Monday, July 02, 2007
Video Feedback for Whitewater Kayak Skills Training
Will video feedback help kayakers to learn and/or perfect their paddle technique skills?
Here is a video of me surfing on a tricky little river wave. Despite its small size, good edge control skills are needed to surf this wave. The superEgo kayak makes it easy to see how I used edge control to initiate the little left and right moves that allowed me to stay on the wave. Notice that the paddle is kept low, my arms are kept extended pretty straight and torso rotation is used to power the paddle. Very little paddling is needed to stay on the wave if you use edge control to maximum advantage. Some additional videos of other kayakers surfing on this wave are at BRT Kayaking Channel.
The video was taken with my Olympus 720SW waterproof digital camera. Image quality is not up to videocam standards, but is good enough to see what the kayaker is doing. The purple streaks in the video are caused by shooting into the sun. Notice that the image quality is better at the end of the video when the camera was shooting in a different direction.
MOV format videos were converted to AVI format using Any Video Converter software, then imported into Windows Movie Maker software for editing.
More about: Kayaking Techniques for Whitewater Rivers.
Labels: technique
