By Greg Spencer
Photos:
Tony Dallimore – T3 Imaging
& Greg Spencer
A big thank you to Marianne Davies of Dynamics Coaching for her contributions to this article. For further reading see http://theuglyzone.
rocks/
As a rule, we arrive in canoeing and/or kayaking pretty well equipped to cope…
Becoming a paddler
That’s true even if we have no directly relevant experience. We have expertise we can draw upon from our experiences on land and in the water. With very little play and exploration we can come up with workable ways to do pretty much anything we want to do.
Once we have made a start, we’re mostly in motion. We move relative to the water and the air. We create bow waves and navigate slight breezes, both of which shape what we can do. As a rule, we know that if we simply freeze and do nothing, our situation will continue to unfold in some way, shape or form – even if that’s just with us spinning around.
As we get more accomplished we get more attuned to what we’ve set in motion. We become switched-on to the options available to us. Our growing awareness gives us a feel for moving upon the surface of the water. Soon, it starts feeling as natural as moving on land or when we’re swimming.
In developing our ‘feel’ for our new activity, we tune into feedback we get through all of our senses. Initially, we might struggle to distinguish sensations which are important (e.g. a wind blown wave accelerating us into a turn) from those which may not be (e.g. a wind blown wave simply passing under our craft).
Fortunately, the struggle to distinguish relevant and irrelevant cues is a battle we know how to overcome – as it’s what we’ve faced many times when learning something new!
Stacking the odds
Whilst we don’t really have any good long term alternative to developing our skills through feel, our capacity to create barriers to our own learning is matched only by the ease with which we can rather lose sight of what we’re actually trying to accomplish.
Getting our heads in a good place is an obvious enough starting point for anyone wanting to progress. In the bigger picture, this might at least mean doing things to stack the odds on us staying motivated as we know our readiness can easily be blown away by any drip-drip-drip of unsettling experiences.
If we are going to progress rapidly we also need to take steps to ensure we’ve got the confidence to try things we find suitably challenging. Confidence can be built on many things, but in our craft, one primary source is a conviction that we’re at least looking in the right place to start noticing how our boat is moving on the water!
With all of that said, we also need to be wary of distractions like thinking about how we’re moving our body or having our focus on a ‘marker’ such as another person or a point on the bank. If we’re doing any of these then we’re not even giving ourselves a chance to develop the ‘feel’ needed to make progress!
Balance
Developing feel is first and foremost about developing a new understanding of the dynamic balance we need to stay over our base of support through the full cycle of each of our strokes and throughout all our manoeuvres.
All too often, we get encouraged to focus on the base of support provided by the craft we are using. This is perhaps a necessary step but if this remains our sole focus we have immediately created a barrier to our development as a paddler. If anything, attunement to this side of balance is a matter for later on!
Of course, we are more likely to get lucky and develop a feel for something if we are actively searching for it. If we don’t appreciate that the catch phase of each and every forward stroke widens an experienced paddler’s base of support we are unlikely to play and explore in ways that allow us to understand what the water offers us!
We can liken our forward paddling to the ‘gaits’ we have in walking and running on land. As experienced paddlers, are we in balance at all points? No! We may not want to flop from one ear-dip to another but that’s perhaps a closer analogy to the subtle, nuanced flow of what we ordinarily do.
Coordination
In time we are likely to develop a range of forward paddling movement solutions to move us along at different rates in different situations. Each one is likely to become a recognisable personal ‘gait’ but each will, of necessity, be our own. No one paddles with someone else’s style: we’re all distinctive!
Each of our forward paddling solutions involves coordinating to connect effectively with the water through our blade and boat and to transfer power in useful ways, and even if we haven’t already started searching for support from the water when we try and lock our blade, we’ll find ways to move along. That’s a great start – but it’s also seriously limited and limiting!
To really progress, the solutions we develop will need to reflect a better sense of how we can connect with the water. In practice, we will at least end up needing a workable catch. The frame created by our shoulder girdle arms and paddle will have to be stable and able to transmit force transferred from our core.
All too often we hear coaches obsessing about ‘rotation’ but we all know that we can rotate very smoothly without achieving anything whatsoever. Coordination is more basic. It’s about developing our feel for our body as a linkage allowing us to drive our boat from our blade.
Agility
At a very basic level, our agility in handling our craft builds upon our ability to retain our balance even when taking more in our stride. It’s what comes with anticipating earlier and reacting more quickly and more smoothly. It also builds upon stable coordination patterns which we have learnt to adapt.
Our smoothness in our craft through all the vagaries the dynamic environments in which we move will depend on us having a ‘feel’ for how we might tweak the path on which our craft might otherwise have been set. If we don’t perceive the useful cues, every adjustment we make will be late and/or inappropriate!
As we become more attuned to the nuances of how our boat is running we become able to adapt the weight we transfer at each catch, the length of each of our strokes, the way in which we shift our bodyweight on each repetition, and the power transfer that results from our actions. Crucially, we even end up able to get the same outcome in lots of slightly different ways!
Over time, we generally try to add in attunement to the nuances of the dynamic environments in which we travel. That might be adjusting for gusts of wind, small waves and minor variations in the flow. At the other extreme, it can mean adjusting to fly off the lip of a waterfall. Wherever we are heading, we aim to be cued in!
