Kit Reviews, Travel and Advice
Moving on from my tutorial of how to Lunar Orbit on flatwater, I’m now going to explain how to do it on whitewater – something I recently learned myself. For the purposes of this tutorial I will be explaining the steps to do a lunar orbit on a steep feature (as pictured below) – a […]
Consistency is an important part of sport in general, not just for kayaking and not just for freestyle. It doesn’t matter if you manage to do something perfectly unless you can do it again (or someone filmed it so that you can pretend you can do it again). In this post I’ll describe how I’ve […]
Everyone is stronger on one side than the other and it’s tempting to forget about your off-side, it’s weaker, it’s slower and it’s more difficult – right? However, you won’t become a balanced paddler thinking like that and it will stunt your freestyle development in the long run. I put off learning tricks on my […]
The double pump is pretty much the first thing you should learn if you’re trying to do any sort of flatwater freestyle. Effectively it’s the first end of a cartwheel and it sets you up to learn more complicated tricks like a tricky woo or loop. Some people learn how to tailee beforehand but I […]
I know that some people don’t bother practicing freestyle on flatwater, maybe it never occurred to them or they don’t think there are any benefits so they never tried it. This post is dedicated to persuading such people to try training on flatwater, maybe before a session on whitewater or simply for convenience because it […]
Head-to-toes winter checklist – I’ve tried wearing a couple of different bits of kit and some of it works really well and some of it doesn’t (I just have to wait for it to break so I can justify getting something better); I’ll recommend the equipment I like and I’ll be blunt about things like […]
I was afraid that if I tried the Pyranha Ozone at Lee Valley I’d want one. I tried it. Now I want one. For those of us who don’t know, the Ozone is Pyranha’s latest release and replaces the Inazone in their “freeride” (river-play) category; in layman’s terms, freeride means you can perform modern freestyle […]
In this post I’m going to explain how to loop, going over set-up and finishing as well as body, boat and paddle position throughout the movement with some tips to improve snappiness and height throughout. I will assume that you can comfortably move about on grade 2 or 3 whitewater – by comfortable I mean […]
This is one of the hardest tricks to learn but it is also one of the most impressive. A phonics is defined as a “pirouette initiated by a cross-bow stroke in a front surf position, followed by a front loop in one fluid motion,” and it is worth 140 points (190 with air) which makes […]
I have spent quite a lot of time outfitting each of my playboats; starting with my original 2016 Rockstar I then progressed to a plastic Jed and now a carbon Jed; I also have an Exo Rexy for river running. Each of these boats has come with slightly different stock outfitting and consequently I’ve had […]
Alright. What is a blunt? A blunt is a 180 degree horizontal rotation at a vertical angle greater than 45 degrees, clear of the foam pile, where the competitor rotates around the bow of the boat. Ignoring boring definitions, the blunt is probably one of first wave moves that you will attempt to learn and […]
In this review I am going to compare four river-play kayaks – the Pyranha “Ripper”, Dagger “Axiom”, Exo “Rexy” and Jackson “Antix”. I have demoed all four of these boats at the Lee Valley whitewater course on both the Legacy (Grade 2 / 3) and the Olympic course (Grade 3 / 4) to test their […]
Patrick Kyak 