- styling

How do you go about composing your program's elements so that you can skate with style? Which of your moves are more conducive to expressing your style? A pancake spin is a pancake spin is a pancake spin: since the posture determines the position of your legs and one arm (unless you can somehow hold the position without grabbing an ankle) this leaves only one limb free for embellishments, and how can you be gracefully stylish from a pancake? Well I suppose you can be a tad bit expressive, see for example this video.

Also some transitions clearly allow for greater styleability: a move that is difficult to enter or that requires rapid footwork and body realignment leaves little maneuvering room for expression. How you finish an element also determines your freedom to play: exiting off-balance or with too little velocity will limit your options.

Where the styling happens isn't necessarily obvious from first inspection since it's hidden by coaching pedagogy: nobody actually learns their moves focused on style and then working outwards; this would be an inside out way to learn. You tend to build elements from the "committed" limbs, and combinations of elements by the postural flow or velocity required to make the transitions.

Style proclaims its gracefulness in negative space: you express it beyond the limb postures required with the motions that aren't already spoken for. Style is that part of you that isn't otherwise already committed.

Skating for style therefore requires you to plan a program differently. Since you express style with your free limbs this requires that you use more "open" moves, with as much attention paid to exits and transitions as to the elements themselves.

- jump practice

I spent a couple hours on Sunday at the Toyota Sports Center freestyles past the Airport, and either by reputation (or because Culver Ice is now closed or both) it was a bit too busy, really. It seems they run "open" freestyles where  anyone can show up with any skill level, so some national caliber juniors were practicing triples along with novices trying to hold a steady spiral. The city power cut off around 9:00 with 10 seconds of total blackout until the emergency lights came on -- talk about a scary situation during a freestyle! Rink designers please pay heed: this makes an excellent argument for a couple of small skylights or high transom windows (as long as they don't let the sunlight shine directly on the ice).

Anyhow while watching the more adept skaters practice their elements I was drawn to the difficulty and disconnect between an Axel during freestyle and actually jumping one during your program. The etiology of the issue is down to your horizontal vector -- the speed you travel across the ice when you launch and when you land your jump. At a busy freestyle you avoid other skaters, look for an open place to jump, and vary your stroking speed constantly. During a program you have the entire ice to yourself, are stroking and keeping time to the music, and trying to get full rink coverage by maintaining an elegant velocity. And hence the rub: if you practice your jumps at a slow horizontal velocity during your freestyles, then you are going to herkily jerkily slow down your program when it comes time to launch. Or if you keep your rhythm and speed to launch faster than you've practiced then you will yaw during your spin and additionally land and check with a pressure on your edges to which you are unaccustomed.

I guess what I am asking, dear readers, is shouldn't you always practice your jumps with the same smooth stroking lead-in and velocity as you are expecting for when you are jumping them in your program?

- smoothe

While watching some intermediate skaters in Pasadena, I was most impressed by a particular gentleman who stroked more smoothly than I had ever seen. I will see if I can describe it in enough detail to give you a sense of the effect of this approach. The technique seems to extend somewhat beyond what one would learn straight up in a stroking class. I saw an article about this type of skating once by a Russian ice dance team (it may have even been called Russian stroking), but I can no longer find its reference. In any case let me describe the impression I got and you can take it from there.

If you were to take a high-speed camera and some LED lights marking an outline of a skater's boot on a single solitary stroke, and then graph them onto a piece of paper, I expect (for the typical skater) you would see a slanting line extending downward at more or less constant velocity, of approximately a fixed angle of descent. It would look like a wedge, or the hypotenuse of a triangle, until the skate hit the ice. This is well and good and is rather what one would expect from managing the leg muscles at a constant rate of extension. I doubt it is mechanically optimal and it doesn't look particularly elegant.

Now picture a graph of a curve that starts more steeply and then gets shallower, approaching the floor axis more and more gradually. In math we say that the curve has an asymptote, like a graph of y = 1/x. Is it possible to have each stroke appear this way?  In my lifetime I have seen perhaps two people in person skate like this, and it is quite a striking visual effect. It makes it appear that they are achieving very high transfer-of-energy productivity to the ice, with little or no wasted impact friction. 

