I cheerfully admit to being a beginner skater. Oh, right, I've passed Basic 8 and got stuffed into Freestyle 1, but I always felt my basic skills were weak and....sloppy. I can do them, but they're nothing to be proud of.
You can be both cute and sloppy. But only when you're young
So, initially I tried to get my coaches to 'fix' my weak skills. That didn't work. Then last summer at Lake Placid, I went to Coach Amazing and said, "Rebuild my crossovers."
She got a big smile on her face. Finally, a student without ego!
I had strong crossovers, but they weren't smooth or with an underpush and attempts by other coaches to tweak them hadn't worked. So in a half hour Coach Amazing rebuilt them into what they are today. I'm still working on the consistency of my Twinkle Toes Maneuver, but they're smooth and powerful. (During my last lesson Dance Coach kept me going around and around the center circle doing crossovers while he stood silently by. Finally I stopped, "What's wrong with them?" He frowned, "Nothing, I was enjoying watching them." Well, yes, that made my day.)
This has become my mantra for my weak skills: Rebuild, don't fix. For my weak skills on my goal card, I plan to rebuild them from scratch as if I had never learned them before. This is my way of breaking bad habits, and constructing skills with the skating knowledge I didn't have when I first learned them.
Now, I'm working on rebuilding my Mohawks with Coach Cruella. She started with the inside edge with bent knee, then bring the free foot to the instep and go even deeper in the knee.
A light went on in my head!
Oh, THAT's what I'm supposed to do?
For years I'd been unconsciously treating the mohawk like you do a 3 turn--down, up, down--and Coach Cruella said it was down, then down deeper. No wonder my mohawks are hoppy! There's still some ways to go; my mohawks aren't as strong as my crossovers, but progress is being made. I suspect other coaches have taught me the same thing, but until I was recommitted to rebuilding the skill--as if I had never learned it before--was I able to break a bad, unconscious habit.
I was deeply affected by a group lesson given by a coach at Lake Placid when she started her mohawks class with a motivational speech. "Basics are critical." She said, "I'll get a student in who comes and says 'I'm having trouble with my flip.' Then she'll do this..." The coach stepped into an awkward forward crossover. "And I have to say to her, ' Whoooa! Maybe we should step back from that flip and work on your crossovers."
I don't want to be that student, so absorbed in some advanced element, that I don't realize that I don't have control of my basic elements. I suspect that coaches casually eying a skater look at those skating skills with a critical eye, and rate that student accordingly.
My GOAL for now is nailing my skating skills solid. No excuses. No spinning in the corner. No self absorbed pursuit of 'fun' in skating. I want to be a skilled skater. A REAL skater.
Coach Cruella and I started private lessons this week. I want to improve my skills, but as I'll post tomorrow, sometimes you have to go back to the beginning to fix bad habits and relearn stuff. So I took 10 minutes and created a 3x5 card with my skills on them divided into sections. I think this is a worthwhile exercise for anyone in any sport or long time endeavor. I gave it to Coach Cruella for her reference.
I divide my skating world into four divisions: Weak Skills, No Skills, Goal Skills, Improvement Skills.
Weak Skills
Mohawks -- I have the hoppy ones :-(
Back Edges--lack of power
FI3--can only do them from a stop
Back Cross CCW
FO3 at speed
Improvement Skills
Power
Crossovers--The Twinkle Toes Maneuver isn't consistent
Back Chasse'--Short, no power
Swingrolls -- Extension needs to be higher
Checking
No Skills
BO3
Choctaw
Goal Skills
Rocker
Counter
Bracket
I plan to lay out a chart to track all my skills from the most basic to the most complex so I can treat them like a process chart. Unfortunately, my experience with figure skating is most books are worthless, and the DVDs are jargon filled and require you to already know what they're talking about. Maybe if I can break each skill down into a chart, I can get a better mental grip on them. This Goal Card is just a start.
"Don't jerk your foot like that." Dance Coach has the frowny face as he watches me do the Evil Step Behind from Rhythm Blues. If I'm not paying attention, when I bring the front foot up, I do it too quickly (just to get the thing over with) and my upper body will rock slightly in response.
Ah, yes. Move. Smooth. It's more than just style points. There's actual physics involved.
