CASKA: Chicago Area Sea Kayakers Association

To Flip or Not To Flip III: Back in the Head

by Haris

The question for this mini-series was the universality of the local practice to upright the capsized kayak before a T-rescue. In the pool, we found things to like about the alternative—lifting an upturned boat—and not a lot to ground the arguments against it. At the end of the day the contest seemed a bit like a toss-up and the upside-down method, at the very least, appeared as a worthy contender.

How would the two techniques fair in a head-to-head comparison in rough water? For now, this is a theoretical study as the Great Lakes fend off encroaching armies of ice and potential testers avoid the drink—even for the sake of science?!

Theoretically speaking, it seems to me that the greatest difference between the two techniques in the real-life conditions will be the ready availability of and easy access to the deck lines and toggles for both the rescuer and the paddler being rescued. The cardinal safety rule, a sea kayaking Commandment of sorts, is to hold on to one's boat and paddle after a wet exit. 'Exactly how critical is that?' you may ask. Consider this: two of Chicago's elite sea kayaking coaches got married so they could merge their last names—all just to emphasize the point for you the paddlers! The dynamic duo is known as 'BPs' and the acronym stands for "Hold on to Boat and Paddle Stupid!" Noticed the missing letter for 'Hold?' So did they...  Took a while but their firstborn promptly got a name that starts with 'H.' So now you have no excuse!

In case the acronym is not enough to drive the point home, remember that your boat and paddle are your tickets home after a capsize (not to mention the $). You want to get out of the water as fast as possible and you'll need a paddle to get out of trouble once you're back in the cockpit. In the pool we got away without doing these things. In the pool you don't really need to worry about holding on to things because there is no wind, no waves, and no current will wrestle with you for possession. Neither your kayak nor your paddle will go anywhere if you let them go in the pool. Out in the open, though, you don't need even 10 knots of wind to promptly separate you from your ride home. No matter how good of a swimmer you think you are, you have to face the reality: the wind is faster. And what about the paddle? It does not take long to permanently lose sight of it once you let go. The paddle will not drift but you will.

Just in case you're thinking like this: it should be OK to practice your rescues in calm water without special emphasis to contact with the boat and paddle. True, you don't need to worry about separation in calm conditions without current. However, the purpose of practice is not the success in a particular scenario. It is to build the rescue motions into your muscle memory and to solidify them as habits or reflexes in your cortex. If you capsize on a cold stormy day in conditions that are testing your limits as a paddler, you will not be thinking calmly to yourself: "Well, this is not a scenario, not the calm warm water in which I practiced my recoveries. Think I better hold on to the boat and paddle this time!" No, when in stress, you will reach for the instinctual and the habitual. And HBPS better be the top contender to direct your actions!

Some argue that an upside-down boat does not drift as fast with the wind as the uprighted one. Point taken! I would say, however, that the sense of security associated with this slower drift is both false and potentially dangerous. Conditions are not hard to come by which will take away the boat from you even if it is upside-down. The damage that counting on slower drift will do to your HBPS habit is just not worth the temporary peace of mind. I don't know if I want to test the strength of wind that will push my kayak away from me faster than I can swim and then guess at what it is from one situation to the other.  HBPS is far simpler and not that much work.

So the bottom line is this: when the boat is upside down, the deck lines and toggles are submerged, out of sight, harder to grab and hold on to. A paddler who has capsized needs to travel to the bow of the capsized kayak. It would be awkward and slower to do that while holding on to the deck lines under water. Maintaining contact with the boat on the slippery hull is asking for trouble.

Contact with the upturned boat was not really an issue in the pool. In living water, with boats being tossed around, banged together and pulled apart, joggled up and down, I would not count on being able to retain this contact with the smooth bottom of another kayak. Keel at the bow provides something to hold on to but the grip is not definite. Here, deck lines and toggles offer a distinct advantage—both realistically and as a matter of psychological security. The ability to hold on to the lines with the outboard hand will also all but eliminate the possibility of the rescuer capsizing backwards I discussed in the part II.