Limits
If we’re going to put developing feel at the heart of our efforts to develop as a paddler, we need to take seriously the idea that it is our job to find our solutions where we are seeing challenges. That’s not saying there’s no role for anyone else but it does mean understanding coaching as something akin to accompanying us as a sense-maker.
In practice, those around us may well have a pretty good idea what our paddling is likely to end up looking like before we start developing our own solutions. That’s likely to be true even when those around us are pretty open-minded about technique because the way our craft are designed to work means we face real and unavoidable functional limits in trying to get creative in our personal movement solutions!
If we’re in a racing kayak with wing paddles we still have scope to find our own, distinctive gaits as a paddler. Even at elite level, leading paddlers end up being quite recognisable from their paddling style. That said, certain commonalities will be identifiable and like it or not, certain temptations will be really dysfunctional, no matter what style we adopt.
If we switch to white water canoes we need to accept that the craft we are in are designed to carve on an edge across eddylines and to spin out whenever unconstrained. Those considerations really do constrain us. Again, movement solutions can be many and varied but the work of developing ‘feel’ might as well start with an appreciation of inescapable realities.
What does this mean?
Do the functional limits we find in canoe and kayak mean we are best off starting from some master-guru’s ‘how to paddle’ technical template? Should we be learning what ‘ideal’ is supposed to look like and then going out ‘error correcting’ in practice sessions until our effort at doing as we’re told starts becoming vaguely effective?
Working from a technical template is a great way to make something look pretty on the outside (so it has the appearance of being workable). Sadly, below the veneer we can be looking at mush – not least because a focus on outward appearance can really get in the way of developing the feel necessary for ever better balance, coordination and agility!
Fortunately, being new to paddling does not have to mean floundering around developing dysfunctional movement solutions as we can quite productively use tightly-constrained tasks to help us develop the ‘feel’ we need to get better attuned to feedback we can narrow down our search as we strive to develop genuinely useful movement solutions.
One well known trick to help us narrow our search space when working on efficiency through turns, is simply tackling a complex manoeuvre at something like quarter-pace. As solutions, which are inefficient at higher speeds tend to completely kill our limited momentum at the lower pace, our search focus shifts – we become attuned to letting our craft run!
Validity
Working to develop ‘feel’ can be anywhere on a spectrum from hugely fun to excruciatingly frustrating – but simple steps can make all the difference. A primary one is structuring our practice so that we get meaningful experiences and can actually make sense of the feedback we’re getting.
For a variety of reasons, learning in a crew boat (tandem or bigger) with an otherwise skilled crew can be a rewarding way to gain experience. This can have huge practical advantages, especially where we can tune into the rhythm established by those skilled partners without having to concern ourselves with more than one role or responsibility.
On the flip side, few things undermine efforts to develop feel more comprehensively than having to distinguish the feedback we’re getting from what we do ourselves from the feedback we’re getting from what everyone else is doing – especially where another inexperienced paddler might also be contributing in strange ways.
Whilst paddling solo can resolve some issues (e.g. finding the hull accelerating just as we’re about to initiate our own stroke) it can create others – especially where we have limited choice over craft and environment. In anything but a ‘beginner’ craft and in anything beyond very sheltered water, the challenge level can easily become overwhelming – and task simplification can become really difficult.
If we’re really going to stack the odds in our favour, we are possibly going to need to switch craft and environment from time to time. We might also find we need some sort of trick to amplify the feedback as we try things which are only slightly different, or to slow things down. For all these reasons and more, we might invite a coach-as-sense-maker to accompany us as we strive to develop our skills.
Conclusion
Those well versed in such things should be able to attach fancy language to much we’ve covered in this short introduction. Any one of us should see the potential for spiralling outwards from almost any point. In practice, however, this option is more likely to end up with us disappearing into (and getting lost and demoralised within) conceptual rabbit-holes.
All too often, we get encouraged to focus on the base of support provided by the craft we are using. This is perhaps a necessary step but if this remains our sole focus we have immediately created a barrier to our development as a paddler. If anything, attunement to this side of balance is a matter for later on!
Of course, we are more likely to get lucky and develop a feel for something if we are actively searching for it. If we don’t appreciate that the catch phase of each and every forward stroke widens an experienced paddler’s base of support we are unlikely to play and explore in ways that allow us to understand what the water offers us!
We can liken our forward paddling to the ‘gaits’ we have in walking and running on land. As experienced paddlers, are we in balance at all points? No! We may not want to flop from one ear-dip to another but that’s perhaps a closer analogy to the subtle, nuanced flow of what we ordinarily do.
The guide by the side
If we start by understanding our coach as a sense-maker, we will hopefully always start our practice with questions such as, “What is the motor problem we are trying to solve?”
To ensure we are always allowing scope for appropriate self-organisation (in ways which will help us solve the problem we’ve identified) we might also ask practical questions such as:
- Is our practice-structure encouraging us to explore the movement pattern variability we’re going to need in the environments in which we wish to perform?
- Are the coordination patterns we’re developing representative of those we’re going to need in the environments in which we wish to perform?
- Are we practicing with access to the perceptual cues and information we’re going to need in the environments in which we wish to perform?
- Is our decision making in our practice representative of the decision making we’re going to need in the environments in which we wish to perform?
The science links ‘degrees of freedom’ and ‘motor abundance’ and talks of the ways we can increase our adaptability to get resilience in our movement solutions and protect ourselves from key injury risks – but fortunately, the doing doesn’t need the science!
