Why drills and breaking things down is an essential skill

Drills are boring. The end…

… Actually, they aren’t. They’re extremely interesting and they are essential for improving your skills.

What I’m about to describe is focussed on freestyle, but it can be applied to pretty much any skill in kayaking. It’s also incredibly important.

Just doing more paddling on rivers or mucking about throwing your boat around and hoping you get naturally better will get you to a certain point, but it won’t allow you to you truly advance. One of the reasons why modern boating is so much more advanced than it was in the 70s, 80s, and 90s is because a much more analytical view was taken. For example, techniques such as boofing became much more refined, and also advanced, using actual physics and positioning to hone the technique rather than leaning back and hoping for the best. Other aspects also developed, with a focus on being much more proactive, driving the boat and being more ‘active’ with the blade. Gone are the days (hopefully) when beginners were taught low brace eddy turns, for instance.

The problem with simply doing more boating and hoping that you’ll eventually be Bren Orton is that you will reach a skills plateau. Not only that, but you’ll have ingrained lots and lots of difficult to remove bad habits. The solution that many of those people who take this line is to increase the grade of rivers that they run, hoping that it will kick start their skills advancement again.

The problem is that the skills you need to run grade 3 well are the exact same skills you need to run grade 4 well. In other words if you haven’t got the fundamentals down, using key strokes, timing, lock & load, a really good understanding of paddle technique, river positioning, how to use lateral momentum, etc etc, you’ll simply be surviving down the harder grades. Instead, your lessons will be learnt from getting yourself, and your paddle buddies, into risky situations.

I’ve seen it all before. A paddler gets bored of grade 2 and 3, so they increase the grade. They might survive down the rivers, but sooner or later they get caught out and end up in a situation. They then give up kayaking because they no longer like the risk of those higher grades, but they can’t bring themselves to just paddle grade 2 and 3 instead because they find it boring.

I’ve seen it happen multiple times over the years.

Simply put, getting coaching, doing drills and breaking things down allows you to do more on the river, and it also helps internalise movements and reactions so they are natural and not forced. It also allows you to have more fun on lower grades even if you don’t decide to move up to higher ones later.

What’s this got to do with freestyle?

What’s this got to do with freestyle? Well, it’s the same thing. If you want to advance you need to learn to break things down into their component parts. The double pump is a good example of this. The double pump is an example of a move that, unless you are on the heavy side for your boat, you will have to use good technique to do it – and to do good technique you need to understand it. I mean truly understand it. And in order to understand it, you need to practice each component part of the movement in isolation, otherwise there’s simply too much happening at once for you to get clarity over what’s going on.

So, with the double pump, that means isolating the first part of the movement and practice lifting the bow out of the water on an edge. Some key points here are to focus on a properly executed, effective stroke, that really helps lever the bow out of the water and also, importantly, to push with your lower leg and to use your core to assist, keeping your body neutral and over the boat (not leaning back trying to ‘hoof’ the bow up). Try to get the bow out of that water as high as you can. Yes, I know some people say this isn’t necessary, but that comes with very refined technique once you can do the whole move without thinking about it. If the bow is lifted high, guess what? That means the stern sinks under the water, and the more underwater the stern is, the more it will get rejected, helping you with the second part of the move.

Then you need to practice the second part of the double pump on its own in isolation. You can do this by taking a few strokes forward and then taking a strong back/support/lever stroke with the boat on edge and using your upper leg push and body rotation combined to get the bow into the water as much as possible. You must use your upper leg to help drive it, and you must focus on doing your body rotation with your head over the boat, not leaning out to the side – remember what you were taught about edging – or trying to forward ‘hoof’ by leaning into the bow, and also making sure to keep core tension. See, there’s quite a few factors at work there happening all at once, and you can’t really concentrate on them or internalise them if you are trying to rush to do the entire move all in one go.

This is just one method to break the double pump down into two parts. Once you get better at each individual part, and your movement instincts are internalised you can start to put them together into one. But please understand this: You need to practice those component parts enough that you actually do understand them, and become effective at doing them. Too many people will just practice each part maybe two or three times and think that’s good enough. It isn’t. You must practice them enough that you are seeing an actual tangible improvement in the results.

A common reason for rushing past this drill stage is that ‘drills are boring’. I’ve got some news for you; drills aren’t boring at all if you are actually focussing on your technique, openly aware of the realtime feedback you’re getting while doing the move, and giving yourself effective self evaluation on what you are doing or might need to do differently next time. A drill isn’t some static, repetitive, dull thing if it is done properly. Sure, if you just go through the numbers without paying attention to what you’re doing, a drill might well be boring. But that’s on you, and you won’t improve or be effective that way.

The simple fact is that it is extremely difficult to get truly good at something, or to understand something properly, especially if you intend to coach it to someone else later, if you don’t break things down and do isolated drills in some way or form. If you go on any coached kayaking course, whether it’s for freestyle or river running, you’ll be asked to do drills in some way. That might be to run sections of a rapid multiple times in different ways to understand it, or a difficult (or simple) ferry glide, or a boof ledge. Or it might be to break down moves on flat water or in a hole for freestyle.

Looping without any air

An example of this is when Bartosz Czauderna showed me that you can actually ignore the air launching part of the loop in inlet gate at HPP to practice the core loop movements. So he had me line the boat up and lean forward as the bow caught the green water, sending me upside down. As I went upside down I was told to focus on the hip thrust and leg push for the second part of the loop. Bartosz demonstrated it, proving that you could indeed make the boat do a full 360 motion without launching into the air at all, as long as good technique was used.

This was important because it meant that the most critical components of the loop, keeping the boat straight as it plugged and the second part of the loop, could be practiced without being concerned about getting a good air launch. It’s a move breakdown that I have now realised I can do on flat water as well.

On flat water the boat will just go upside down, but I can still practice the throw forward from a bow stall, and then the immediate leg push movements for the second half of the move to internalise them, even if the boat will simply flop upside down. It might sound silly to do because you won’t get a successful loop by doing this, however, the most difficult part of the loop is going from a throw forward immediately into an effective leg push/hip thrust. It doesn’t matter at all that the boat won’t do a loop. What matters is that I’m throwing straight forward and then immediately into the leg push, and that I am making that quick movement succession my internalised reaction.

In the same drill I can also practice standing up and sighting something upstream or on the bank. Taking the bounce and full launch out of the equation means I can practice the really important movements and details without the distraction of hoping I get a good bounce and air launch, which can introduce all sorts of uncontrollable factors.

This is why doing drills is so effective. They take a complicated movement with many factors at play, and allow you to build the component parts without distraction. Kayak coach Dan Wilkinson gave me the best analogy I’ve heard. Imagine you have to bake a cake. You have to gather all your ingredients together first, and then you have to methodically put those ingredients together in the right way before you put the cake in the oven to bake it. You can’t just throw all the ingredients into a bowl without measuring them out or following certain stages in the hope that a cake will result. Yet that latter part is precisely what a lot of kayakers hope for!

Sooner or later, in order to advance, no matter how much you think you know, you’ll have to take a step back and deconstruct what you’re doing. There’s a reason why the best athletes in the world do drills and movement breakdowns. It’s because they work.

But here’s something else important as well. Some people would say that this attitude is simply too serious, and to just get on the river and have fun. Well, to them I would say that drills are fun if you understand how to use them and do them properly. This comes full circle to the flawed idea of getting better just by doing things. As I mentioned just now, sooner or later you’ll have to break things down. The idea is that you can have a ton more fun by actually being able to do things effectively later! Having fun is, after all, the main aim!