- vapor

After your kid has been competing for a while you get a pretty good sense of the variety of ice rinks. Aside from the big mix in amenities and heating for the parents in the stands, you soon recognize that all rinks share a sublime difference that has more of an impact on how your kid skates. At first you may think it has to do with the Zamboni or the rink's temperature. Somehow they must be affecting the ice's surface. But after years of sitting in a wide variety of rinks I suspect the difference is something deeper, more sublime, and environmentally holistic.

Consider this: over the lifetime of an ice surface, in between complete melts, a couple years of running the Zamboni a couple dozen times over the ice daily, probably deposits a good 20 feet of additional vertical surface above the freezer pipes. Yeah it also scrapes off a bit of the snow on top. Still, how come the ice doesn't rise right up out of the building? The answer my friend, is that ice evaporates.

Natural ice sources, like a lake, have a resupply of water from underneath. The rink however has to always add water on the top. So what influences how the ice evaporates? I am sure there must be some lengthy technical article about this in some trade publication (is there such a thing as Rink Maintenance Monthly?), but my guess is that rinks strike a balance between four variables: temperature, humidity, dehydration rates from the mechanical air conditioning, and the quality of the rink enclosure's "vapor barrier."

Although I can never quite come up with a simple rule that ties them all together, I am quite confident that the vapor barrier is the key determinant to good skating. Compared to a building that has been "repurposed," modern rinks specifically designed for the sport are hence both fifty times more comfortable and have much better ice conditions. It's all about the vapor.

(repost)

ed note: After writing this I did a bit of research and found this PDF, which explains a lot.

- sand

When you are on the ice for hours at a time, you begin to appreciate the minuscule and subtle differences of where your feet contact this piece of Earth, this artificial layer you triage with steel blades and a millimeter of meltwater. Ice conditions vary from rink to rink and even within the same rink, depending on the weather outside, the humidity management, and how "thick" they are resurfacing.

Ice can feel "fast" or "slow", hard or soft, springy or deadening. Not to mention rough, smooth, slick, bumpy, and even wavy. Most rinks have an inconsistent surface at any given instant due to the uneven wear in the surface or the inconsistent cooling underneath it. I've even been in a couple rinks with skylights where the sun's path across the ice leaves a trail of slush.

But wait, there's more. Just a few inches under your feet lies the substrate, what the ice is built upon. Every decade or so a rink will completely resurface; if you ever get the chance don't miss the opportunity to watch this. The whole process can take a month.

After they turn off the freezer pipes and let the ice melt, draining and mopping off the water, they will bring in the shovels and rakes and remove the paint. Then you have freezer pipes under a couple inches of sand (some of it quite wet now, depending on the condition of the prior paint). Lift out the pipes, then bring in the mini bulldozer to scoop up the sand and the gravel under that. Now you are left with a big empty building.

Of course things are a little trickier when you get ready to build the ice up again in reverse. Is all the new gravel and sand level and equally tamped down? Are all the pipes flowing leak-free? Is the paint dry yet? Is the new water clean? It turns out that what determines most of the ice's personality you don't even get to see: you are skating on gravel, sand, and paint.

- protocol

Here's one of the more peculiar and incidental ebb and flows of skating: you have tons of unstructured practice time and moderately adhered to coaching sessions that dramatically funnel down to a strictly timed and scheduled performance. For all the flexibility, creativeness, and random explorations the sport of figure skating allows, there are a few times when the strictures of rules, procedures, and protocol are very binding. Once you're within the vortex of a competition there are a couple even more tightly controlled scenarios you need to abide by.

One of these we'll simply call the Referee. I always wondered what this person did: they get introduced along with the judges and the technical staff. The simple answer is the Referee is the Protocol God. She enforces that every single rule of the competition and all of its standard procedures are being followed down to the last iota. Usually when things run copacetic you don't see her do much at all. If anything out of the ordinary happens though the Referee will intervene. I've seen her have the announcer call the skater back out onto the ice to pick up a dropped bauble from a hairpiece. Once when the door monitor allowed the next flight of skaters to take the ice for warmup before their names had been rollcalled, the referee directed "mike" to have the skaters clear the ice. Don't mess with the protocol God.

