rolling and footpeg position

[PeterB]

For several weeks I had been having a bit of difficulty rolling my boat (Chatham 16); I could feel that I wasn’t initiating good hip and/or leg action for some some mysterious reason; hips felt strangely paralyzed . Well, last week I adjusted my foot pegs forward for a seemingly unrelated reason (although my legs felt comfortable in their knees-bent position, they were cramping and falling asleep on me) and, immediately , I was rolling much more easily.

Nigel Foster had advised that that ones foot pegs should be positioned such that with knees bent and thighs braced against one’s boat, the balls of one’s feet have firm contact with the pegs, and with legs extended (as if to stretch them out) the heels will contact the pegs. I realized that my footpegs were positioned too far aft.

Given this instant improvement upon adjusting my pegs, I must suspect that footpeg position plays a more significant role in rolling that I would have thought. If this is indeed the case (please chime in, you rolling gurus out there) it would suggest that attention to foot peg position (and general cockpit outfitting etc) would be an advisable as a matter of course to instructors and mentors involved in rolling practice, classes etc.

If anyone responds to this, please try to leave out the second, third and twenty first letter of the alphabet, lest this innocent posting should metastasize into another endless thread featuring the airing of personal vendettas,, self-congratulatoory diatribes and cirriculum vitae, hand-wringing metaphysical musings, and general bad kharma…

[eneumeier]

When I was first attempting to roll -- in a pool -- with lots of free advice from several spotters, I was told to move my footpegs back toward me, so that I was tighter to the boat. I did so and found I could not move, nor could I roll. And, I was in agony. No way I could paddle with my footpegs there.

I agree with you Peter, although I have heard that some of the Greenland folks "wear" their kayaks.

When I talked to Bob Foote about this after our class, he said that the use of videos, especially under water ones, has improved the teaching techniques a lot in the past few years. What he was saying fits with what Nigel taught.

Liz N.

[jonsprag1]

A point well taken Peter---staying on the subject I'm not sure from your desciption of your peg position---were your legs extended so the heels were on the pegs? It sounds like you put your pegs forward--if so were your thighs still on the thigh braces? and what part of your foot did you keep on the pegs, heel or ball? thanks Jon

[wernermaas]

Peter,

rely on your hips and knees for your roll, not your feet!

Werner

[eneumeier]

There are lots of ways to roll.

What Bob Foote taught and what finally worked for me - the few times I did all the pieces correctly - was to initiate the roll by pushing the kayak off me with my foot, then driving up with my knee. Rolling up on my right, I first pushed with my left foot, to get the kayak in motion and nearly on its side. Then drove it the rest of the way with my right knee. (Meanwhile, my left leg was still pushing forward on the foot peg and down, with the knee nearly straight - as Nigel described.)

This does require that the foot pegs be set close enough to the bow to be able to use your leg in this manner, as Peter discovered.

This approach was a revelation to me. No one had ever told me to do that. I was amazed!

All that talk about "it is so easy to roll when you do it right" - I finally experienced it.

Liz N.

[Bill Gwynn]

Foot Peg or Foamed out bulkhead placement is important not only for comfort, but also to boat handling in general. The correct placement is: When braced, you are on the balls of your feet, but you still have enough room to fully extend your legs flat footed. If your pegs were too close, you would be so jammed in that you couldn't move your hips, and your hips are where good body rotation starts. Personally, I like to have a little room to move in my boat, it allows my older less flexible body to move my butt around some and help with rotation.

[bob budd]

Each of us finds often finds something simple that makes a difficult task seem easy. If adjusting your footpegs improves your roll that sounds great. When I was learning to roll I constantly kicked my "Keepers" off. So as others have said it might be better if you didn't "depend" on the footpegs.

For me the magic bullet has always been following the sweeping paddle "all the way" back. When Chris Thomas did this for me at the beginning I learned to roll well within his fifteen minute guarantee. Since I reprogrammed this at Mystic Lake a few weeks ago I have come up every time. The last few times it seemed so easy it felt like someone was helping.

[rcohn]

Last Sunday I went out for the first time in three months in my Necky Elaho, I’ve been playing with my Greenland SOF all summer. I’ve developed a fairly consistent hand roll on both sides this summer and wanted to see if I could transfer it to the Elaho. With a little practice I found the feel of rolling the Elaho again. Paddle rolls were fine (all using a GP) and I got the norsaq (rolling stick) to work but not as consistently as I hoped. When I moved on to the hand rolls nothing seemed to work. I worked at it for awhile focusing on the hip rotation and getting my head back, however nothing brought the boat up.