Finally, I think there's also a psychological benefit to having paddlers in the water upright their craft. Capsize is always accompanied by a certain amount of anxiety. Anxiety, in turn, is to a large extent a factor of the unknown and shaky confidence with regard to one's ability to deal with the situation. Having an engrained protocol of 'HBPS, upright the boat, HBPS, swim to the bow, HBPS' offers the person in the water a degree of familiarity and control over the situation. In the absence of these outlets—specific actions one can do when in trouble—and combined with heightened arousal the swimmer is more likely to either freak out or do something counter-productive. The ritual is a sort of lightning rod that will channel the energy produced by excess adrenaline in the blood stream.

So, in conclusion, which one of the two Ts will I advocate and teach from now on? I think both!

On flat water upside-down T-rescue is marginally more efficient. In rough conditions upright T-rescue is much safer. Why would I teach the upside-down variety, then, given all that I just said about forming good habits, etc. In real life, when conditions are calm, there just is no need to insist on uprighting the boat if the person in the water is either not familiar with the protocol or if they start arguing with you that the upside down method is the way to go. If the situation is at all emotional, there is no learning going on and, in that situation, you just want to get the person out of the water and back into their boat quick. You'll have all the time in the world to argue for the benefits of uprighting the boat at the pub after the trip.  For this reason, I think it is a good idea to have the upside-down T-rescue in your toolkit. It also gives you something to do in the pool!

If conditions are less than perfect, in a real-life rescue situation with wind or current I will insist that they flip their boat up and HBPS to the best of my ability!

Criterion		Upright	Upside-Down
Speed		Faster if rescuer has trouble breaking the cockpit seal, pulling the kayak onto the cockpit, or boat is heavy; people with short hands have trouble flipping the boat back to upside-down position	Faster with empty boat and good proficiency—between 5 and 10 seconds for testers competent with upright technique
Physical Strain		Boat is easier to lift out of the water and slide over the cockpit (assuming overhang at the bow and deck lines); no need to worry about breaking the cockpit seal	Easier to drain once boat is over the cockpit; the difference in the ease of lifting the boat out of the water was MUCH smaller than expected—negligible in the pool and with empty boats; can 'scoop up' the bow by submerging the cockpit rim and edging away, avoid strain on upper body; swimmer can assist by pushing bow up—more effectively
Maneuverability and Control		More definite contact with capsized kayak due to access to deck lines and end toggles	No difficulty moving from parallel to perpendicular and vice versa in calm conditions; maintaining contact with the boat would be compromised in rough conditions
Safety—rescuer		More definite hold of the boat due to exposed deck lines and end toggles; can catch oneself if capsizing away from the boat; less likely to lose contact in rough conditions	Surprisingly good control of the capsized boat on calm water—keel-line provides positive grasp; chances of capsizing on opposite of the boat being rescued no higher
Safety—rescued		More definite contact with the boat due to exposed and accessible deck lines and end-toggles; less likely to separate from the boat when moving to the bow while waiting for rescue	Marginally slower drift speed (may encourage a false sense of safety and lead to separation from the boat); less time in the water
Psychological		Encourages best practices of maintaining contact with the boat; gives the paddler in the water something to do while waiting for the rescuer to arrive	Satisfaction of saving some time and effort

To Flip or Not To Flip II: In the Lab

by Haris

Thanks to all who commented on the first post and to everyone who put some thought into the question as well as those of you who will try it for yourselves on the liquid surface next time you paddle. I took the questions straight to the lab—Naperville North High School kayak pool session on Sunday. Thanks to Janee Matesson of Kayak Morris for help in comparing the techniques. The two boats we worked with were a kevlar Valley Avocet and a plastic P&H Capella 160—both on the short end of the sea kayak spectrum and not loaded.

The Findings

In the context of the pool—really really flat water, warm water and no wind—the very first thing that we noticed was that lifting the capsized boat out of the water was not really any harder from the upside-down position as I expected.

I need to qualify this statement a bit. The cockpit forms a vacuum seal with the water when the cockpit points downwards. To heave the bow of one boat onto the cockpit of the other we had to twist it sideways by about 30 degrees—minor technical adjustment.

