Practice Thread

[antmanb]

Yesterday's practice went ok - jumps were ok but both loop and flips were giving me fits and getting me incredibly frustrated so coach moved me on to field moves and turns, she went for all of the turns that I usually struggle with for various mental block reasons (BI 3s, BO double 3s, FI Rocker pattern) and weirdly all of them were working really well. I was totally amazed.

The FI rockers are done on a serpentine pattern, LFO 3 turn, push on RBO and cross, step onto RFI edge RFI rocker on the axis, push onto LBO edge, cross, step onto LFI edge, LFI rocker and repeat. Usually the RFI goes all sorts of wrong, I break at the waist, and turn the foot too far out and don't push onto the correct pattern so i'm all over the place to try and do the turn but things were working well. A few of them were clearly RFI 3s with a quick edge change, but I cleaned them up to basically be proper rockers.

I haven't managed to get through that pattern for months but I managed it and it was the last thing we did so I left the ice feeling positive.

 

[antmanb]

Me again! I am loving having flexitime at work it means I get to leave early and avoid the traffic and have a proper practice now rather than a rushed session.

Last night went really well - having the extra time means that I get to warm up slowly with stroking and exercises to get my knees and body working properly. My friend was on the session about 15 minutes after I got there so we worked together and did all of our 3 turns forward, backward, inside and outside, taught each other some moves that each of our coaches likes, then decided to jump. It was really helpful sharing tips from our different coaches. She managed to get me to land my loop on one foot so I was very pleased.

Then it was lesson time and we did some of the moves I was too scared to do without someone able to watch my back earlier so back change of edge patterns and back cross rolls (which are still rubbish).

We moved onto jumps and I managed to land a couple of loops on one foot along with one ugly as sin salchow-loop combination but I muscled it out and landed on one foot.

Managed to eventually land a flip on one foot but our focus this week was on picking in further back. I have a habbit of letting the picking in foot start creeping back towards the skating foot and then planting the pick and letting the foot go down onto the edge as i'm jumping rather than coming up properly off the toe pick. So in making sure I stretch as far as I can and planting the top toe pick down, i'm obviously bending my skating leg much more, and I was consciously putting the toe in with a bit more force the jump was absolutely huge and scared the hell out of me. I had done the full rotation by the time I was at the top of the jump and over-rotated every attempt I made so i'm going to need to play around with it to figure out timing on it but I clearly don't need to bring my arms in much if the jump stays that size.

Anyway that was all good progress - spins were all working fairly well, and I was totally tired out and sweating by the end of the session so I was really happy.

 

[bladesofgorey]

congrats! Sounds like you had some breakthroughs.

 

[Bunny Hop]

Asked coach if we could work on bits of the Fourteen Step. We worked on the end pattern and I did the cross behind all but the first time we tried. Cross behinds are my nemesis (I blame Rhythm Blues), so I am ridiculously thrilled by this achievement!

In other news the WTF-Cover-Versions craze has reached our rink. Someone was skating to an orchestral version of 'Take On Me' today.

 

[antmanb]

There's a girl at our rink skating to the most awful recoding of a song from the Greatest Showman soundtrack - it starts quietly and builds to a sound system wrecking crescendo at the end. It's not like her coach doesn't know it gets louder, why they can just play the whole think more quietly i'll never know. I made my coach laugh by attempting to do a toe-loop with my fingers in my ears...I only made it through the three turn and until my toe picked in before I pulled them out, but she was impressed that I controlled the landing enough to put my fingers back in my ears on an extended RBO edge

Also I had a great lesson where I even landed a flip on one foot!

 

[Bunny Hop]

Coach and I kept having to move out of range of the speakers on a recent lesson so we could hear each other because the music was so loud. I am convinced all young people are half deaf because if it sounds loud to me then it should by rights sound ridiculously loud to them.

 

[misskarne]

Coach and I just skate over and she turns down the music to an acceptable level. Unless it's on a phone then she hands it to me to turn down to an acceptable level. Luckily most people don't blare their music at my rink though.

First skate back from my trip and first lesson back from my trip, we did jumps because I was dying to jump. Salchow was just a pile of garbage, toe loops were good, I did a couple of severely under-rotated loops (but I managed to get my body in somewhat the right position which is always a challenge on a loop for me), and then worked my way up to some one-footed UR flips. I felt it in every joint of my body the next day, but it was so good!

