Regardless of what you may have heard, you don’t need a kayak to practice your kayak skills. You may have heard rumors of me standing on the shore of lakes having students stirring water with their paddles. This is true by the way and I find it does wonders to help student understand how their blades move through the water. Sometimes there is a method to my madness. . . Really. I’m always looking for new ways to help students isolate skills so they can focus on one thing without the added noise of worrying about going over, or keeping their boats in one spot or all the other little bits that can often be a distraction.

Yesterday was a “free” day at our local pool. I was amazed how busy it was. Suffice to say taking the boats in was not going to happen. Thing is we have this neat little toy. It’s a tube of sorts made up of a whole bunch of foam discs held together my a plastic strip running through the middle. Essentially it’s like a big flexible log. Lord knows you have to be careful taking any pictures when climbing on it or someone may fear you’re having Freudian issues. . . If you’ve got one around in your local pool I’d encourage you to give it ago. Yes, you will look silly. Deal with it. Many of the balance skills, games, tricks or whatever I’ve learned to do on my kayak, I’ve also learned to do on this foam log. Then when you translate it back to the kayak, your boat seems huge and sturdy by comparison. Some of the things I practice on it are; Laying back, then bringing my feet up, followed by bringing my arms across my chest. Basically bringing my body out of the water and keeping balanced. I’ll sit in a lotus or I’ll practice the spin exercise we do in kayak 101, where you just sit in one spot then turn your body in a full circle which helps you understand and improve upon keeping your body centered for balance. Recently I’ve been working on getting up on my knees and keeping my hands out of the water. This is no easy task with the silly thing. Yep, in the end it’s just screwing around with a toy but I can tell you it helps.

Another little exercise I’ve been playing with is for hand rolling. Kelly Blades told me once his great idea of flooding a whitewater boat and then letting people swim it around with their hands, then slowly removing water. I have to tell you it’s a good plan. It’s easy to swim a flooded kayak back around and yet you still have to lay back and give it a bit of a hip flick or twist right at the end. Great training. What I’ve done is added an earlier step. Something you can do without a kayak. Just have your student lay in the water horizontally and hand swim themselves in circles like a log on a river. The thing is they should not use their feet and legs to kick themselves around. Just use their hands and twist their bodies. The effect is something like being the victim of an alligator attack. In this exercise there is no boat, so there is no fear that they won’t get round. Once then they get into the flooded kayak they just repeat the same motions. Now certainly this is a good way to teach someone a “hand roll” as a first roll. Kelly tells me this is often the result of his rolling method. But it’s also a way to help someone used to the hippy C to C motions, to convert to a full body twist that is much more useful in traditional rolls. Yeah, you may look silly but this is another way to get in touch with your body movements. Like I said before, it’s all about your body and not about your hands. Maybe this “Alligator victim” exercise will help you out.

So there’s todays tips from that rather odd Wisconsin kayak coach. . .