How to Lead with Your Torso when Freestyle Kayaking

Video Transcript

"In kayaking, there's 3 ways that we can separate out body movements. One of the biggest ones is our ability to rotate our torso. If I put my paddle on my chest, you can see this torso rotation as an example. It's moving my body with every stroke that I take. That allows me not to use the little muscles in my arms, but I'm using the core muscles of my upper body. When we kayak, it's really not important to use our paddle as much as it is to really involve your core muscles. A little more of how that works is also your vision is involved. If I look, I'm going to then lead with my torso and that's also going to go into my legs. It's look, torso, and then that pulls the boat around with your legs. You get a lot of momentum into every move that you do. When I'm doing sweep strokes, or pivot turns, or cartwheels, I'm trying to keep my torso in front of the boat. If I'm running a river, I want to point my shoulders into the eddy and have my boat follow into that eddy as well. The more that I can separate out my torso from my boat and not get tunnel vision looking straight down at the kayak, the easier it's going to be for me to move around on the river."