 

[antmanb]

Well I had six weeks off the ice initially for holidays and then because I have had an unexplained knee injury.

Four physio sessions later - he checks the knee every time and says it's fine it's the muscles that connect into it from the top that are causing the issue- and i'm walking pain free so I risked a trip to the rink yesterday.

Stroking was fine, I spent a long time just stroking around the rink slowly going lower and getting my knees bent. I was scared to stop because I didn't want to put too much pressure through the right knee to stop, but it was ok. I did some two foot slaloms and swizzles and the knee felt fine. I moved on to Forward outside then inside edges and they were fine, tried back outside edges, but the strike from the right foot to go onto a LBO edge caused a little bit of discomfort in the knee so I stopped. I managed forward outside change of edges and then inside change of edges.

Decided that was plenty for my first session back and left it there.

I'm still walking pain free today so it's good that I haven't aggravated it.

 

[Theoreticalgirl]

@antmanb I'm having a knee issue that sounds similar to yours. You may want to have your doc check to see if you did anything to the popliteal tendon (which is what happened to me). I'm recovering well, but struggling with crossovers in certain directions only on account of the injury. Wearing a compression sleeve while skating helps a lot for me.

 

[antmanb]

Thanks @Theoreticalgirl i'll ask the physio (I haven't seen a doctor because I didn't want to wait for three weeks). I have issues with how talkative and unprofessional the physio i'm seeing is, but since i'm having success with his treatments, i'm biting my tongue and trying to stop myself from slapping him. But I will ask about this. I'm hoping next week i'll have my final session with him...maybe one more once I resume normal gym training just to see.

ETA: I've just read about the popliteal tendon and it seems this is at the back of the knee and causes pain in the back of the knee. The pain I experience is in the front and quite high up on the knee.

 

[antmanb]

Well my knee has been fine all week so I went to the rink last night and tested it out a lot more. I did all the 3 turns, forwards, backwards, inside and outside and the knee felt ok (the BI turns were dreadful but that's a different problem). Changes of edge outside to inside and vice versa, forwards and backwards and everything was fine.

I didn't get any pain from striking forcefully onto back edges. I tried a few spin entrances to see if the transition from RBI to LFO edge cause pain and it didn't so I did lots of forward spins.

At the very end of the session I wanted to see how jumps felt so I warmed up just by doing some small jumped backwards swizzles. That felt fine to I moved onto holding a landing edge and hopping, progressively doing bigger hops. Everything felt fine to I did small from standing waltz jumps that felt fine so I built them up a little bit but not to full speed. In the end I got salchow and toe-loop out and even got a small crappy loop on one foot, although I did step out of it fairly quickly.

Today my knee feels fine - a little stiff but so is the other one so I think it's general skating stiff and not injury stiff

 

[misskarne]

Thursday I had an excellent practice, worked out the revamped version of my ChSq, and managed to do it complete without dying.

Woke up Friday morning very stiff, and Saturday morning too, so no practices since. If I can get a skeleton run-through (no jumps/spins) done on Monday, I can probably enter the competition. I am quite determined to.

 

[misskarne]

Skeleton run-through completed. I did not die. Marked jumps and spins, but completed choreography to music, and with enough energy that I think I'll be fine with the jumps. Just checking the regs to make sure my planned layout is acceptable.

 

[misskarne]

Another good practice tonight, this time with a mostly run-through - all four jump attempts and one spin (not the other). And I didn't die.

With that said...I suspect it may be smarter to only do the technical competition and not the artistic competition. (Of course, it actually would probably be smartest to do the artistic and not the technical - less jumps - but my current artistic is very fast). I had my heart set on both, but if I'm not doing proper runthroughs by this stage in the game - and entries close tomorrow - it's probably not a good idea.

Also slightly annoyed because I thought the rink would be open for practice on Saturday morning. Nope.

 

[misskarne]

Full costume/hair runthrough complete! No major issues. One of my jewelled flowers came half-unstuck so I'll just wield the fabric glue on it and get it sorted.

Interesting that my brain seemed to react with "hair done, makeup on, dress on IT MUST BE COMPETITION TIME TO GET NERVOUS". Good challenge for my runthrough, but I made it through with only a two-foot landing on the flip and a slip off the CUSp.

Maybe I should do the CUSp first, come to think of it.

 

[Bunny Hop]

I started to learn forward inside counters today. Happy to be adding to the long list of things I can do whilst hanging on to my coach.

