- 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.

- lucky

Something is messed up with the way we plan our practice and our competing. In a word, we somehow expect to be lucky. No one in their right mind plans a major endeavor under the assumption that everything will click just so, and yet as I watch the gals practice their programs that is exactly their approach.

Should you really be pushing yourself to the limits of your skills in your standard competition program? I don't think so; if you can only land a jump half the time in practice then how do you expect to land it when you are under stress and under the eyes of the audience and the judges?

I think you should skate the jumps you already are quite comfortable with; in other words your regular program should be easy, and slightly less than you can actually perfectly accomplish on a lucky day.

- outside

Skating can be about projecting an imagination. This can happen two distinct ways however. Call the first way "from the inside" and the second way "from the outside."

From the Inside everything happens in your head, you have an idea of what you are creating and sharing that runs through your mind as you practice, and you share this same thing when you skate in front of an audience. It is a Performance.

Imagination from the Outside is different entirely. When you are practicing with your imagination outside, you have an idea, a template for what you wish to communicate, but it isn't cast in stone and it changes depending on the mood and who is watching. You become both connected and interacting with your environment and the spirits around you.

Skating with your imagination on the Outside is more then a performance: it is a Show.

- classical

I am going to go way out on a limb and propose that generally, almost without exception, you should figure skate to classical music. You can once in a while, very occasionally, skate a popular song for a novelty program or in a show. But skating is such serious work that only classical music does it justice.

Classical music has Sweep, skating has Sweep. Classical music has Drama, skating has Drama. Classical music has sublime intricacy. Skating has sublime intricacy. Skating and classical music were just meant to go together.