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Wednesday, October 14, 2009

PrecisionMania - Debut nears and roll disappears

Last summer I went to a white water camp put on by a friend, someone I look up to a lot. I really wanted to represent myself well. Then, a month or more before the camp my bomb-proof rolls went haywire. And, they did not return very quickly.

Now, this fall, we are nearing the debut of PrecisionMania, and with great nervousness, my wife's left-handed roll has suddenly faltered. Amazing stuff, these nerves. Her rolls have been rock solid for years.

We fixed both problems similarly. In my case, I had developed bad habits of setting up weakly and rolling with my arms, not my torso. In Donna's case, her left-handed roll had a rotten set-up and the sweep had disappeared. In both cases, the setups and sweeps needed to get fixed. The setup was easy. Have someone see what is wrong, tell you, and you fix it. But, the sweep is harder to solve. Interestingly, both sweeps were fixed the same way. We worked on the part that initiates the sweep. And, the rest came back immediately.

The sweep can be initiated with your head and shoulders, not your arms. In this method, the forward ear leads by moving out over the forward shoulder trying to get behind it. Since it cannot get behind the shoulder, the shoulder then follows the ear/head movement, and the arms and torso come last.

Since we each already knew how to roll, it was easy to finish once we had gotten the proper body movement started.

So, if your roll is not as consistent as you'd like, maybe it is in your setup and/or sweep. Of course, if your rolling technique does not include a sweep, you may not want to add one now.

I must roll along now. Bye. :-)

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