We did try the 'scooping' technique where the rescuer submerges one side of the cockpit and hooks the bow of the capsized kayak with the cockpit rim and then pulls the boat out of the water by edging own boat away from it. It requires some gusto but technically it is not difficult at all. 'Scoop' eliminated virtually all effort out of lifting—all you need to do is support yourself against the hull of another boat much like you do against the deck of an uprighted kayak.

So there really is not much additional effort required to get the upside-down boat onto the rescuer's cockpit. This observation, combined with the need to flip the boat two extra times in the upright variety leads me to conclude that upside-down t-rescue is physically easier, not harder. I have absolutely no experience teaching the upside-down technique; however, when teaching the upright variety, one of the common sticking points is re-flipping the kayak upside-down once it is on the cockpit. Especially weaker people with shorter hands often struggle to reach around the bow to grab the keel for leverage. The weight of the kayak on your lap is not trivial.

When both methods are done right, the time savings of not uprighting and then re-flipping the kayak are small. First of all, uprighting does not cost any time as it should be done by the person in the water before rescue arrives. Secondly, with practice, re-flipping is a matter of seconds and is not worth considering when evaluating the pros and cons of the two techniques.

My next concern about working with upside-down kayak was the ability to use it for rescuer support as well as obtaining positive grip in order to manipulate it from parallel to perpendicular and back to parallel. I only tried rescuing the plastic Capella but both the support for leaning against it and the grip on the well-defined keel were unexpectedly solid. With outboard hand on the keel and inboard hand under the bow of the capsized kayak I felt very solid—no danger of capsizing onto the upturned kayak.

Rescuer flipping in the opposite direction, albeit less prevalent, is a real concern. It is unlikely you will be able to hold on to the hull of the boat you're rescuing if you capsize backwards. The hand under the bow is rather useless, it will probably instinctively let go in an attempt to seek support on the opposite side, or will simply be pried away by the rising gunwale of your own kayak. In other words, I would not count on it to save you.

So, overall, the verdict from the lab is slightly in favor of leaving the boat upside down. Surprisingly, it was not for the reasons of speed as expected. Gains in speed are negligible. We found a lot to like about the simplicity of the t-rescue and little to dislike about it. It is physically easier to do and non-meaningfully faster to top it off. It eliminates two flips from the process: one relatively easy (initial uprighting) and the second one which can challenge some paddlers in the beginning. The capsized boat was not the slippery elusive eel I expected it to be.

In the absence of volunteers to do t-rescues on the open icy water, at the moment, the comparison of the two techniques in rougher conditions will have to be postponed. I have some strong thoughts on how that will go but it'll the next post.

This article from Science News magazine might be of interest. If nothing else, it reenforces the value of lots of practice. The original has charts and photos.

Jim Tibensky

Elite athletes get their heads in the game

By Nick Bascom Science News January 14th, 2012; Vol.181 #1 (p. 22)

Superstar athletes are revered for their physical prowess, not for what goes on between their ears. And most postgame interviews do little to challenge the notion that athletes have more brawn than brains.

But brainpower has a vital role in elite sports performance, recent research shows.

“Brawn plays a part, but there’s a whole lot more to it than that,” says John Milton, a neuroscientist at the Claremont Colleges in California.

Whether on the court, field or course, the body depends on the brain for direction. But the brain is a busy taskmaster, with duties beyond guiding motion, making it difficult to focus on that particular job. Like chess masters and virtuoso musicians, superior athletes are better than novices at turning on just the parts of the brain relevant to the desired task, Milton’s work reveals. “In professionals, the overall brain activation is much lower, but certain connections are enhanced,” he says. In other words, experts employ only the finely tuned neural regions that help enhance performance, without getting bogged down by extraneous information.

Elite athletes’ ability to focus the brain might even explain their struggle to eloquently describe performance after the game. Like a starship captain diverting power from life support to bolster shields in a battle, professional athletes temporarily shut down the memory-forming regions of the brain so as to maximize activity in centers that guide movement.

“That’s why they usually thank God or their moms,” says cognitive psychologist Sian Beilock of the University of Chicago. “They don’t know what they did, so they don’t know what else to say.”

