Rolling is a nice to have skill when paddling whitewater. Even though most of us try to keep the open side up, everyone ends up talking to the fishes sooner or later. Being able to roll back up is a nice skill to have, saving you a swim and keeping you in the relative safety of your boat on harder rivers.

Learning to roll is not the easiest part of paddling, even though I believe one can't learn this particular skill soon enough. (Watch the kajak paddlers, they learn it soon, they have plenty of time to bomb-proof it, and push themselves harder because they know they roll up again).
Anyhow, learning to roll is learning to work against your instincts to lift the head up, and push yourself upright with the arms.

I've been strugling with my roll for over a year, being instructed by Kris from canoeadventure.be, having watchet the Bob Foote video, Kent Ford video, ... . And still not mastering my roll. Time to try another instructor to see if he manages to teach me. So I went for Heinz his course in Lippstadt.

Well, it was an amasing weekend. As with the other topics I saw covered by Heinz, there is a profound theoretical explanation behind it, yet brought with a sense of humor. We started, as usual, theoretically and watching some good rolls on video. Moving over to some short dry land exercises to end up on the water.

The first exercise was to get the hip-leg motion memorized. We did that by floating our upper body on a foam plate, trying to minimize the pressure. Going smaller and smaller with the plate was the eventual target. Later on we moved to use light pressure by an assistant hands to roll up, or in low water and see the amount of sand we  brought up rolling. Finally some exercises on setup were done.

None of us managed to get that roll nailed down reliable on those 2 intensive days of practice. But we all went home with a decent basis of where to pay attention for, and how to make progress.

I learned some important trics and some common pitfalls. Now I know them, I can avoid them. But most importantly I learned I need more muscular training. That hip/leg movement that is needed to roll the boat aint just working for me. So I'll have to work on that. Once finished you'll be able to find those exercises on this website. So maybe some of them could be of use to you.