Forward Stroke
Your Workhorse Stroke for Getting from Point A to B
The Forward Stroke is one of the most important strokes for learning to separate your head, paddle, boat, and body and begin to have control over them for all situations.
The Drill-
100 Forward Strokes
50 slow, 25 medium, 25 fast
The Stroke:
Head-
- Head points at your target, which is most likely going to be straight in front of you. This is easiest now, because you are not yet using torso rotation in your forward stroke, once you begin adding torso rotation, you’ll find that your head wants to rotate back and forth with your torso. At that stage you’ll need to focus on your head again.
Paddle-
- Paddle goes in the water at your toes, and comes out of the water at your butt.
- The paddle should be as vertical as possible from both the side view and the front view. The more vertical the paddle is in the front view, the closer the blade is to the center line of the kayak and pulls you forward more efficiently. The further the blade is from the centerline (the less vertical you hold the paddle) the more the paddle turns the boat on each stroke and the less it pulls the boat forward.
- The more vertical the paddle is during the stroke in the side view, the more effectively you pull the boat forward also. If the paddle is vertical and you put 40 pounds of force on it, you will be pulling the boat with 40 pounds of force. If the paddle goes in at 45 degrees (top hand is back by your face and bottom hand extended) then only 20 pounds out of the 40 will be pulling you forward and the other 20 pounds is lifting your bow up. How efficient your forward stroke is, has a lot to do with your blade angle. Your top hand is in charge of setting your blade angle. To get a vertical stroke throughout, you’ll need to start with the top arm partially extended and finish the stroke with the top hand not fully extended.
Boat-
- When doing the forward stroke, your goal for the boat is to keep it flat. Avoid side to side rocking (edge dropping). This will be easy if you are not using any torso rotation, which you are most likely not. Once we begin using torso rotation, you must separate the movement of your torso from your hips. This takes practice.
- Yaw- Your boat will yaw back and forth with each stroke. Your goal is to keep the yaw to a minimum for the type of boat you are in. The shorter the boat the more the yaw will be. To keep the yaw to a minimum, keep the paddle blade close to the boat with a vertical paddle.
Body-
- Your body should be “quiet” and not lunging forward or backwards during the strokes. Don’t “reach” with your body by leaning more forward and don’t pull back on the paddle by leaning back.
- Torso Rotation: This will be a theme for the rest of the book and if there is one thing you need to know and that is that you most likely don’t have any torso rotation in your forward stroke, but most likely think you do. I know that sounds presumptuous, but that has been my experience from watching and teaching many thousands of kayakers of all skill levels. Those who do have some torso rotation, usually only have about 50% of the desired amount.
- Winding-Up- Unwinding- Sitting in your chair look down at your chest and and extend your right arm in front of you. Now rotate your body to the left by twisting at the waist. Pin your left shoulder backwards and push your right shoulder and arm forwards as far as you can. This is torso rotation. You are now “Wound Up”. Now pull your arm and right shoulder as far back as you can- pushing you left shoulder forward. You just “Un-wound”, and then “Wound-up” the other way. Your forward stroke is strongest when you begin the stroke wound up like a spring.
- Also the speed in which you can pull yourself forward is the speed of your arms pulling the paddle back and the speed that your torso pulls the paddle back combined. Your top end speed is greater with torso rotation and your stroke is able to be longer with a more vertical paddle than without.
- The way to know if you are rotating your torso when you are paddling forward is to look at your life-jacket. It should be rotating back and forth against your spray skirt- about 45 degrees each way.
- Do not look at your arms swinging in front of your face as an indicator of torso rotation, as it will fake you out and is not a gauge.
Putting it all together for a good forward stroke for the first time:
- Start with your paddle position- VERY, VERY slowly put your right paddle blade in at your toes, your left hand just left of and in front of your left eye. Pull your right blade back slowly until it reaches your butt. Take it out and try the left blade. Right now our only focus is paddle position. Try to keep the blade as vertical as possible from the side view as you can. You do this by not Punching the top hand all of the way out and by not having the top hand too far back at the beginning of the stroke.
- Now look at your life jacket and notice that it is not moving 45 degrees back and forth like you want. Stop paddling immediately, “wind-up” your body, then put your paddle in and unwind. Switch sides and repeat. If you don’t do it SUPER slow motion and deliberately, you will not be able to make your torso cooperate. If you just start paddling along, you will not learn anything, not get your torso moving and this drill and the others will not achieve the primary goal- to learn to control your head, boat, paddle, and torso all separately but at the same time. If you are using some torso (maybe 5% of the readers), try to use more, going for as much as your body will allow.