It’s not stupidity; it’s selectivity. And in the last few years scientists have been able to visually capture this concentrated, purposeful neural concert that takes place in the expert athlete’s brain. But even these vibrant brain scans reveal only part of the success story. Other recent studies demonstrate how athletes’ brains seamlessly interact with the muscular system to perfect and deploy movements — and how the athletic brain anticipates actions in advance and updates planned responses as needed.

By examining how such brain processes lead to excellence in sports, as well as what goes wrong when athletes blow it in the big game, scientists think they can enhance training techniques and improve performance under pressure.

In the zone

Using functional MRI scans to monitor blood flow in the brain, Milton and his colleagues have identified the regions essential for expert-level motor skill: the superior parietal and premotor areas. These regions, two of the brain’s motor centers, primarily move the body toward a visually perceived goal and direct complex motion. In brain scans of professional golfers planning a shot, these areas showed heightened activity, Milton and colleagues reported in 2007 in NeuroImage. In contrast, the study found that the brains of beginner golfers preparing a swing showed much more dispersed activity — especially pervasive in the basal ganglia and limbic system, regions of the brain that control emotions and make people consciously aware of their movements.

Such differences in brain activity reflect the players’ different concerns. “The novices were worried about all kinds of things — wind, water and sand,” Milton says. “The pro golfers just hit the ball.”

Yogi Berra once famously quipped that he couldn’t “think and hit at the same time,” and Milton believes that devoting too much conscious attention to swing mechanics could actually hurt performance, even among big leaguers. His research suggests that when professional golfers think too long about their shots, the athletes activate parts of their brains that they haven’t used during golf since first learning the game, throwing finely tuned sensorimotor pathways out of whack. “This is because the expert’s brain has already figured out the optimal solution, and anything they consciously change will disrupt that,” Milton says.

The experience of “being in the zone” could simply be what happens when the brain regions making athletes conscious of their movements are finally quieted and motor centers get free rein to guide the players to victory.

Such an ability to perform a complex motor task without thinking, also called automaticity, gives an athlete a big advantage in competition. But to access a complex movement subconsciously, the athlete must first rehearse the motion countless times in training, fully developing the nerve connections essential for expert muscle control. “Practice may not make perfect, but it makes permanent,” Milton says.

How close an athlete can get to perfection through training may be driven by attributes a person is born with. “It depends on the way the neurons connect to the muscles, and that can’t change,” says Daniel Wolpert of the University of Cambridge in England.

The way the nervous system interacts with the musculoskeletal system isn’t flawless. Transmission errors along the way serve as a sort of sensory static, or “noise,” that prevents the muscles from hearing the message the brain is sending. Static can also disrupt messages that sensory organs such as the eyes and skin send to the brain, leaving an athlete with a distorted image of the state of the game.

Players with less noise gumming up their sensorimotor systems are predisposed to athletic glory. With fewer disruptions, these athletes are able to elicit strong, fast muscle contractions that are incredibly accurate, cheating what scientists call the speed-accuracy, or energy-accuracy, trade-off. Unlike most people, expert athletes don’t have to slow down to improve their execution.

A lucky few are granted this genetic head start, but anyone can “train muscles and refine a way of moving that reduces the bad consequences of the noise that’s already there,” Wolpert says.

So training is not only about building bulk to overpower an opponent, but also about teaching more nerve and muscle fibers to work in unison to hone one’s movements. Scientists think brain cells known as mirror neurons may help.

The value of reflection

When a person watches someone else performing an action, the same neurons that would fire if the observer were replicating that action become active — even if that observer is standing completely still. This neural activity is the brain’s way of simulating the motion being witnessed, and can help an athlete reproduce those movements. Mirror neurons thus provide “a system for matching what you do with what you see others doing,” says Salvatore Aglioti of Sapienza University of Rome.

The mirror system may also mediate another important function in the athlete’s brain — anticipation. If mirror neurons are already simulating the motions of an opponent, an observing athlete might use information from those neurons to chart out the full course of the adversary’s motion. In sports where time is of the essence, the ability to predict a movement offers a major leg up.

