Recently I have been spending a lot of time re-learning or polishing off my roll. I have been paddling for 9 years and had a "good enough" roll. Now I decided that the roll that was good enough for bigger water rivers was not good enough for the low flowing rivers in the Alps. In this post I want to review my polishing efforts and results. This is still work in progress so hopefully I will learn more as time goes by. I guess there is nothing new in here but for me it was worth going through once again.

1) Staying in good shape makes all the difference. This helps me staying under water for a long time and gives confidence.

2) Spending a lot of time up side down. Since this is not comfortable on the low volume rivers in the Alps I had to find another place to practice. So the local "boring" white water channel was ideal.

3) Practicing the roll on flat water was not so useful since there I can always roll up effortlessly. Now I spend a lot of time trying loops and cartwheels in all the features in the channel. Actually I just get vertical and the up side down. This helps me go down in many different positions. I also like to paddle hard for a while and then go down, when I am more out of breath.

4) I try not to back-deck roll, since that is not what I want to do instinctively in the Alps. But when I back-deck roll in strong current having good core muscles does not hurt.

5) Now when I go down I stop, think, and plan how I will roll up. I do this now so I can roll up using good technique. I guess it will be more automatic later.

6) One thing I realized I do wrong is that when I am up side down I was just tucking my body straight forward to the deck, and not to the side where I wanted to roll up on. This means that I had very limited space to hip snap, and had problems getting my paddle out of the water.

7) A friend suggested I imagined I had to hold a piece of paper between my back arm and my body (left arm if one tucks in the roll position and goes down on the left side). This helps, but now I have realized it works because it helps keeping the paddle down and in front of my body.

Now I concentrate on making the roll a continuous, smooth, and a powerful motion.

9) ... to be filled in later when I learn more

10) The most important thing I learned and that is the reason I started all this is I am never too good to practice some more

Well these are my thoughts for now. I hope to start playing polo soon, I guess that will be good practice as well.