Frustrated, I gave it a rest and moved on to some work on the forward finishing rolls. When I was nearly done, I decided to try one more thing on the hand rolls. I took my feet off the foot pegs and slid as far forward on the seat as I could. I was on the lip of the bucket seat with my thighs tightly jammed under the thigh braces and my feet free. This is the position used for back finishing rolls (at least the hard ones) in a SOF. I tried the hand rolls again and they were now easy, both onside and offside worked fine. Balance braces were also much easier.

So my message is that moving forward a few inches in a sea kayak can make a big difference on layback rolls. Laying on the back deck is much easier, but the advantage goes beyond that, I haven’t decided what the physics might be, but it may have something to do with placing your body closer to the center of the boat. You don’t need to push with your feet to roll, you need a firm connection with your thighs/knees to rotate the boat. Paddle rolls have so much power you shouldn’t need to reposition once you master the technique but moving forward may help anyone struggling with layback rolls.

Good luck.

Ralph Cohn

Elaho DS, blue & white with yellow trim

[Jed]

>. . . having a bit of difficulty rolling my boat

> I wasn’t initiating good hip and/or leg action

> hips felt strangely paralyzed

Feat are not technically required to roll

(neither is any part of the leg below the knee)

Rolling is fundamentally about the paddler's ability to:

1) pull the torso towards the surface (set up)

2) sweep the torso along the surface (sweep)

3) rotate the hips (hip rotation, hips-flick, C to C)

4) apply the above with flexibility, range of motion and proper timing / overlap

Note that the above requires the use of muscles from your knees, hips and torso up to your head but not arms, hands or feet.

If your foot pegs are too close your legs can feel "bound" and your hips may experience sympathetic tension, effectively taking hip flexion out of the equation. Since your hip range of motion is the single most important component for rolling, anything that causes your hips to "tighten up" is contraindicated.

Nigel's comments about foot peg / leg position are typical direction from the alphabet soup of collective knowledge. It's not the leg position that is important but rather the "freeing" of the hips that is providing the difference that you feel.

Ralph's technique of climbing into the forward part of the boat is well documented and is used by many of the best G-style rollers for aft-finishing and/or speed rolls. There are solid physics-based explanations for the advantages of this position but I won't bore you with the technical explanation. Better to just try it and see for yourself.

Instructors tell a lot of different students a lot of different things to help them perform one body movement or another. In part this is because few paddlers have any language / experience that allows them to follow a verbal description of any complicated physical movement with any accuracy.

Each new roller typically has one or two "tricks" or "points of focus" that helped them "find" their roll or some other stroke. Unfortunately we are all different so one person's "point of focus" may not work well for someone else. An instructors ability to dial in an effective "point of focus" for a particular student is often the determining factor between success or lack of and hence the instructors value or lack of to that particular student.

Lastly, leg position / comfort and general outfitting are a common "points of focus" for many instructors but these issues are normally resolved long before the student attempts to learn to roll.

> If anyone responds to this, please try to leave out the

>second, third and twenty first letter of the alphabet,

Sorry, I needed to use most of the letters of the alphabet to write this response. BeCaUse the words that I needed required use of most of the alphabet. I was however able to avoid using the letter "Z". I hope that is acceptable.

Cheers,

Jed

working for "freedom of training" for every paddler

[Jill]

With deepest respect for Jed's experience with rolling and teaching rolling, I submit that the feet can play a significant and effective role in executing a sweep roll. I learned this from Bob Foote (no pun intended) and have put it into practice in rolling both sea kayaks and white water kayaks in combat situations.

Bob's tip is this: At the same time as you begin sweeping the paddle out from the set up position, use your offside foot (if you are coming up on your right, your left foot) to begin to push the boat away from you (in the same way as you would use that foot and knee to push the boat away from you as in doing a balance brace on the right side). This foot action is deliberate but only the starting point. Then engage the knee and hips as the sweep continues. If done well, by the time the paddle is half way to perpendicular to the boat, the boat is already rotated half way out of the water.

In my experience, using the feet in this way has made a significant and positive difference in the effectiveness of my roll.

Jill

[JohnHuth]

I think Jill has a point. Here's something I found in practicing rolls - you can tell something is going wrong when you get a lot of "yaw" (or horizontal rotation) when you come up. Ideally, the roll should have no yaw in it, and the yawing motion bleeds off power from your desired aim of the roll. (I used my compass to measure the amount of yaw - before and after the roll)

The initial sweep, when the blade is planing across the surface of the water can induce some yaw, and I think the foot, being the furthest object from the center of rotation, can create the most counter-torque to fight the yaw. That's why I think the force of the foot at this stage of the roll can help a bunch.