Since I'm a beginner, up to this point, most of my skating problems have been soluble by thinking about my center of gravity. It's not until I got to the Evil Step Behind that I run into more complicated concepts.
For those of you pursuing Freestyle, I'd better explain The Evil Step Behind. Think of it as a back cross roll, without the back, or the roll. You skate forward, bring the free foot in front, then gracefully (this is ice dance) move it so it crosses behind the skating foot, to the opposite side, and switch feet so the free foot is now the skating foot. You don't 'roll' so there's not any margin of error of skate placement. This is usually the make or break point for adult ice dancers. And it's in a beginner dance. Fortunately, Coach Amazing helped me past this point with her advice to Point.That.Toe. Now, I have to achieve consistency and 'pretty skating'.
What happens when you too quickly move your foot up ahead of you, either in the first step or subsequent steps? Well, there's a disturbance in the Force. And that disturbance is called jerk. I do not make these names up.
What happens when that front foot snaps up too quickly is that your foot accelerates up, then suddenly stops. The rate of change of acceleration abruptly goes from something to nothing. You get a physical jerk, hence the name.
When you stop that foot too quickly the rest of your body has to respond to the resulting release of force. A beginner skater like me wobbles in the upper body to keep from falling. This doesn't happen when you're standing on the ground, but when you're in skates, you're on the rocker. Your stability is lessened and the upper body is sensitive to sudden changes in acceleration. Even small changes in acceleration such as from a badly done step behind can cause a wobble in the upper body. (More experienced skaters don't have this problem, as they have better body control and years of practice. This is a beginner problem. )
The solution to this is to Move.Smooth. The motion of raising the foot from the ice and bringing it to a stop has to be done so that there's a slow change in acceleration. It should be like stopping a car when your elderly great grandmother is sitting beside you. Don't just 'step on the brake' to stop. Plan that stop so it feels like a soft pillow gently being put on a sofa. Same thing with the step behind. Raise it (increase the acceleration from zero to something), then bring it to a stop in a planned manner. Smoothly.
Interestingly, in the early rocket programs of the 50's and 60's jerk caused the destruction of many rockets. Here's some motivational video of rockets exploding.
1. Disbelief
"You want me to do what with my foot and put it where while I'm doing this with my arms?"
2. Disorganization
"Okay, I got my foot there, now why can't I do that at the same time?"
3. Denial
"I don't care what coach says, nobody over the age of 9 can learn this."
4. Deliberation
"Well, maybe if I alter my hip position, thus, and add a little upper body swing...."
5. Dominate the Move!
"Ta-Da!"
6. Disbelief
"What does coach mean it's not perfect? Coaches, they're never happy."
Starting after Thanksgiving I'll be doing a series on skating protection, starting with "The Pad in the Hat". Hope everyone has a happy and safe holiday!
As a beginning skater I was able to get through learn to skate with only a moderate amount of extension and toe point. Then in ice dance I ran into the screeching wall of EVIL DEATH called the Rhythm Blues.
It is the third in the beginners dances, all forward steps, with one little trick to it. In the end pattern you skate forward and step behind your skating foot with your free foot.
See 00:15 for the beginning of the EVIL Step Behind
The picture to the left represents my expression the first time I did the step behind. OMG, there's so many things that can go wrong. Let me count the ways:
1. You can step on the blade of the skating foot--and fall backwards
2. You can jam the free foot toe pick into the ice behind the skating foot--and fall backwards
3. You can be moving the free foot behind the skating foot--and fall backwards
4. You can just raise your free foot up a tiny bit and fall backwards.
Then I went to Lake Placid Adult Skate Camp and took a lesson from Coach Amazing. She had me doing the step behind in 15 minutes. The points that I took away with me were: keep the thighs together (no wide stepping, no swinging) and when you bring the free foot forward POINT. THAT. TOE! Suddenly I was doing the step-behinds. After a half hour they ceased to be scary. What was going on?
I did a little experimenting with this. First I exaggerated flexing the foot. I stood on one foot, bringing the free foot forward and FLEXed the free foot. I felt a pull up the back of my free leg, through my glues and to my lower back. Since my center of mass is just below my belly button, that leg is acting as a lever arm pulling me backwards. Don't want to go there. I point the toe, point it with all my heart. Now the pull is on the front of the leg and up to my core. The pull is now pulling me slightly forward over the middle of my skating foot. That's where I want to be.
