Bad Advice - Downwards Pressure

This is the first blog I'm writing on common bits of bad advice that the people I coach have often heard. "Bad Advice" might be a bit harsh for some of these topics as sometimes they have been told the right thing in the wrong way but "Bad Advice" sounds good so we are going to roll with it.

The first of these is one of the most common ones I'm asked about when coaching paddlers and to be fair it's quite a tricky concept to wrap your head around. It's the concept of "Downwards Pressure".

Now almost ever paddler that asks about this makes the same mistake in search of this downwards pressure. They all think to make it you have to push the paddle down on one side and potentially roll the ski down on that same side as well. This seems like it will put the weight down on that side of the ski and a lot of the time you will see people lean/bob forwards as they take their catch to add to this downward motion in the search of the downwards pressure. But unfortunately this just isn't right.

So why isn't it right. The answer lies in the second word, pressure. To make pressure you have to have something that is resisting you when you push against it. If whatever you are pushing against moves or you move through it, you can't make any pressure. So when you push your paddle down deeper in the water and roll your boat over to one side in actual fact you're not making any pressure at all. So if you can't push down to make downwards pressure then how do you do it?

The best way I can explain it is that instead of pushing down you actually just have to resist the up force that is coming from the water. Water is always "pushing up" that's why your boat is floating. The boat is pushing down just as hard as the water is pushing up and you sit there held up by the water. So when you put the paddle down on one side of the boat the water is going to push back against the paddle just as hard as you are pushing against it. Because you are putting the paddle down on one side of the boat the water pushes the paddle back up in a perfectly equal and opposite force and direction to the way it entered.

Our job is to resist this force. We need to make sure that nothing moves up or away from the water we don't want to push downwards.

Now this isn't easy but it's actually relatively simple. Imagine you are walking, you put your foot down in front of you on one side (the catch) and as you shift your weight onto that foot your foot doesn't move downwards, it stays still as the ground pushes back. Because the ground is pushing back as hard as your foot is pressing down, we can put our entire body weight on that foot as we lift our other foot off the ground but we don't sway left and right as we walk along. The forces are equal so nothing moves and there is pressure between your foot and the ground.

While we put our weight on the foot we are using our quads to hold our foot below us and stop our knee bending and if we pushed down hard enough on one foot we would actually jump up in the air. Not down.

We need to have the same result in paddling. If we create enough "downwards pressure" we should be lifting ourselves higher. Pressing down outside the boat would make the boat lighter and it will sit higher in the water. So the whole reason we want "downwards pressure" is to put weight outside of the boat, we want to take some of the pressure off our seat/bum and put it on the water/paddle. If we have pressure on the water we won't roll over towards the water because the water will be holding us upright.

So how do we resist this upwards pressure from the water. We give it something to push against the isn't going to move. As the water tries to lift our paddle we hold it in place with our triceps, our lats and our core. If our triceps is off our elbow bends and the paddle can move. If our lats turn off our shoulder can lift up and our paddle can move, if our core disengages our torso will crumple and our paddle can move. If everything resists then we have achieved pressure.