The other time you get absolutely no choice or free will is if you get injured while skating. Shortly after first aid is applied a rink official with a clipboard will track you and your parent down and subject you to The Injury Debriefing. It seems to be a fairly standard and legalistic practice. During the process you will feel you are essentially being forced to indemnify the rink and show that you can manage safely the rest of the day by yourself. Sitting casually aside listening to a couple of these (not my injured kid) I've come to recognize this procedure is much more than rinkwash.

Most skaters get so pumped up with adrenaline during a competition that the effects of hormones completely mask their injury. They may have gotten an infection or be partially in shock and not even recognize it. The parents as well get roiled when their kid is injured. A large part of the Injury Debriefing is to assess the mental state of the skater and parent and to "talk them down:" have they descended yet from their adrenaline high and are they fully aware of what their injury might entail? The debrief gradually brings them back to earth, so the rink staff (and parent) can determine if more medical attention might be required. So if this unfortunate bind should befall you, please chill, and follow the protocol. The rink is looking out for you.

- popped

Nothing in skating bothers me much more than seeing a gal pop a jump in a competition. It's hard to put a finger on why this is so upsetting. I full well realize that a skater may be on the learning edge of a particular jump and hence only be hitting it seventy per cent of the time or so. She'll add it to her program as a somewhat unessential element -- an extra bonus -- and then she'll see how it feels.

As soon as she lifts off she can pretty much sense if she launched her jump with the correct posture and balance, and then react accordingly. No good? Pop.

I suppose my discomfort has to do with a behavioral expectation for a competitor. I know you run through your entire program four times every day in practice, and I am perfectly fine with your popping a jump then, during the practice session.

You should treat a competition however as much more than just another repeat of your practice with a bit more audience. It's supposed to be a different "standard." You'll earn far more respect from me if you try and fall (safely) in a competitive jump than if you pop it.

It's kind of like picking your nose: okay in private or discreetly in your car, but not in front of an audience, okay?

I also recognize of course that this behavior mostly results from a force of habit. When you're on practice ice it's natural to experiment at your limits; popping is a safe way out during that long ramp up the learning process. So after a while it may become a second nature way to escape.

Now I am no expert on sports psychology (my skating daughter studied it quite a bit so maybe she can comment) but I am guessing that one way to fix this is to create two "modes" of practicing your program for yourself, "poppable" and not. When you queue up your music for practice think ahead of time, what mode will I be skating in? If you choose poppable, okay fine you may pop an uncomfortable jump.

But if you choose "competition" mode then when you initiate a jump and it's floundering you have to decide either how to two-foot, fall safely, short, or otherwise recover it.

Becoming habituated to the rigors of competition imply occasionally practicing with a competitive mindset. Some of this mindset is to always complete the jumps that you start. If you can't complete it when you're in "competitive" mode, you shouldn't start it when in that mode in the first place. Well, that's my theory anyhow.

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Hi Dad,

I agree that popped jumps are quite a disappointment, but the fact remains that they will always be a part of the amateur ranks. A couple of things:
_____________

Although I've never been a coach, it's evident from their style that there are two types of coaches:

Some coaches agree with your view that students should only perform skills that they can routinely complete within competition. Students of these coaches will usually be the top places of their level, and seem to be living dual lives in practice, dividing their time between polishing their program and learning new jumps and other skills.

Other coaches disagree with your view, and believe that students will be most driven to practice that difficult jump if it's included in the program (hence why the difficult jump is often choreographed to be directly in front of the judges: added pressure). This definitely raises the stakes for the student and may change the way he or she practices.

The competitor who wins an event with the difficult jump in the program experiences a different kind of joy than the competitor who plays it safe. Ultimately, competition is about being able to pull through under pressure; there is nothing safe about it. _____________

In my opinion, it's nearly impossible to predetermine two different "modes" of practicing. Due to the extremely risky nature of jumping, each jumping pass is a unique combination of physics, psychics, and muscle movements that can only be controlled in a very limited way. If a skater takes-off and doesn't feel right, there's a chance to fall and break an arm or fracture a tail-bone. Of course skaters always try to fall "safely" when the only choice is to fall, but there's only a limited amount of control that you have over the situation. It's better to not fall at all and pop a jump which gives the skater more control over the landing and a better chance to avoid injury.

