Author Topic: basic skating skills  (Read 1900 times)

deimante

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basic skating skills
« on: February 22, 2018, 11:18:22 pm »
hello all!

i'm new to the forum and i started skating about a month ago. i can do anti-clockwise crossovers, skating backwards and one foot glides but i wanted to ask what should i be able to do before moving on to more difficult stuff? what about edge practice? how do your practices look in general or looked when you were a beginner?

i figured it's the best place to ask for advice :).

The Sacred Voice

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Re: basic skating skills
« Reply #1 on: February 22, 2018, 11:52:55 pm »
Does your rink offer any kind of group lessons, and if they do then are you on them?

I only ask because many rinks do and they're typically very inexpensive and, in my opinion, absolutely the best place to start as you'll make friends as well as move through a logical progression of skills appropriate for your level.

To more directly answer your question, have you done a two-foot turn yet? Lemons/swizzles are a commonly used early exercise (forward and backward). You'll have to be able to do clockwise forward crossovers at some point too; if you can already do anti-clockwise then you'll have an idea of the theory, it's just trickier doing the direction that most public sessions don't skate in so practising it is harder. Some of my early lessons also featured basic Mohawk turns and open chassés (both directions, you can YouTube a video for either of those to get an idea of what they look like).

Otherwise we did a lot of stroking practise to make that nicer and more consistent, but you really need a coach to tell you how to refine your technique in my opinion.

After those things then you could probably try 3 turns and backwards one-foot glides and maybe backwards crossovers? Those are probably what I would considered somewhat more advanced for the level you've described yourself as at (but rinks teach things in all sorts of orders).

You might also find this link helpful, which is the current curriculum for the Skate UK learner course. If you're in the UK and your rink has group lessons then they'll likely either be following this or another programme called Skate Excellence.

Hope that's helpful!
« Last Edit: February 22, 2018, 11:54:30 pm by The Sacred Voice »
I'm blogging about my skating journey, please read along at dontexcelaxel.blogspot.com

deimante

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Re: basic skating skills
« Reply #2 on: February 23, 2018, 11:41:22 pm »
i can do both forward and backward lemons and working on the two-foot turn. i'll work on the stuff you suggested too!

according to the curriculum i can basically do or working on everything up to level 4. my rink offers skate uk lessons but i was thinking i'll take them when i'm more advanced to save money. however, if i do take up group lessons now, would they make me start at level 1 or could i immediately progress to a higher level?

FamilySkater

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Re: basic skating skills
« Reply #3 on: February 24, 2018, 01:53:30 pm »
i can do both forward and backward lemons and working on the two-foot turn. i'll work on the stuff you suggested too!

according to the curriculum i can basically do or working on everything up to level 4. my rink offers skate uk lessons but i was thinking i'll take them when i'm more advanced to save money. however, if i do take up group lessons now, would they make me start at level 1 or could i immediately progress to a higher level?

I'm in a similar position in that I can do everything up to level 5. I ended up going with the group lessons (although Skate Excellence, not Skate UK). I expected to be frustrated 'learning' the very basics when I really want to be taught turns and spins but the lessons are forcing me to practice stuff which I wouldn't have done by myself and surprisingly it isn't always that easy. I've found that my balance, edges and posture have improved so much that when I am doing the harder stuff by myself it is easier. It was also pointed out to me that while I think I can do all of those moves, I can't do them perfectly. I think that focussing on the basics now means that the harder stuff will be easier when I come to it.
 

The Sacred Voice

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Re: basic skating skills
« Reply #4 on: February 24, 2018, 03:32:03 pm »
according to the curriculum i can basically do or working on everything up to level 4. my rink offers skate uk lessons but i was thinking i'll take them when i'm more advanced to save money. however, if i do take up group lessons now, would they make me start at level 1 or could i immediately progress to a higher level?

Rinks all handle their group learning sessions differently so it's hard to say what your rink would do in terms of placing/progressing you. At my rink then they essentially run two classes in the same time slot: one that covers the level 1-4 material and another for the 5-8 material. This is mostly done out of practicality more than anything else, paying coaches to do eight different levels of classes would be expensive for the rink and, broadly speaking, the stuff in 1-4 is all around an appropriate level for new skaters that it gives the coach in charge just enough variety of activities that they can dip in wherever they fancy for each lesson, so, at least where I am, you don't necessarily learn the levels in the strictest of orders. The 5-8 group operates almost exactly the same, but they sometimes borrow exercises from the progression beyond level 8 (Skate Star Bronze-Gold levels) in order to keep things spicy in those groups.

If you were at my rink then I suspect that, at your current stage, they'd put you in the 1-4 group and you'd get bumped up as soon as the coach thought you were pretty competent on that stuff. Honestly, I doubt you'd find being made to redo some early stuff to be that big of a pain because you get a whole new perspective on how you can improve what you're already doing. Coaches can refine what you're doing because when you're working with new elements by yourself then it's hard to know what's "correct" when you don't have an expert on hand to point out little corrections and adjustments.

