the water I'm still gonna reach forward I'm still gonna drive with my foot but instead of that paddle tracking alongside my kayak I'm gonna take that paddle and sweep it away from my kayak almost like I'm doing a big rainbow notice my foot driving the boat away from the paddle my heads looking to where I want the cat to go you know also notice my boat just doing a slight edge if I push forward against my right foot into that foot pedal my boat naturally wants to kick to an edge and kayaks are sort of designed that way to be paddle on their edges so as I Drive with my right foot I wake my right hip in the boat kind of car of a tighter turn to the left and the more I push and drive through my feet the more you'll feel the kayak do that if you're just starting off take your time and just worry more about the torso rotation and the complete stroke playing at your feet we pick all the way to about the stern of the kayak another trick you can do is you can roll your elbows forward and slide the paddle back up to the front and what this does is it provides what we call a low grace so as you're learning this it's a good idea to just practice that give me the water cuz what you'll find when you need that stroke will be right there and it can act as a really good grace to keep you upright up here in challenging conditions now if I needed to turn even sharper say oh oh I needed to spin a 180 here I could alternate strokes I could do my forward sweep that's gonna push my boat forward and I can alternate that with what we call a reverse sweep same thing but backwards I'm gonna put in at the back the boat notice how my torso is rotated facing my work put it in the back of the boat and sweep the paddle up towards my toes now if I alternate for sweep reverse sweep or sweep reverse sweep you see I can face with spin my kayak in a 360 with very very little effort the other thing I see a lot of beginners do is turning the paddle around in their hands they turn around I think they're gonna get more bite by using it backwards the truth is you guys the back face of your paddle blade works just as good the power face and the biggest thing is you don't want to lose your position so as I'm holding my kayak most of your paddles with some sort of an index or an oval that allows you to not really look at what you're doing your knuckles are always going to be lined up with the paddle blade almost like you're crunching a fist against the paddle blade as you start turning and moving stuff in your hands what happens a lot of times you get to here you do your stroke and when you come over here your paddles in a weird way and it can tip you over it can slice down through the water and cause you to go over so just get in the habit of keeping your paddle straight and just using the backside of that blade alright so we've got our four sweep a reverse sweep our forward stroke last thing I'm going to show you guys is just look upon inside edge here if you need to just stop and to turn your boat this is a very effective way to do it what you're gonna do is you're gonna go elbows up put your paddle down on the water and you're gonna push down there you go it's just like a low brace okay we talked about that on our recovery stroke right for sweet low brace the same is true with this stroke our paddle isn't flat it's at a slight climbing angle so as we put it in the water it's like a wing and it wants to climb up out of the water we take a few four-stroke get some speed going and I call this an inside edge search what I'm doing is I'm waiting my way to the inside of the boat I'm dragging that paddle the paddles are adding support to the stroke allowing me to lean over on it and turn my boat nice and sharp the reason I like to touch on this stroke is because if you're fishing rivers this is one of the most important strokes we need to know as you cross an eddy line and you need to peel out you need to be able to lean over put that boat on an edge and have a nice supportive position to transfer from downstream current to an upstream eddy current if you're not paddling that you're just doing flat water well it's still a good thing to practice because it's teaching you how to brace it's teaching out of control in tight areas and you'll find you use that stroke all the time anyways you guys I hope that doesn't overload you but gives you some food for thoughts and things to think about I see a lot of people getting into the sport nowadays that don't ever take a class don't really learn to paddle and instead of enjoying the kayak in there immediately like well if I'm going to be effective I need to get a pedal drive so my hope is that this encourages some of you that are just starting out from paddling to give paddling a fair shot to really learn paddle sports and I think you might fall in love with the paddling aspect of kayaking or that's my hope anyway and if nothing else is going to make you more efficient and increase your enjoyment on the water so if you guys have any questions do me a favor leave those in the comments section so I can get back to you and hopefully educate you some more I think this will be a first of many series that's my hope where I can continue you know you guys ask questions and I can answer them in the next video hopefully you guys enjoy it if you do give it a thumbs up subscribe to the channel if you don't that's fine too until next time you guys this is Dan

Channel: Headwaters Kayak

Views: 436,537

Rating: 4.9689512 out of 5

Keywords: headwaters, kayak, fishing, kayaking, instruction, kayaking 101, how to kayak, how to paddle, forward stroke, sweep stroke, low brace, intro to kayaking, crescent kayaks, happy paddlin, yak life

Id: rUYEH2cOA7c

Length: 13min 21sec (801 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2019