Balancing Your Kayak
Balancing a kayak is key for any beginning
whitewater kayaker to understand if they wish to get better. There
are several easy principles that you have to understand to get better
at balancing your kayak. The first thing you have to understand is
the difference between balancing a kayak and leaning in a kayak. To balance a kayak, all you do is relax your stomach and torso muscles. This allows the kayak to move as it needs to in the river current without you fighting it. When you tense up and try and fight the current or river dynamics, that is when flips and spills happen. By relaxing you allow your upper body to stay steady and upright while your lower body moves as it needs too. Leaning is a different maneuver that is to be used differently. It is used to help you move your kayak through rapids and to counteract the forces in rivers that want to flip you such as holes and waves. It is probably the single most important skill you will learn to progress from a novice to intermediate kayaker.
There are a lot of different ways to learn to lean your kayak, from basic techniques like just leaning to one side or the other, or lifting one side up using your hip but the best way to do it is too learn how to J-Lean. A J-Lean is a relatively complicated maneuver to explain, but if you have someone demonstrate it to you, you will pick it up right away. We will explain the basic idea of it here, but to actually learn the J-Lean, take a class or ask someone to help you learn it.
The basic idea of a J lean is to tilt your boat to one side or the other while keeping your upper body weight centered over the kayak. To do one, you want to lift on hip up but lean upwards in the direction of the hip. Start small and try not to use your paddle to balance. As stated though, plan to take a class or have someone help you learn this one!