For example, I secretly taught myself the single loop jump in advance of doing it with my coach, so when we got round to it together then I was able to surprise her a bit with what I'd been working on, but after I'd figured out the basics of the jump then I still had no idea what I was meant to do in order to improve it by, say, adding power while maintaining control and consistency. The positioning I'd been using for the takeoff in my secret practising was acceptable, but the long term growth of the skill, particularly if I ever intended to move towards the double loop, required that I have a similar, but fundamentally refined, body position for it that I probably wouldn't have worked out if it hadn't been for her. Maybe I could've gleaned it from watching enough YouTube videos, but there's nothing like a live human that knows what they're on about and catering to your specific level of learning. This analogy can be stretched to basically any element of skating, even the really early stuff. For instance, you'll find that you'll be working and improving on your crossovers for a surprisingly long time to come yet! Every time you think "yeh, I know how to do those" then your coach will show you a way to make them generate more power and then you have to work on controlling that new speed, etc.

All that said, I appreciate your attitude towards the cost element, keeping a lid on the costs in this sport/hobby can be a challenge! My rink charges something like £41 a month for a weekly half hour group lesson and free entry to the public session that that lesson is held on, so it works out at £10.25/week, although the entry to that public session itself would normally be £8.20 for a standard adult, so you're paying just over £2 more than normal entry for the session and you're getting a half hour lesson on top of the session time, which I think is pretty good value.
I'm blogging about my skating journey, please read along at dontexcelaxel.blogspot.com

deimante

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Re: basic skating skills
« Reply #5 on: February 24, 2018, 09:03:00 pm »
i appreciate all of you taking time to answer in detail! you convinced me to take group lessons so i'll try them out from next week and see how it goes.

i find youtube videos helpful and that's pretty much how i've been learning but i find that sometimes i can't quite understand the move or execute it on ice no matter how hard i try so i think that having a teacher specifically tell me how to do it would be super helpful. i still can't do a t-stop because theoretically i understand how to do it but my feet just won't listen ;D.

i understand that everyone learns differently but long did it take you to clear all skate uk/skate star levels?

The Sacred Voice

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Re: basic skating skills
« Reply #6 on: February 25, 2018, 01:12:25 pm »
With the lessons then I'd suggest you can just try them and if you think it's not worth it then you can always go back to practising without them, just see how it goes for you :)

With the thing you mentioned about not understanding a move correctly then that's exactly the kind of situation where a coach can see it all happening in front of them and be like "yeh, your leg is in the wrong place, which is ruining the balance" and sometimes it's those changes that seem small that completely alter the success/failure of a move.

With progression then I'm afraid it really is an "everyone learns differently" kind of thing. I did a lesson a week with only an occasional rink visit for extra practice and finished in about five-six months (there was a coach timetabling complication at my rink that set my group back a month and a bit), but I know a girl that absolutely smashed her way through the course in no time at all, maybe like four-five months? Similarly, there was a lady that started with me that did about a year and a bit of it, I think, and there're still more people that were in that group long before I started (July 2016) and are still there now. So it's definitely hard to say.

I'd say that if you do do some group lessons then I'd treasure that time because, for one thing, it's the cheapest tuition you'll likely get in skating, as soon as you start doing individual lessons (which kinda becomes mandatory at a certain point) then the prices shoot up somewhat. Also, you'll get to skate socially with others when you're in group lessons, which I kinda miss. I still get to chat with the people from the groups I used to be in but the group learning atmosphere is always kinda fun.
I'm blogging about my skating journey, please read along at dontexcelaxel.blogspot.com

Florence

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Re: basic skating skills
« Reply #7 on: February 27, 2018, 10:47:53 am »
i appreciate all of you taking time to answer in detail! you convinced me to take group lessons so i'll try them out from next week and see how it goes.

i find youtube videos helpful and that's pretty much how i've been learning but i find that sometimes i can't quite understand the move or execute it on ice no matter how hard i try so i think that having a teacher specifically tell me how to do it would be super helpful. i still can't do a t-stop because theoretically i understand how to do it but my feet just won't listen ;D .

i understand that everyone learns differently but long did it take you to clear all skate uk/skate star levels?


Good luck, am sure you will love them!


If you go onto Nottingham Ice Centre website, in the lesson section they have video's by ? the coaches (I say this as I recognise one from Ice stars) which show everything in the Skate Uk 1-8 syllabus. I found the video's really helpful.


Your feet sound just like mine  ;D 

The Sacred Voice

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Re: basic skating skills
« Reply #8 on: February 27, 2018, 08:25:44 pm »
If you go onto Nottingham Ice Centre website, in the lesson section they have video's by ? the coaches (I say this as I recognise one from Ice stars) which show everything in the Skate Uk 1-8 syllabus. I found the video's really helpful.

I used to love looking at those videos when I started out. I remember dreaming what it would be like to be able to do the later level stuff and, although I don't do it as smoothly as they do in the videos, I can now broadly speaking do those things and don't feel quite as impressed with them anymore! ;D
I'm blogging about my skating journey, please read along at dontexcelaxel.blogspot.com

deimante

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Re: basic skating skills
« Reply #9 on: April 18, 2018, 01:16:48 am »
a bit of an update: so i've been doing group lessons for nearly 2 months now and they've been superrr helpful. i started from level 4 and i'm really happy with my progress and that the teacher challenges us with stuff from above levels. so yeah, if you've been hesitant about taking group lessons, you should totally do it as you fill progress faster than learning alone.



 

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