Spinning is hard, and it gives me comfort to hear skaters I really admire say that they’ve never worked so hard on anything. At first, I could do 1 rotation at a time. A solid 2 foot spin, but even in my early days (Day 8), I could feel the pressure on my toe of the foot in the direction I was spinning, and the pressure of the heel in the other foot. I just didnt really know how to up my rotations from there, and for the first 40 days or so, I didn’t really bother drilling spins.
Day 40 (June 30, 2022), I started to more deliberately drill them. There are so many great tutorials out there. I watched Dirty Deborah’s and EstroJen’s tutorials a million times, but I kinda did get thrown off when they talked about the heel leg being the axis–I found myself leaning too much on the heel leg that I’d have to correct myself and remember to not let the toe leg spiral out.
The biggest help for me as far as tutorials go was RoC’s World’s lesson. He emphasizes the importance of balancing on your heel toe. He has you build up quarter rotation by quarter rotation until you can do a full rotation. After repeatedly drilling quarter and half rotations, upping my rotation from 2 to 5 was not difficult. The key was to make sure my body stayed balanced in between feet. I still struggle with executing these consistently, but I do get that feeling of centripetal force when I’m perfectly balanced.
I initially started by handlocking my forearms and staring at my wrists, but lately, I’ve been having more success looking up as I play around with different arm positions.
As of Day 77 (August 25, 2022), I’m still working on consistency, and I’m working on this concept of pumping. I purchased access to StormSkater’s spin tutorials, and she goes into pump drills, and I’m excited to give them a try!
Day 110ish:
I spin everyday, but I don’t myself progressing. It’s very frustrating. It’s been like this since Day 50ish, where I had my breakthrough on hitting multiple rotations. Since that time, I took a break from really studying my spins for about a month. Frankly critiquing my sloppy spins gives me anxiety–it brings me back to when I studied the violin growing up and was trained to nitpick at myself incessantly. It was debilitating growing up (I had a love/hate thing with my violin), and it has been debilitating in my skate practice where it sometimes takes a lot to drag myself to practice.
But during that month of not focusing too much on perfecting my spins, I probably picked up a whole host of bad habits because when I started recording my spins again, I was like, “Holy shit…why I am leaning so much in the direction of my spin? Why are my arms hyperextended behind my back?” And now I’m having the darndest time trying to fix my posture. I’m pretty lost right now on how to fix my posture. As much as I think about all the things below, I just don’t know how to fix them:
- I lean a lot in the direction of my spin. I’ve been playing with putting more weight on to my heel, but other than trying to do this, I don’t know of drills to really help with this.
- I also notice that my toe leg is more bent. Correspondingly, I notice I put more weight on my toe when stabilizing my spins…which goes to my earlier point about needing to shift weight to my heel. In fact, it looks like my heel leg draws a circle around my toe leg when the tutorials say my heel leg needs to be the anchor.
- I notice that my feet are further apart than I want them to be. I don’t really know how to best address this. I have this deep fear that my wheels will clip and send me to my death.
- I have been working on being able to stretch my arms out straight while spinning, but I didn’t realize how much I was hyperextending them behind my back! This has been a little bit easier to fix, and I am improving bit by bit.
With harder Fundae wheels, I’ve been able to hit 9, maybe 10 rotations, but my posture is such crap…they don’t count! I guess it really comes to figuring out my heel toe balance. If I find a drill that works, I’ll share on the blog!