LEARN HOW TO DO A CANNONBALL SPIN IN FIGURE SKATING! (journeybacktotheice)

I'm back with another skating tutorial. Today's video is going over my absolute favorite sit spin and that is the cannonball. There are many different types of spins you will learn in figure skating. One of the spins you will learn as a figure skater is the sit spin and there are many different ways you can do a sit spin. Many different variations, difficult add-ons you can do to try and grab extra points during your program. In today's video I will be going over my absolute favorite version of a sit spin and that is the cannonball spin. Before starting to work on your cannonball spin, there are a few things you need to know prior to doing so. First, you should be able to do the regular sit spin position and hold it comfortably for at least three revs. Preferably, if you want to have an easier time learning your cannonball spin, I would recommend being able to hold your regular sit spin for at least five revs, maybe more. This is just going to help center the cannonball. Another thing that I find very helpful for the cannonball spin is being able to touch your toes or at least touch your ankles. So if you're standing off ice, you can bend over and at least touch the top of your ankles. While this is absolutely not necessary to be able to start working on a cannonball spin, I do find this off-ice exercise to be extremely helpful and this can also help you gauge your level of comfort when it comes to how far you can stretch for the entrance of your cannonball spin and helping you decide if you would like to try the head down variation of the cannonball spin. Another thing I highly recommend doing before you try your cannonball spin is just going around the rink in this squat position. You definitely don't have to do a shoot the duck around the rink. You can if you would like. This little squat position is just going to help us warm up our hip flexors as well as our hips because that is very essential for this spin. With all that being said, I do recommend stretching before you try this spin. It's just going to feel a lot easier and it is much safer to try difficult variations like this with our muscles warmed up and ready to go rather than trying it with cold muscles. The reason why you want to be able to do a regular sit spin position prior to trying a cannonball is because you're just going to have a lot more success with this. You're also going to be able to understand the feeling of snapping into a sit spin position because that is a key part of the cannonball spin. What I mean by this is that our free leg is going to come around and then snap into the spin. This is very similar with the cannonball except instead of bringing it around this standard position, you're actually going to reach out and grab it on the entrance. So basically what we are doing for this spin is we are replacing our arms coming around and holding in front just like I'm showing here in the regular sit spin position. We're replacing that with bringing our free leg around and grabbing it in front. So our arms will still be in front but we'll be grabbing our free leg in front of us rather than our regular sit spin position where we are just sitting. And this leads me into a few common errors that I see almost every skater do when they first start working on this spin. The first one is getting into our regular sit spin position and then trying to straighten our leg while we are spinning and lean forward to grab it. While you can do this, this is going to make it extremely challenging and it's going to run the possibility of going up on your toe pick or rocking back on your heel and falling out of the spin completely. And for this video of course I will use myself as an example. So this is me trying to do a cannonball spin from two years ago back in 2022 and as you can tell I am trying to do a regular sit spin and then straighten my leg while I'm spinning and reach for it and that's just a lot going on at once and it makes it really hard. Eventually I did finally understand the rhythm and system that helps me get into a cannonball spin a lot faster and it makes it easier. Another thing I wanted to talk about is where to grab your skate or your leg when you're doing the cannonball spin. Now this is different for every skater and so you just kind of have to work and find what is best for you. But here are a few things that definitely did not help me when I first started working on my cannonball spin. As you can see in this video here I am trying to grab my toe pick and not only am I trying to grab my toe pick but I am trying to grab my toe pick pull it up towards me while I'm still in an upright position and this is just a recipe for disaster. So I highly recommend if you're going to try and grab your toe pick make sure you are in the cannonball position first. In this video I am trying to grab my knee or my upper thigh and pull it towards me. Again this is a recipe for disaster because I am essentially just trying to pull my leg up to my chest rather than bringing my chest down to meet my leg at the 90 degree or lower position. Finally here in this clip you can see that I'm starting to understand that I will need to grab a lower closer to my calf muscle my ankle or even the underside of my heel but still I am falling forwards and so let me share with you how I preferably like to grab my foot for my cannonball spin entrance. What I find that really helps me on my cannonball spin entrance is grabbing my ankle or as close as I can to my ankle while I