Based on his knowledge of the mirror system, Aglioti hypothesized that athletes focus attention not solely on the ball, for example, but also on their opponents’ bodies to gain clues that will help in deciding whether to expend energy on a certain response. He studied how well expert basketball players, novices and expert watchers including coaches gauged the result of a free throw based solely on time-lapse photographs depicting various stages of another player’s shooting motion, reporting the findings in 2008 in Nature Neuroscience.“Compared to novices and scouts, elite athletes were better at predicting the outcome of a shot after watching the body motion of basketball players,” Aglioti says.

Expert cricket batters also appear to gain important information from the physical details of an opponent’s throwing motion, suggests a team of Australian researchers. After showing study participants sequential photographs of a bowler in motion, the scientists found that elite batters’ ability to predict the final location of a ball in flight was impaired when the researchers blocked out the arm or hand of the hurling bowler. Novices were equally bad at predicting where the ball was headed regardless of whether they could see the bowler’s arm or hand.

What’s more, anticipation abilities improved among expert batters when they were allowed to fully swing their bat while making a prediction, compared with predicting while standing still or while only completing the lower-body motion of a swing, the Australian team reported last year in Acta Psychologica. Novices’ predictive ability did not improve when they picked up the bat, suggesting that success in sports is partly dependent on how effectively the brain couples the body’s perceptive machinery to its motor processes.

Milton has suggested that athletes in all fast-ball sports — including baseball and tennis — anticipate where the ball is headed based on information derived from watching their opponents’ movements. What helps separate elite members of these sports from novices is a superior ability to sort out the relevant from the irrelevant physical cues.

Of course, once the brain gets the message, the body still has to react appropriately.

A model plan for the future

In the heat of the game, athletes have to process the sensory data they’re taking in to automatically deliver the best motor response. To save precious time while performing such calculations, the brain builds a virtual representation of the world so it can predict what might happen next, new research finds. Called “forward models,” these mental maps allow athletes to preplan “what they want to accomplish and how they’re going to accomplish it,” says Emanuel Todorov of the University of Washington in Seattle.

The brain readies commonly repeated actions in the motor cortex just like a torpedo is loaded into a firing bay. But the response action can’t fire until the command to act is given by the forward model. If an athlete’s forward model is working well, it determines the best countermove quickly, reducing delays in the body’s movement.

Because they provide reference data, previous experiences are essential for crafting forward models. For example, if tennis star Rafael Nadal hits the ball with heavy topspin towards Roger Federer, Federer’s brain computes bounce heights from previous topspin shots to determine how high the ball will bounce, so he can prepare a swing well before the ball rebounds off the ground.

Forward models aren’t set entirely in mental stone, however — a good thing, since rarely are multiple scenarios in sport exactly the same. The ball Nadal hits toward Federer might be slightly deflated or could glance off the baseline, causing the topspin shot to bounce lower than Federer would have predicted based solely on previous topspin shots. If Federer’s forward model didn’t make use of current sensory information to adjust predictions built on “priors” — the accumulated knowledge of all the topspin shots he has seen before — he wouldn’t be able to react on the fly when something unexpected happens.

The brain’s predictive machinery is constantly being updated with new sensory information as it executes a motion, a feedback loop that helps the body maintain control over its movement, Todorov says. “Given your goal, given where you currently are, the optimal feedback loop posits the best way to get there,” he says.

Todorov and other scientists are finding that athletes’ brains calibrate forward models in a manner consistent with Bayesian decision theory, a statistical approach that combines a continual stream of new information with previous beliefs. Because there is a level of uncertainty associated with sensory input, the brain has to decide whether it is going to rely more on the new data (which could be misleading) or on more credible (albeit potentially outdated) priors. Elite athletes, who have acquired more priors through frequent competition and practice and who have less noise in their sensory input and motor output, will have the edge, Todorov suggests.

Buckling under pressure

Even the best athletes, though, don’t always perform when the pressure is on.

“I don’t rattle, kid,” says Paul Newman, as Fast Eddie Felson, to another pool shark in The Hustler. Unfortunately for Eddie, this is true only when he heeds his own mantra and plays “fast and loose.” When he starts to let self-doubt and other concerns slow him down, his pool cue stops feeling like it has nerves in it and the balls stop dropping.