 

[antmanb]

I left my skates in the car yesterday all day while I was in work and they felt too soft by the time I was skating in them - I never got them to feel right the whole session so everything felt a little bit off.

I'm still working back and through a knee injury so overall there was a lot of careful (and often bad skating).

One of the highlights was after struggling to get spins working and getting up and over the spinning foot properly I started hitting them. I managed to get a camel going out of sheer frustration I pulled really hard with my left arm and really got over the left side and got several fast-for-me rotations in position. Next we tried a camel-sit, and after a couple of shaky revolutions in the camel I really swung my free leg through and got down to the sit position in one revolution and it sped up and I held it, and got a controlled upright on the end. I have literally never managed to do the whole thing under control. Admittedly the sit part would never actually be called a sitspin, but the whole combination worked so I'll take that as pretty much the only win of the session.

 

[misskarne]

Last Monday my kneecap was tracking awkwardly after the comp so I asked my coach to teach me a new turn I'd never tried before. We did practice brackets, mostly on two feet. Quite fun, I'll have to keep practicing them.

Tonight I felt good so we jumped. My Salchow is still giving me problems, but I landed good toe loops and one or two decent flips, and even managed to awkwardly hop a few loop jumps (they're really hops in place, to be honest). I want to focus on getting the flip consistently around and on one foot before the next comp, because I'm really close.

 

[Spun Silver]

I just started learning to skate five weeks ago and if anyone can remember back to their early days, I would really appreciate some advice about NERVES. This week I found I did the same moves as well as I'm capable of while practicing alone one day (I had the whole rink to myself for 20 minutes!) while doing them much worse in a lesson, with a few other skaters on the ice, two days later. My ankles shake, my knees wobble, my heart races, and everything feels more out of control. Today I realized I was holding my breath which could have something to do with it. I'm very affected by the presence of other people, even if my rational mind tells me they could care less what I'm doing. My coach says this is normal for all skaters, even elite ones. Opinions? Advice? I'd appreciate it!

 

[antmanb]

@Spun Silver unfortunately I don't have any advice, just solidarity that that is exactly how I felt when I started too. Even now I sometimes abort an element or exercise/pattern because I think someone is too close to me despite my coach keeping an eye out for me when i'm doing things and saying it was fine.

Nowadays if the rink is crowded I find that most of my mental energy goes to looking out for other skaters and I don't skate as well because i'm not concentrating on the things i'm trying to do (unless it's stuff I can do without really thinking).

As your confidence and ability improves (and for me the key was learning to stop or change direction quickly that improved this) so will your nerves about being on the rink with other skaters.

One great piece of advice I was given when I was a beginner was that I had a tendency to find a small corner of the rink (in an attempt to stay out of people's way) and practice whatever it was I was trying, or use one of the circles and stick to it and it was pointed out to me that I was basically hogging the same space for the entire time I was on the ice and eventually other skaters would need to use that space too so the advice was to keep moving around. If you practice in one particular spot for a short while, move on and try the move elsewhere. You might not be doing this at all, but I didn't realise that I was until it was pointed out to me.

Good luck with it i'm sure you'll fall in love with it the more you do it!

 

[Bunny Hop]

Also no advice, but more reassurance that this is normal. My mind is continually divided between what I'm doing and what other people are doing, mainly because I don't want lowly me to get in the way of people who are training seriously. But you can't take that attitude too far because you'll never get anything done and you've paid the same money to be on the ice.

 

[Spun Silver]

Thank you, @antmanb and @Bunny Hop! I have definitely been hogging corners of the ice (this you for that tip!) and I am full of the "lowly me" feeling. I guess the only way out is through.

Maybe a few mantras like "Hockey players are not trying to kill me" and "It's my ice too" as well as "Breathe" will help.

 

[fallenskater]

I'm a new member (just discovered this site yesterday, hehe) so please excuse me if this isn't the appropriate place to post this

I went skating for the first time in almost a year on Tuesday and it was the greatest feeling ever! I've been out of training for 5 years, give or take, so I was surprised to see that I still had my doubles. Well, my double flip at least, heh. My double flip w/ overhead arms was always my easiest jump after all.

It's amazing how much fun I could actually have when skating. It used to be a nightmare with my dad "coaching" me and never being satisfied with my results. Got runner up for the National's Team at 12 years old and he was FURIOUS that I didn't place on the podium. Being able to skate voluntarily without him looming over me and yelling at me for not "bending low enough" on my landings felt real good.

