Turning your Board: The Sweep Stroke

Hi. I'm Jimmy Blakeney with Paddling.com Standup here to talk to you about the great sport of stand up paddleboarding. In this video, we're going to talk about how to turn our board.

When we turn our board, we use what's called a sweep stroke. Sweep stroke is the basic turning stroke that you use. A sweep stroke can be either a forward sweep, where it's going from the nose, or a reverse sweep, where it's starting at the tail. Either way, here's an easy way to break it down for you so you can start to develop good technique for turning.

First thing is, unlike a forward stroke, we're going to bend our knees a little bit more. I'm going to rotate my hips and shoulders, plant the blade fully in the water before I pull, that's the number one rule of paddling. I'm going to push the paddle away from the board in this case. When it gets to my hip, I take it out.

For a reverse sweep, I rotate my hips and shoulders, plant the blade fully in the water, push the paddle blade away from the board.

So, for our sweep stroke, we're going to use this stroke if we want to stop or turn around. The key sweep for stopping is the reverse sweep. So I call this putting on the brakes. Rotate, plant, push the paddle away from the board. Right? That's going to quickly start to slow you down and turn the nose of the board.