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How to Turn Your SUP With Power And Style

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Turning is a surprisingly under-rated skill in stand-up paddleboarding. Supboardguide.com coach Bill Dawes breaks it down and teaches you how to turbo-charge your turns…

All too many paddlers never really get around to learning how to turn their board properly – often because they make the mistake of assuming that better turning means having to step back and sink the tail. Which seems scary and wobbly, and quite likely to end up with a dunking.

However, there are actually many turning techniques in stand up paddleboarding which don’t require any foot movement at all. Indeed, you can turn any general purpose recreational iSUP through a full 180 degrees with literally just one paddle movement, whether you’re stationary or moving forward.

It’s a whole lot easier to see than to describe, so do check out our video on youtube accompanying this article. As you’ll see, a well executed paddle turn is powerful, dynamic – and a whole lot of fun! It’s also surprisingly physical. You’re cranking literally as hard as you can.

So let’s break turning down, and build up a better understanding of what’s actually going on. The great thing about learning to turn properly is that it can be approached in a series of relatively small steps, which on their own are easy to master. Fast turning is within the reach of any recreational paddler, it doesn’t require any extra skills, coordination or panther-like balancing abilities.

Terminology

Or should that be ‘turninology?’ (Any more like that and you’re fired! Ed). Poor-quality puns notwithstanding, it’s important to understand that there is no standard nomenclature for turns, so you may well find the same turning technique given a different title depending on where in the world you encounter it and who’s teaching it. I’m fully guilty of this, and have probably muddied the waters even further with my own set of names. So if you recognise one of the turns described here by a different name, please feel free to stick with your own terminology!

The Basic Beginner Turns

The first turn most people learn is essentially just a normal paddle stroke done a bit wider. The further the blade engages away from the side of the board, the more your stroke becomes a turning stroke. It works, but it’s a fairly slow and inefficient way of turning, and usually takes a good many strokes to actually turn the board around.

Likewise, the first reverse turn most people learn is simply a back paddle. Put the blade in somewhere behind the feet and pull it forward. Again, it works, but it’s limited. Indeed, this is actually a dangerously ineffective stroke in windy conditions. If you’re trying to turn the board around to bring the nose up into the direction of the wind, back-paddling won’t actually turn the board at all; the wind will cancel out any actual turning effect, and all that will happen is that you go backwards. You may already have experienced this.

So if this is where you currently are with your turning, it’s highly advisable that at very least, you progress your turning skills beyond this point, and learn to do proper sweep turns (which, for the kayak purists, is a turn done with a sweep stroke).

Dab Strokes

The big mistake that people make when trying to do a sweep stroke is that they are still essentially doing a paddle stroke. You need to disengage from this completely. The first thing I do when instructing someone on how to do a proper sweep stroke is focus on the pure act of turning; using the paddle just to push the nose of the board in the direction that you want it to turn, with absolutely no forward propulsion at all. Completely disengaging the turn from the act of paddling. I like to call these ‘dab strokes’ – place the blade of the paddle in the water up by the nose, and then just push out, at 90 degrees to the board.

You’re literally pushing the nose in the direction you want it to go. Small, repeated dabs. It sounds so easy but it’s surprisingly hard to break away from the act of paddling! Just don’t let that paddle blade start creeping back towards your feet.

Sweep Turns

Once you’ve got the hang of ‘dabs’ and are purely moving the nose around, then you can extend the stroke a bit further round. Keep focussing on pushing the blade out and away from the board, but allow it to start coming around, so you’re sweeping the paddle blade in a big wide arc from the nose to the tail. “Drawing rainbows”, as a youngster I was teaching called it. Which I liked a lot. But they need to be big wide rainbows; you must focus on getting that paddle blade a long way out from the board. As far as possible. Literally. Push the paddle out with both hands, extend it away from your body. Get lower; this also enables you to get that blade further out.

You can turbocharge your turn further by either coiling or uncoiling the upper body. There are two schools of thought on this, and essentially they both work. Traditionally in boardsports, the rule is that you turn your head to look where you want to go. This naturally generates turning force through your body into the board. However, the problem with doing this in a sweep turn is that you can’t see what your blade is doing, so it often ends up riding up out of the water in the latter half of the turn. The alternative is to track the blade with your head, turning it so that you’re always looking at the blade, and this very noticeably allows the shoulders and hips to open up too. This may seem counterintuitive as it seems to be asking the feet to twist the board in the opposite direction to where you want it to go, but it still seems to work really well and makes it easier to really stretch out into the turn.

Even if you consider yourself well beyond needing to work on such a basic turn as the forward sweep, take the time to revisit it and ensure that you’re really getting maximum crank out of it. Can you get lower? Can you push the blade further away? Is the blade properly submerged for maximum grip? Try tracking with your head (both ways), and see what works for you.