Fast Eddie and real-world athletes might choke when it matters most because the stress of the situation or outside life seeps in, Beilock and colleagues reported in May in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. The team is investigating what happens in the brains of athletes who fail to perform to their potential when the stakes are highest.

“In these stressful situations, athletes become worried about the situation and its consequences, and these worries disrupt ability to allocate attention to where they need it,” says Beilock.

Malfunctions of the prefrontal cortex, the center of the brain’s reasoning, emotional control and focusing abilities, are primarily to blame, Beilock says. Stress prompts the prefrontal cortex to try to control information that should be left outside of conscious awareness, causing what she calls “paralysis by analysis.”

Like Milton, Beilock studies golfers, and she has found that high levels of stress increase activation in the prefrontal cortex of experts, preventing scratch golfers from keeping their swings on autopilot. Such overanalyzing prevents the successful execution of fluid, habit-filled performances that should run automatically, she says.

When athletes think about mechanics too intensely, the pool cue, golf club or tennis racket can start to feel like a foreign and unwieldy instrument. Golfers prompted to weigh in on Tiger Woods’ struggles following his personal problems and hiatus from playing in tournaments seemed to recognize the influence of thinking too much. Bubba Watson publicly suggested that Woods was too mental with his swing, saying Woods should drop his swing coach and “just go out there and play golf.”

Though athletes can’t avoid stressful situations altogether, being aware of the effect of stress on brain-body communication and coordination can help enhance training sessions, Beilock suggests. By putting players in high-stress, gamelike scenarios in practice, coaches can help athletes stay cool during competition.

And since the brain chemistry elicited by intense competition translates to other stressful situations, Beilock believes choke-prevention techniques derived from her sports research could also give college students an edge at exam time or help postgraduates ace a job interview.

Whether competing on the court or in the classroom, recent discoveries suggest that the key to living up to the potential you’re born with is to train your brain well, and keep calm and focused. With such revelations as guidance, the coach of a faltering team might consider playing some En Vogue at halftime to get players in the right frame of mind. The ’90s pop group said it best: “Free your mind, and the rest will follow.”

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/337209/title/Brainy_Ballplayers

To Filp or Not To Flip: Optimize Your T-Rescue

by Haris

The winter has been very mild this year. Nevertheless, the kayak pool season is in full swing. To break up your roll-work an occasional sea kayaker's bread-and-butter—the T-Rescue or T-Recovery—is probably in order from time to time. So here's something to tinker with before you will have to take this tool out in the drink.

Most UK versions of this rescue I've seen, as well as the 'older' instructional documents, show the capsized kayak being picked up upside-down and drained immediately by the rescuer during the T stage (see Assisted Kayak Emptying section under Safety Basics).

Conversely, in most US sources, and in practice here in the Midwest, the standard seems to be to ask the capsized kayaker to upright their boat before the rescuers pull it onto their boat.

The upright version is so prevalent here in Chicago area that it did not even occur to me to question the practice. The alternative versions I've seen in book after book and on DVD after DVD just seemed old, odd, and … well … wrong.

So why DO we upright the boat before emptying it in a T-Rescue?  After I actually asked the question of myself, all of a sudden, this new practice seems somewhat paradoxical. I mean, why would you upright the boat only to flip it back upside-down in order to empty the water from the cockpit? Why not just lift the bow straight up from the water, drain the cockpit, and be done with it in one sweep? Without uprighting you eliminate two steps from the process. Makes sense, right!?

Questions, questions:

• Why do we waste precious time uprighting the boat when the cockpit is already pointing down, ready to be drained?
• What is gained by uprighting—an additional step in the process which needs to be undone once the kayak is on the rescuer's cockpit?
• What is lost, or what are the costs of uprighting?
• Are the gains of uprighting worth the cost?
• Are there circumstances when upright versus upside-down draining are more/less appropriate?
• Are there other ways to overcome the problems with upside-down draining without resorting uprighting that needs to be undone?

Next time you practice your T-Rescue (and practice you should) question the standard of 'here' and 'now.' And just in case you're itching to do it right away, here is a list of local pool sessions on CASKA calendar.

Don't forget to write back.

PS: Don't forget to renew your CASKA membership for 2012