I'd actually like to start training again since I plan on competing intercollegiates. I was working on my triples at the time I quit so I'm considering working on those, off ice at least. Any workout regimens I should consider? Also, any advice on how to deal with lower back pain when skating? Should I slap on an Icy Hot patch or something? I never had it before but I'm assuming it's from all those biellmanns I used to do.

 

[bladesofgorey]

Welcome back!Great to hear you love skating again.
I would:
1.get a coach
2.get a coach
3.get a coach
for someone at your level who'd like to get their skills back safely. Good luck and enjoy the process

 

[Bunny Hop]

Also, any advice on how to deal with lower back pain when skating? Should I slap on an Icy Hot patch or something? I never had it before but I'm assuming it's from all those biellmanns I used to do.

I have never skated at your level, but I tend to deal with any pain experienced on ice by finding some appropriate off-ice exercises which assist and making sure I actually do them. If it's back pain it might be worthwhile consulting a physiotherapist as you don't want to inadvertantly make things worse.

 

[fallenskater]

Welcome back!Great to hear you love skating again.
I would:
1.get a coach
2.get a coach
3.get a coach
for someone at your level who'd like to get their skills back safely. Good luck and enjoy the process

Thanks for the support! I’d like to get back with my old coach but would it be awkward? I mean, yeah, she was like a second mother to me and we had a very good relationship but I feel weird trying to pick up skating with her after all these years. Plus, lots of things have happened since then. Do I deserve a second chance from her? Do I deserve a second chance from anyone else? I’ve developed a lot of anxiety after quitting skating so maybe this is just me being paranoid but I’m just... not so sure of anything.

appropriate off-ice exercises which assist and making sure I actually do them. If it's back pain it might be worthwhile consulting a physiotherapist as you don't want to inadvertantly make things worse.

Thanks for replying I’m assuming the off-ice exercises would be some forms of stretching? I’ll try to find some vids on YouTube, thanks! Consulting a PT but sounds good but I’m worried about money. I’m working at the rink as an assistant coach/summer camp counselor, so I’ll be using work credit as a way to “pay” for my practice sessions. As for other financial investments such as lessons, therapies, etc, I’m not sure how I’ll pay for them. My dad was the one who forced me to quit so I doubt he’ll fancy the idea of me skating again. Plus, he’s the one that takes care of our bank accounts. My mom wants me to skate again so she’ll probably find a way to get me coaching money. As for everything else, not so sure. Thank you for the advice though!

 

[Bunny Hop]

Thanks for replying I’m assuming the off-ice exercises would be some forms of stretching? I’ll try to find some vids on YouTube, thanks!

Maybe go for some yoga videos in that case. It helps strengthen the core and that in turn helps with the back - or so I've been led to believe.

 

[Bunny Hop]

I started to learn forward inside counters today. Happy to be adding to the long list of things I can do whilst hanging on to my coach.

Quoting myself so this post makes sense.

Other coach prefers to teach rockers. So I'm now also learning outside rockers. Apparently my exit edge is pretty good. Which as I can't do back outside edges on their own is actually quite frustrating.

 

[antmanb]

Quoting myself so this post makes sense.

Other coach prefers to teach rockers. So I'm now also learning outside rockers. Apparently my exit edge is pretty good. Which as I can't do back outside edges on their own is actually quite frustrating.

I actually really enjoy doing FO rockers and find them quite easy. BO rockers, on the other hand I can't get - I usually do a BO three followed by a quick edge change.

One coach had me practice them using the curling circles on the ice in a figure of 8. Start at the top of one of the circles push onto e.g. a LFO edge - hold it for half the circle til you get to the next curling circle along (our coach had us push onto the edge swing through with the free leg, cross it over the skating leg to help execute the turn)do the rocker which will exit on the LBO, cross right foot over left to be on RBI, push onto LFI, push onto RFO (by now from the top of the 8 of the curling circle) and repeat the pattern eh other way turning the RFO rocker in the middle of the 8, crossing LBI over right leg, pushing onto RFI edge and repeat LFO.

You can do it with the BO too on the same circles but I can't quite remember it.

 

[Bunny Hop]

I did find the rocker easier than I expected (though perhaps beginner's luck!). That sounds like a good exercise (though no curling circles here!).