- Once you can get some torso rotation going, it is time to see if you are keeping your head straight, or if it is moving with your torso, instead of independently. Most of the time the second I ask a student to try to hold their head still, they can, but they stop using their torso, if I ask them to start using their torso again, they start moving their head. The trick to knowing if your head is still is to close one eye and put your nose over the bow of the boat. See if your nose stays over the bow or if it swings back and forth.
- Finally- if you are able to keep your head straight, rotate your torso, and are using the right paddle motion, check to see if your boat is staying flat, or if you are rocking it back and forth on each stroke. Typically when somebody is learning to use torso, they lean the boat towards the stroke, because separating your torso rotation and hips for edge control takes practice. You can actually develop good edge control just learning a good forward stroke!
The Drill and what it should look like:
- Level 1: Learning: Start off super slow motion- really focusing on the paddle placement, then the torso rotation, then the head straight, and then the boat staying flat in the first 20 strokes. Slowly pick up the speed until you are paddling at a normal pace by 50 strokes. Increase to a medium pace for the next 25 strokes, double checking your torso rotation every 10 strokes or so. Finish with 25 above average paced strokes, which is important to begin trying different paces as you don’t want to have a good stroke when going really slow, but have the stroke fall apart at the faster speeds.
- Level 2: Getting Proficient: Now you should be able to use torso rotation without thinking too much about it. You can keep your boat flat, your head straight and your paddle is nice and vertical. It is time to improve your efficiency with improved stroke and torso timing. Your Boat slows down in between each stroke. In order to maintain a certain speed, you have to accelerate your boat to go faster than your desired speed on each stroke, so that when it de-accelerates in between strokes, you are averaging the speed you want. If you want to improve your speed and efficiency, you’ll want to reduce the break time in between strokes. This is done by consciously dropping your next stroke immediately after the last one is finished. Think about the switch from one stroke to the next as being almost without any pause. The other benefit of this focus is that if you do have a short pause in between strokes, you will more often than not, unwind in between strokes and not get the benefit of the spring action in your body. The feeling you are going for is that of a gear in motion, not a pull/glide/pull glide, but a constant amount of blade pressure at all times. The amount of force that needs to go on each stroke will be less because you don’t have to re-accelerate on each stroke. If fact, depending on just how well you do it, you can reduce the amount of force required to paddle 6 miles/hour, for example from 40 pound strokes, to 25 pound strokes. This reduces fatigue and turns your stroke into more of an endurance type of feel versus a sprinting feel for the same speed.
- Drill- start off with a speed just below your normal speed for the first 25 strokes and then slowly pick up the pace from 25-50 strokes, really focusing on a fluid stroke, quick turn-over between strokes, and good torso rotation. From 50-75 strokes- pick up the pace again, a fast endurance pace, but not sprinting, trying to maintain a good stroke at the higher pace. Finish the drill from 76-100 strokes close to full sprint, again really trying to hold the technique together under the faster pace and fatigue. Notice that the temptation is to shorten your stroke to do a faster stroke rate, instead, keep the stroke long, the torso doing much of the work, and the catch fully wound-up, and vertical paddle.
- Level Three Drills- Whitewater warm-up- Once you are proficient with the forward stroke in flat water, It usually takes somebody about 10,000 strokes of real focused practice and paying attention to have your flat water forward stroke become proficient and a habit. Get somebody to video your stroke occasionally, to be sure that what you think you are doing and what you are doing are the same thing. Assuming it is, you can begin to warm up in whitewater and practice your stroke while doing ferries, running down rapids, etc..
- Drills: 50 slow, 25 medium, 25 fast but in whitewater. Focus on stroke timing, working with the water, placing your strokes so that you can keep your bow dry when going down through waves as well as timing in and out of eddies. Ferries are always a good warm -up and you have to deal with boils, waves, eddy-lines, in order to make it from one side to the other. Check your torso rotation, of course, as the hardest thing to learn is naturally using torso, even when in whitewater. It must really be a habit to not lose it in whitewater.
To buy my Book on this subject, you can go here: https://www.amazon.com/Whitewater-Paddling-Strokes-Concepts-Kayaking-ebook/dp/B004BDOR4W