Here's what I think is going on. When I point the toe I'm keeping my balance forward over the blade because all the muscles in the front of my body are active and the muscles in the back of my body are more relaxed. Being centered and stable reduces stray movements that can cascade into losing my balance and falling backwards when I move the free foot back. I could certainly do the step behinds with a flexed foot, but as beginning skater I would end up very subtly rocking to the back of the blade, thus creating a potential for falling backwards.
So the test for me was to use POINT. THAT. TOE. on inside swing rolls. The first time I tried this (pointing my toe with all the fierce force fervently forward) I sat on that inside edge like I was riding a rail. Excellent! I was channeling Maia Usova!
Now when my foot is forward or back and extended, my toe pointing is as hard as I can make it. So far so good. At some point I may run into a case where POINT. THAT. TOE should be point. that. toe. but by then my skating skills will be better and I'll be able to judge what level of effort to use.
Yes, that's scary and it prevented me from progressing on a lot of elements. I needed to be on the middle of the blade for 3 turns, mohawks and every other move, but my body was having none of it.
Until I took up Ice Dance no coach had ever made me fix this. You know how it is in lessons, there's so many things to learn (*cough* fix *cough*) that even important, singularly critical instructions from your coach can zip through the air, bounce off your ears, and never reach the brain. Then one day Dance Coach put on the Russian Coach Frowny Face (trademark). "Don't skate on your heel," he said with such bossy Russian accented authority that it penetrated the outer ear and made it to my brain.
And then came the problem, I had to figure out how to not do that. Sometimes I could get it and sometimes not. I tried various things that ended up with me bending too far forward to get my center of mass over the blade. I think for a while I got worse.
I don't know how I got to the solution, maybe coach said it in bossy voice and it only penetrated my consciousness later, but the solution is: Bend the knee, and Bend the ankle.
How hard can it be to bend the ankle? Well, pretty hard in stiff boots. And as a beginning skater I needed to hear: BEND.THE.ANKLE. Which is the emphasis it deserves.
It wasn't easy for me to get to the point where I could consistently bend the ankle and get well tied boots. I could consciously know what to do, but my foot in boot wouldn't cooperate. So I tackled it like an engineer.
Yep, I kept changing stuff until I found something that worked. Here's my solution, I redid the way I tied my boots to free up the ankle without losing support.
This is how I used to tie my boots, with the official Maribel Vinson Owens surgeon's knot at the ankle.
Knot once, knot twice and finis!
But Maribel was skating in boots from a different time. Perhaps the boots in her era weren't as stiff as the ones of today, or she was so powerful that she could skate in a stiffer boot. I'm a fragile and delicate flower I need a little slack.
Step 1. I stopped tying a knot at the ankle to give the ankle freedom to bend.
Well, as in all engineering problems changing one thing just introduces problems somewhere else. In my case it was that I was now pulling the lacing on the lower boot tighter and my foot began to hurt. But I needed the extra support since the knot wasn't there to hold my heel in. Then luck stepped in. I came across the video below. At 00:45 the host introduces a new way to tighten laces, pull down toward the blades rather than up. And it worked! I now had enough support in the boot that they didn't slip around and I didn't need the ankle knot AND my feet stopped hurting when I skated.
Step 2: Tighten by pulling down.
Now all I had to worry about is the lacing above the ankle. Over the hooks or Under the hooks. I don't make a decision, I do both. Under on the bottom two, over on the second two, under on the top and tie off. That sill leaves the top hooks. I don't lace these, I use Katz Straps (these get a post on their own) or heavy duty pony tail holders. Elastic at the top give enough 'give' to get over the blade, but are secure enough to feel safe.
Step 3: Under/over/under. Elastic at the top.
Even with an engineering fix it took me a couple of months to reeducate my body and develop new skills. Then one day I realized I could put myself on any part of the blade whenever I wanted. Success! I had freedom at the ankle to move, and security in the boot to not move. Freedom and security, it's like a party platform running up to a Presidential election!