am entering the spin and you can see here that my arm is reaching out to very gently guide my leg into place. I'm not shoving it into place I'm naturally moving my arm and my leg at the same speed so I can reach the center and get into the 90 degree position. If we go back and look at some of my earlier attempts you can tell that I'm trying to go into a regular sit spin or I am forcing my leg into the center spot while I'm still upright or I'm just forcing it and it's throwing myself off balance. So the key for a good cannonball spin is making sure you can maintain speed while staying on your spin rocker and casually guiding your leg into the proper spot it is supposed to be. The next important thing I want to talk about for this spin is what our legs should be doing and this also is going to help make it so much easier to get into your spin and stay in the position comfortably. Keeping our legs straight is very important now when I say this I think a lot of people get confused you do not how to have your leg as stiff as a board super straight it can have a slight knee bend it just don't have it bent like this. Often when you think of having your leg as straight as you can get it into the spin it is going to be so much easier to control because there's less turning and twisting of your knee that's going to throw you off balance. The other important thing is what your back or your upper body is doing while you're going into this spin. Now as we go back and look at some of the earlier attempts that I had I'm mostly staying upright and then quickly trying to get down to the ground. One way to make everything super simple and a lot easier to get into your cannonball spin is thinking of having your upper body and your free leg move at the same speed. What I mean by this is not having your upper body stay too upright for too long and not having your upper body go all the way down all of a sudden. You want a happy medium just like I'm showing here so a good rule of thumb is to think of going down at the same speed that your free leg is coming around to meet your skating leg. Everything is going to come around and come join everything together in the front at the same time. Now that we covered that here is one great thing to think about when you are doing the cannonball spin that I think will help everything click and make sure that your timing and your speed is all correct. I like to tell my students to think about this spin as a clock so you're going to think about yourself as the center point of the clock you're going to think about your free leg as the long hand on the clock and you're going to think about your skating leg as the short hand. I think this is great because it reminds you to keep your body still and stay in one center point. It reminds you that your skating leg is going to stay kind of facing forward and that your free leg is going to come around like the minute hand and is going to come meet the hour hand which is going to be our skating leg. So by this point I've talked a lot about the common errors that skaters will make. I've talked about what our free leg should be doing and a really easy way to get into our cannonball spin as well as a great analogy to think about when we are doing our spin. Now we are going to make sure that our free hand or other hand that is not holding our free leg is going to come meet our leg and our arm in front. So once I have started to lean forward and my leg has almost come into the correct position my other arm is going to come and latch onto whatever spot for me it's around my ankle is going to latch onto my ankle and I am just going to pull forward and go into my cannonball spin position. Just like my arm that guides my free leg into place I'm not pushing it or shoving it or pulling it anything like that into place. I am just casually guiding it there. The same thing can be said for the opposite hand that is not holding onto the free leg. When it comes to meet everything in front I'm not ripping it or grabbing it towards the center. I am simply holding it there as extra support and making sure that I can get into the position. So the cannonball spin takes a lot of core strength and stability rather than using your arms to pull your leg into place. So you just want to think about both of these arms holding onto your leg as a very light touch. Nothing is excessively pulling or pushing our leg where it needs to go. We are simply using those arms to just casually guide it into place. I say casually guide it because I feel like that sounds less aggressive and makes you want to be very light with your leg rather than ripping it around. But anyways that is basically how you do a cannonball spin. That is how I break it down into super simple steps and hopefully help you if you are struggling with yours currently. And once you get the hang of a cannonball spin and you feel very comfortable and confident in it you can start trying the head down variation. This is just where we're holding both arms onto our leg. We are going to reach our neck forward extend it over our knee or our thigh however far you can get it and then you're just going to hold it down for as long as you can. I will say this variation can get very dizzy and you can fall out of it very quickly because of that. But definitely a challenge to try once you feel comfortable with your cannonball spin. Let me know in the comment section below what kind of sit spins you are currently working on and if you enjoy the cannonball spin or if you absolutely hate it and I will see you in the next video.