Hope this helps!!

Love, Karline

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(repost)

- sharpened

Sometimes as a parent I found myself frustratingly in the dark on the whole equipment end of things. Down in the weeds it's all about the boots, the blades, and the sharpening; when it came to the technicalities of sharpening I figured that my role as a parent was just to assure that my daughter did her own "homework." Since it was her sport she was the one who had to be "up" on the technology. So here in two referrals is all the gory technical details:

http://www.vesc.ca/Sharpening.htm
http://fredsskatesharpening.com/qa_blades.html

Even so I still felt a deep lingering uneasiness with this whole sharpening business -- it seemed that my daughter's success or frustrations could depend inordinately on some gent I barely knew with a couple grinding and polishing machines in his garage. Yeah he had testimonials and connections, and my daughter found the fellow from checking with other gals at the rink. But how could I tell how much he really knew, or how well he actually performed his duty? He would chat with my daughter about how she was skating, and seemed to listen intently to her concerns. Was he being sincere though or just going through the motions? I couldn't quite tell. What if he saved his best work for a couple of his favorites and then just glided through the rest of his sharpenings? And in my paranoia I even wondered if he wasn't maybe playing on my fears to manipulate me to a higher fee. I harbored my lingering suspicions.

I'm wondering now if this might be one place where the sport couldn't tighten up a bit. With advanced technology nowadays I'm surprised that somebody doesn't make a laser measuring device to display the sharpness and various curvatures along the length of each blade. It seems that you should be able to plop your boot into such a device at your local rink and know immediately if your blades are due for a honing, or if the quality of the job your sharpener did was up to snuff. Anyhow that's a small business idea for you mechanical engineers out there.

My other bright idea is that some skating website should take the opportunity to reduce the information assymetry in this relationship. You know, something similar to Angie's list or 1-800-dentist where a skater and her parents could find a list of local sharpeners along with testimonials and a five star rating. And speaking of ratings. . .

I really wonder if skaters, parents, and USFSA shouldn't push for some sort of licensing, standardization, or certification of sharpeners. It's one of those grey areas: few sharpeners make this their full time profession and yet aside from a small handful of other sports I don't know of many places where "equipment tuning" can play such a significant role.

- reference

Just a shout out to some nice technical articles at Lambco.

- 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.

- between good and great

The other day I was watching my daughter do a strange kind of spin with her foot out to the side. I asked her what it was called and she replied "a broken leg sit-spin." Okay. But I told her that the arms weren't correct: they didn't look right. I was clueless on how to refine them, but I also wanted her to wait until after her ankle surgery (and recovery) before working on the maneuver's arm detailing.

She skated another half hour or so, and as I walked around the rink I realized *ping* how the arms should be. I revisualized a memory of something that I had seen a pro do some time long ago. After my daughter got off the ice and changed into her street shoes I called her into the ballet room and showed her (in private) how the arms should be: stretch over to the side, torso tilted sideways. It's meant to be a big horizontal sweeping motion. She commented "well if the arms are wrong I can always work on them separately and then change them later."

But what I realized the next day (and didn't tell her) was that, no, for some moves the aspect of the arms and body posture are integral to the move. In fact they define the effect more than the leg positions. I also realized something deeper than this though: the best skaters use all of their body parts as a means of artistic expression; they visualize what they are trying to express first and then see if they can accommodate it into the physics of skating.

My daughter is still looking at it in terms of discrete moves to accomplish: sit spin, back camel, Bielman, double Axel. But I recognize that what separates the famous skaters from those just temporarily at the top of their sport is that the famous skaters transcend the moves -- they master them, but then they move on. They incorporate the moves into their intended communication and effusion, rather than trying to imbue the individual moves with their expressions.

In other words rather than using expressions that they apply as a toolset to their moves, they instead internalize the moves and then use them as the tools of their expression.

Well, I don't even know if it's proper for me to discuss this with my daughter -- it actually has to come from her own soul. And it also has to happen after her surgery. And it's also dangerous: it creates an environment where expression can get ahead of physics and result in crashes.

So these were all of my thoughts, but I never said a word more to her about them.