Video: How to do the J Stroke in Canoeing

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Learn the subtle but efficient J stroke for flatwater canoeing in this free outdoor extreme sports video from our kayak and canoe expert.

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Video Transcript

The J stroke is one of the more subtle strokes you can do canoeing, but when you get it right it's a very efficient way to correct your forward momentum. For every forward stroke that sends you towards your off side, the J stroke will help to bring you back toward your on side. The principal of the J stroke is basically that we're going to do a lot of small J strokes in order to keep our line going forward rather than a few larger J strokes, which will make us steer more of a spaghetti course kind of going in zigzags down the river or down the lake. The J stroke uses the power face of the blade. This is the power face of this blade, the one that faces toward me when I'm paddling. The same face of the blade is used for the correction because I turn my upper wrist down and forward. When I have done that, I have the power face of the blade facing away from the boat. Then I basically do a pry stroke. It's like a quick pry using the power face rather than as in the pry where the top thumb faces up, you use the back face. Again, in the J stroke you're using the power face. One of the tricks with a J stroke is keeping the blade in the water while the face is in the right position. So a lot of people are doing J strokes like this and that's an air J. The air doesn't so anything at all to correct the direction of the boat. As long as you have the blade in the water, you can be correcting the direction of the boat. So with a J stroke I'm going to take a regular forward stroke. At the end, turn my top wrist forward. Keep my blade in the water, which means my top hand has to be out over the gunnel and I'm going to do a quick pry or J off the power face of the blade then I'm going to go back to another J stroke. You'll see once I get up to speed that the J has become very short and almost become part of the stroke. The nice thing about this stroke is since it uses the power face to correct, there's no switching blade faces and so it's a very smooth simple correction. Here's what it looks like. You'll notice also that when I do the J that the strokes get shorter and shorter and up to speed and the J stroke moves farther forward in the boat. As you get up to speed, you can move the correction from back here up to here. That again makes for a more efficient stroke and doesn't call you to do the less efficient part of the stroke that's behind your body. That's the J stroke.

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How to do the J Stroke in Canoeing

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