So when I spun up the blog, I had this unrealistic ambition to write a post everyday I skated, but that is just a lot for me–I’m a slow writer! So I’m going to try to weekly recaps of what I worked on. I shared on IG a few weeks ago how I begin my skate sessions:
- bubbles
- braided bubbles
- 1 min of forward pushing against right outside edge
- 1 min of forward pushing against left outside edge
- 1 min of forward pushing sequential circles on each edge
- 1 min of toe manuals
- 1 min of heel manuals
- heel/toe flares
- spin drills
And then I get stuck in spin doldrums, failing miserably spin after spin to correct my posture. Before I know it, 30 minutes have passed, and I’m in a malaise of feeling like I haven’t made progress. So then the last half of my session, I just sort of run through different skills, try to record something if I feel like it, or try something new.
This past week, I mostly stuck with the similar format, but made a concerted effort to refine snakewalk while trying a few new things:
Update on Heel-Toe Spins
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!
Snakewalk
So this is a move that is taking FOREVER to refine, but I do feel like I made a breakthrough on adjusting my snakewalk to get that zigzag effect (where your legs are moving in opposite directions. There are a lot of tutorials that I’ve watched early on that don’t emphasize the importance of timing the switch in foot direction right. I won’t link to those here because I don’t want to call anyone out. But essentially, the diagrams that have been drawn look like this:
There are two main problems I encountered when following this pattern:
- I ended up putting too much weight on my front foot. This was problematic when I tried ot learn the variation where you have the leading toe.
- Because your feet are always following each other, you don’t practice weaving your feet in and out, moving them in opposite positions with each beat.
Here’s how I looked following the above pattern:
I revisited snakewalk after admiring @juulesskates and @rollin_bori‘s snakewalks. I also appreciated the tutorials by @frozenand.ice and @thediamondwalker.
Observing their tutorials, the foot pattern is more like the below. In one step, both feet are gliding in the directions outline below.
This is how I look when revisiting my foot work:
As you can see, I’m trying to extend my legs in each direction as much as possible to add more pop. The lightbulb went off that it is like sideswipe in that way.
Here’s to making light improvements!