Reverse Sweep Turns

Once you’ve got it nailed, the next stage is the reverse sweep.

Get that paddle blade in as far back as possible. Really reach right round and back; try and get the blade in beside the very back of your board. Once again, start by just doing dabs. Push that tail away. Don’t let the paddle come forward at all, not one inch. The blade should only be moving out from the tail. Once you can do those properly, extend it out to the full sweep. And then try to turbocharge your sweeps in exactly the same way; get lower, twist your shoulders and hips, really power that paddle blade around.

Rudder Turns

The next family of turns to explore and master are where we use our paddle blade as a rudder. This is a great skill to have, and one that will be a whole new style of turning for many.

You probably know what a rudder is; a control surface at the rear of a boat or plane that gets pushed out into the water flow or air flow, in order to cause the craft to turn. To be clear, we’re talking about when the craft is moving. Rudders don’t create a turn by themselves, there needs to be that water flow or air flow pushing upon the control surface to make the turn happen.

We can use our paddle blade to create a rudder effect. However, we do a ‘forward rudder’, putting the paddle blade into the water up front by the nose, to make a rudder turn happen, because it works much better than putting the paddle into the water back at the tail. The tail of the board is locked onto course by the fins, so it’s much easier to make things happen by redirecting the nose.

However, there’s one major trick to rudder turns. To actually get enough paddle blade surface working against the flow of the water, you need to twist your hips right round so that the paddle blade crosses over the board’s nose and goes into the water on the other side. This takes a bit of working out. It is all explained in the video, and makes much more sense when you actually see it.

When you’re cruising along with some decent speed, a well placed rudder turn – literally just putting the paddle blade into the water and holding it there – will steer your board through 180 in one smooth arc. It’s an extremely satisfying turn to pull off. However, it takes practice to work out exactly where to put the blade. Too close to the nose, and you don’t get much turn. Too far round, and it puts the brakes on too much. Mess around, and find out what works, and how you can adjust the turn to speed up the turn rate or keep your speed higher.

Draw Strokes

Once you’ve developed this skill, you’ve well on the water to mastering another; the art of the draw stroke. You can do this either static or while moving. Again, set up exactly like for a rudder turn; take your paddle blade over to the other side of the nose and into the water. But now, pull the blade towards the nose. Short strokes just like the dab strokes we did earlier, except this time you are PULLING the nose where you want it to go, instead of PUSHING. That’s the fundamental difference. And for various reasons of physics that we don’t need to worry about here, the nose tend to respond much better to pulling than pushing.

Again, it takes practice to work out exactly where to put the paddle, and how much to draw. Also the direction in which to draw your blade. You will usually find that pulling it in and slightly forward towards the nose helps increase the turn rate.

Cross Bow Turns

Now you can put it all together. Whether you’re stationary or moving, take your paddle over the nose and plant the blade into the water on the other side as far as you can twist around. Then pull it towards the nose of your board, allowing it to jump over the nose, and continuing with a full sweep turn on the other side. Doing this will not only power you round a fully cranked high speed turn, but you also exit with plenty of speed too.

On a board of around 11’6 or shorter, this is actually the very fastest turn you can do. For sure, a well performed pivot turn will spin the board around much quicker, but the rider still needs to get back to the tail to make it happen, then get forward again afterwards, and accelerate away. The cross-bow turn takes less time overall because it starts pretty much instantly, and has more exit speed.

To turbo-charge your crossbow turns even further, get lower, and most importantly, don’t let that paddle rise up. The whole paddle needs to be low down, parallel to the water and close to it too. Push the handle down. If you let the handle come up, your blade is not working properly.

Another good tip is to keep your head up. It’s all too easy to end up looking down at the turn, but if you want to maintain stability, keep looking up and out of the turn.

On longer boards it helps to get the nose up and out of the water, so stepping back with your inside foot as you rotate your hips to bring the paddle round across the nose to initiate the turn, helps get your weight back and lift that nose. This does require exquisite timing though, so it definitely takes some practice.

So there’s your challenge for your next session on the water – get out there and work on turbo-charging those turns! We hope you found this article useful, and once again we’d really recommend that you take the time to watch the video, as it will all make so much more sense when you actually see it happening.

Bill Dawes has been coaching SUP at all levels for 15 years, during which time he has built up a vast amount of knowledge and experience in understanding how to teach the sport. Check out his other videos on our channel, which cover everything from beginner mistakes to advanced paddling technique.

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SupBoardGuide

Heyo! At SupBoardGuide.com we are a team who love the water, the outdoors, and are more than grateful that our full-time job allows us to review stand up paddle boards. We paddle year round (it helps that we are just about 2 hours outside of Las Vegas), and we bring in a wide range of paddlers with the goal of providing our readers with the best, most in-depth, and accurate stand up paddle board reviews.

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