Offside and Onside
The critical basis for any roll is the strength and follow-thru of the hip snap, or uncurling of the body, or however you want to think of it. Most people have a significantly better motion on their “on” side than off. Both myself and husband (who is on his left side) find the on side to be hugely stronger than the off.
The person who finally got me up (on a C to C) assured me that having an onside roll was not going to itself accelerate my progress towards an offside one (when I get there). Her experience, from many years of whitewater, was that the body memory had to be learned pretty much from scratch on the off side as for the other.
And yeah, a roll is mental as much as anything else. I had a hip snap that could start waves early on and have known for most of this time that a roll was very possible for me. But unless someone comes up with a replaceable unit for the brain, making it all come together is another matter.
Frankly, being able to knock off rolls from a few sessions based on learning from a film and having them repeatable as well is an unusually good success rate. That would indicate that the person is among those who have a relatively intuitive response to rolling. The first pool session I ever took had a guy like that in it, and I am not sure he even came back for the second.
I’d love it if I fit in that group - but I don’t. I am one of the many who have to plug away with persistence, and from what I see there are a lot more of us than care to admit to it.
Celia
Intuitive Rolling
One thing I like about the way Eric Jackson teaches to roll is that its much more intuitive. The first time I took my Necky Jive out on the water I was just going to paddle around in small waves and wet exit to get a feel for the boat and take a rolling class later. I ended up having fun in it and started surfing and got flipped several times. Before I had the roll class I could do hand rolls on the back deck, or hard paddle slam C to C rolls and come up on the back deck (smaller radius of rotation for lifting the weight of my heavy torso), then I took a rolling class and everything got a lot harder doing the set up position and everything else trying to learn the “right and safe way” to roll.
intuitive response to rolling?
Nope - just stubborn, and refused to beleive it was hard - to do, just hard to figure out.
I didn’t find it easy or intuitive at all, but the day it clicked I did manage to relax, slow down, and feel what was happening instead of frantically trying to get what I wanted to happen. That’s the mental part, getting your mind largely out of it except to observe.