- balance

It's a curiously entrancing dynamic, watching a coach teach the seven year old gals to skate backward along the center ice circle. The coach already has years upon years of her customary sense of centering and balance, but the seven year olds are cronked between their desire for the same grace as the coach and responding to their own internal millisecond body signals of muscular imbalance.

The coach focuses on teaching them arm position and yet their natural instinct is to use their arms (rather than their trunk muscles) for balance. Maybe that's the first unusual thing to observe when the skaters are just starting out: the sport generally requires arms out, or arms posed, whereas from infancy the natural inclination is to lift your right arm in immediate response to an unexpected body tilt to the left.

As if keeping balanced on one foot over an eighth inch wide blade of steel isn't already hard enough, we ask the young skaters to furthermore ignore using their natural tendency for having their arms help them balance!

- jumps

One of the things a parent rather quickly gets an education on is the terminology for the individual figure skating moves. Many are quite distinct in appearance and once you know their names they are easy to spot: a split jump, a sit spin, a spiral, a camel, a layback; all of these you will know right away. I found however that I was always getting confused over the standard jumps. My daughter sat down with me one day and we came up with this (for a right handed skater):

* Skate Dad's Guide to Jumps *

Waltz Jump -- used for warm ups, a simple half rotation, taking off forward

Toe Loop -- turns going in, pick and jump with left, land on right

Salchow (pronounced sow-cow) -- turn going in, jump with left (no pick), land on right

Loop -- turn going in, jumps with both feet, makes "shuush" sound, land on right

Flip -- turn going in, pick and jump with right, land on right

Lutz -- no turns going in, straight back with big trigger and kick on right pick, land on right

Axel -- forward takeoff, one-and-a-half rotation before landing

:: With a pick kick to jump ::
-- Left foot jumps: Toe Loop
-- Right foot jumps: Flip (turns into), Lutz (straight bkwd into)

:: No pick to the ice ::
-- Left foot jumps: Waltz (in forward), Salchow (in bkwd), Axel (in fwd, one-and-a-half spin)
-- Both feet jump: Loop (shuush)

Well it helps a bit, but I still don't have the eye to get them correct completely.

- school

One of the big decisions for a skate parent is what to do about school. Not skating school: every parent recognizes their kid will go through several years of skate school followed by many more years of the more expensive lessons with a personal coach and off ice specialists. That's all just part of the sport.

But what the heck do you do about the "three R's" the regular boring state-mandated curriculum? If your kid is at all a serious skater she will be spending three or four hours every day at the rink or an off-ice session, and it is simply impossible for a parent to juggle this around a regular school schedule, public or private.

Inevitably then, the serious skaters also home-school. My second daughter skated, and as we had already done a bit of home schooling of the first, for us it was no big deal. For many parents though this can be a deal breaker.

Here in L.A., the district runs a parallel institution (www.cityofangelsschoolk12.com) for home schoolers where the kids check in with a teacher once a week and do the rest as independent study. Around half of this happens at home, but my daughter found the best strategy was to lug a couple books to the rink every day and study during session breaks, in between coaching and class times.

This also has some social implications for how your child is raised: it means skate parties instead of football games. And it's a big part of what causes the sport to be so clique.

- windy

One thing my daughter told me that should have been obvious: skating is windy. You are moving at fifteen miles an hour or so, therefore the effect is of a moderate-speed cold wind blowing upon you. You can see this in the frillier costumes as the edges flutter.

This makes for peculiar body heat dynamics: you are fine when you're exercising and moving, but the moment you stop you get suddenly hot and sweaty, then cold as you start up again. Plus this happens to different body parts on different time scales.

Nose, ears, body, hands, and feet, each going from one temperature to another on their own cycles staggered from your efforts. When you get off the ice it takes a full half hour to feel like a normal person again.

- stomach

No matter how you analyze it, spins are all about your stomach muscles. Speaking strictly from mechanical physics, three things kill a spin: misalignment of the weight distribution along the vertical axis, a shifting of that distribution off-axis, and precession.

As you practice your spins you tend to naturally compensate for misbalance by thigh and arm adjustments, but the foundation for all of these torque dynamics actually are based upon the position of your hips, your rear end, and the angle you maintain between them and your spine.

And this is all governed by taught, controlled stomach muscles. Are your spins unstable? Sit ups, my dear.