It must be an extremely low bar to qualify. Look at the paddler closest to the viewer. Mid frame. Grossly overweight. Like I said… it is one snapshot in time. However that is certainly not a world-class field.
I was also the race director for the longest and richest kayak race in history at the time, so I watched the best athletes in the world for 20some days racing on big open water to the Erie Canal to the Hudson for several years in a row - Greg Barton, Martin Kenny, Dean Gardner, Mike Harbold, Lee Mcgregor, etc. I had a ring side view of exactly what works and wins, and what doesn’t, over the course of several years.
WW or touring boats… as you said, kinesiology is constant, as is physics. A great forward stroke in a WW boat is the same regardless of what boat you are in. As an ITE for WW and instructor for coastal kayak… it doesn’t matter - the same principles apply.
Then perhaps rather than jumping on me for trying to help someone out constructively, take all your worldly experience and offer him some constructive tips.
that would be to be blunt more useful than what you are doing.
Just saying.
If you had bothered to read the responses you’d see that I did, and that the OP responded with gratitude. To be blunt, I was correcting you on information that was not accurate.
Bye.
I am located on Long Island, NY on the eastern end out towards Stony Brook University area for reference.
I went out for a 10mile paddle making some adjustments. I lowered raising the paddles too high and keeping my hands lowered. I forced myself to rotate more. I also decided to crunch myself up raising my legs and thigh to arc up. Not sure if the leg adjustment helped but my legs were hurting so much by midpoint because they were so crunched up that I reduced my hip/leg movement.
Today’s run had no current help at the first half but I think on the return trip I had some resistance from the currents as the tide started shifting. I started at slack tide. From my chart, the first half, my speed seem to have improved a lot. It seems like I lost a lot of power on my 2nd half. The 2nd half seems to be strange because I actually felt a lot better after my brief midpoint rest and re-adjusted my leg/knee position to be more straightened out. But it seems like my return trip avg was 4mph with a lot of drops below that while my first half average was well over 5mph easily.
The dashed blue line on the chart is ~5mph.
A few thoughts. And text is an awkward way to assess technique.
- The axiom for hand position is chin to eyes. A lower hand position means that you are doing more of a sweep stroke. You want the paddle to be as vertical as possible. People who sea kayak on this continent arre wrapped up in ACA dogma. BCU is a better model for performance paddling.
- That top hand drives across your field of vision.
- The angle of your elbows shouldn’t change more than a few degrees throughout all aspects of the stroke. All motion comes from lower core / hips.
- Not getting the “crunching up” thing. Remember: efficient is always comfortable / comfortable is not always efficient.
- Speed, in training, is a pretty useless metric. Its nice to throw out at parties. The real metric that you should be chasing, for training, is output over time. That is measured as HR or watt output, and first assessed in a lab on a bike or paddling erg to establish baseline (see photo).
- Technique work is mutually exclusive from workouts. At the end of our competitive season we did an 8 - 12 week block of technique work. That is where the magic happens. That is where you get faster and peel back the layers of understanding on what is going on with a forward stroke.
- Try this drill: 1. On dry land, wind your torso up so that your paddle and shoulders are parallel to the keel line. Drill that on both sides. 2. Take that to water. 3. Wind up. Hold it for a second. Imprint what the sensation is like. 3. Plant and relax - no power - just relax (keeping top hand driving across your field of view). 4. When that movement and sensation becomes as natural as breathing in your sleep, apply power. You will now really be moving the boat.
- In the video that you posted your boat is all over the place. You need to quiet that shit down if you want to be fast. Your boat’s hull should be flat and consistent. Your chest mount POV camera may be great for this, and rotation. If your field of view in the camera shows left shore, right shore, left shore, right shore, and your boat is quiet, you have accomplished a lot.
Based on being in NYC area I’d look at the Washington Canoe Club. They are below the Key Bridge, right in Georgetown. Contact them about some forward stroke training. Do AM and PM technique workouts for three days, keep your boat right there, walk up to your hotel, restaurants, hang out on the deck with some of the best paddlers in the world, etc.
Check out this article that I wrote some decades ago on the forward stroke. The lead photos show how your torso should be wound up.
Enjoy!
