ILCA Sailing Tips: How to Hike Better and More Efficiently
Efficient hiking is not just low shoulders. The key is moving body mass outboard and getting knees closer to the gunwale for more righting moment.
Improve your upwind speed in the breeze by adjusting your body position to get more out of your hiking. One of the first things we do at clinics is figure out how each sailor can tweak hiking position and posture.
The most important factor in hiking is not necessarily how low you can put your shoulders to the water, though that can contribute. It is how close you can get your knees to the gunwale edge.
This is directly related to righting moment. Technique, sail settings, and fitness all contribute to average speed, but in windier conditions, sailors with better hiking position have much less weather helm.
The lever arm
Consider the edge of the boat as the fulcrum and your body as the lever arm producing effort. The effect of hiking can be measured as force on the gunwale edge. It is maximized by shortening the distance and amount of body weight inside the cockpit and increasing body mass on the opposite side of the fulcrum, over the water.
This lever arm should increase the pressure you feel on your hiking pads as they connect to the boat. For a six-foot, 180-pound sailor, every inch outboard is roughly seven pounds of righting moment. There is often an “aha” moment when the sailor realizes that is what hiking is meant to feel like.
Hiking strap setup
We often see sailors who can drop their shoulders and appear to hike hard, but their quadriceps are hardly activated. They are mostly using core muscles to stay upright. Once we determine physiological restrictions such as height, leg length, calf thickness, and fitness, we adjust the hiking strap to maximize the lever arm by getting knees as close as physically possible to the edge without losing partial calf contact with the grab rails inside the cockpit.
Sometimes this requires a very loose hiking strap that can be pulled outboard with slight ankle flexion. That can gain an extra one to three inches of center of body mass further outboard.
If the strap is too loose, your calves elevate too much, putting strain on the knees and forcing unwanted hinging in the lower back. You need strong quadriceps, hip flexors, core, and glutes to keep your butt high enough from the water. This has to be built up as the muscles strengthen and adapt to the loads. Injury can occur if the strap is loosened too quickly and the muscles are not strong enough.
Pro tip
In the lulls, shift your feet to the front of the hiking strap, near the main block, for a tighter setting and more connection. In bigger breeze, shift aft toward the middle of the cockpit for the looser strap setting and hike off the widest part of the boat.
Tweaking hiking-strap tension can take years of experimentation. Within minutes at a clinic, we can usually diagnose hiking weaknesses and suggest simple adjustments for new settings.