[rcohn]

Excessive yaw suggests that your paddle angle is too steep and you might be working too hard pulling it through the water. The paddle only needs a few degrees of rotation to create a climbing angle. It should skim the surface easily. At this shallow angle the paddle provides maximum lift, needed to roll you up, without the resistance you feel at a steeper angle that povides less lift and only serves to yaw the boat

Ralph Cohn

Elaho DS, blue & white with yellow trim

[JohnHuth]

True - but even a very shallow attack angle will produce some yaw - it's unavoidable - and for learners (like me), having that foot to counter-balance the yaw often helps us get to the other parts of the roll, like the hipsnap.

John

[Jed]

Jill,

With equal respect to both you and Bob Foote:

. . . pushing forward with the offside foot at the start of the roll encourages the torso to move from forward bending towards leaning back. Certainly one way to get the torso to move out away from the boat but not necessarily in the most advantageous direction.

The most effective way to apply the torque required to rotate the boat upright is to apply torque perpendicular to the boat's longitudinal axis and as close as possible to the boat's center of rotational resistance.

To this end, ideally the torso is positioned at the surface of the water directly to the side of the boat while the boat is still upside down prior to the hip-snap / hip-rotation component of a roll. In actual practice the hip-rotation is often initiated prior to the torso being fully perpendicular to the boat, but that a stylistic variation.

The simplest way to get to this position is to sweep the torso to the side, after the set-up, much as we do when we move from a (standing) forward bend to a full side bend. This may make a good dry-land rolling exercise for those seeking to learn to roll. In this dry-land case we push outwards with our on-side foot to get the torso to move in the opposite direction. In actual rolling application this can be done with either the on-side foot and knee or just the knee alone.

If one concentrates on pushing forward on either foot peg to initiate the sweep their torso will unbend but it will not sweep to the side. If we try to use the foot pegs while we concentrate on sweeping the torso to the side we are pushing sideways on the pegs. In this case the off-side foot may well slide off the peg.

This is not to say that Bob Foote was incorrect in using this "point of focus" with specific candidates but rather that this "point of focus" is a secondary thing and not fundamental or universal to rolling a boat.

The most important component of a bombproof roll is hip rotation as is evidenced by those that roll without paddles, hands or feet. When the ability to rotate one's hips is limited, which is often the case, we all look to other things to enhance our roll. My point is that all these other things can distract us from what really matters, the hip rotation.

If pushing with the off-side foot is critical to the initiation of the sweep, then how is it that people can roll without the use of their feet? If a climbing paddle angle is crucial during the sweep then how is it that people can roll without paddles? The more we discount the importance of the hip-rotation that more we encourage candidates to look for other remedies. Rolling candidates would do themselves a favor to learn to trust and use their hips. Everything else boils down to minor variations in style.

John,

Regarding yaw: Anything that makes the boat yaw during a roll is wasted energy. Common causes are straightening the body by pushing on the foot pegs during the sweep, an overly aggressive angle on the paddle during the sweep and lastly the resistance of the torso in the water as it moves to the side. Nothing you can do inside the boat will counteract these other forces. In order to minimize yaw during rolling we must minimize the drag of the paddle during the sweep, much like C-to-C and Slash rolling proponents do. Ralph's hint to reduce the angle on the paddle is a commonly used technique to reduce this drag and the resultant yaw for a sweep or screw roll. An extreme expression of Ralph's hint is commonly refered to as the "Slash Roll".

Reducing the amount of yaw in any one roll is a worthy goal. To really test your progress check you position after 5 consequetive rolls. The boat should neither yaw nor move laterally with each roll.

To all,

This has been fun and a welcome distration from a previous thread but we're burning valuable daylight. I'm off to pack for a busy month. I look forward to your comments when I return.

Cheers,

Jed

[rcohn]

>

>True - but even a very shallow attack angle will produce

>some yaw - it's unavoidable

I agree, so why worry about it so much? If you have perfect body and blade angle there will still be a bit of yaw (and forward motion). Focus on achieving the best technique you can, the point is get up consistently and in a stable position. Excessive yaw still indicates a flaw in the roll, but minimal yaw is to be expected.

As an aside there was some mention of sweeping the paddle all the way around. I work on rolling up onto the deck with the paddle as close to 90 degrees to the boat’s longitudinal axis as I can (it still travels a bit past the 90 degree angle). At this position the paddle provides some support and can brace if necessary. In the standard Greenland roll (extended paddle sweep) you slide onto the back deck with the paddle still in the water, then sit up keeping the paddle in the water providing support if needed.

To improve rolling it is helpful to move onto advanced rolls as soon as possible. A progression such as extended paddle sweep -> sweep in combat position -> butterfly roll -> norsaq (rolling stick) -> hand roll. Paddle rolls are so powerful that is easy to develop sloppy faults: lifting the head, not leaning back very far, weak boat rotation, etc. Norsaq and hand rolls are very unforgiving, make a sloppy mistake and the roll usually will fail.

Ralph Cohn

Elaho DS, blue & white with yellow trim