How to do a CAMEL SPIN in FIGURE SKATING⛸✨

How to do a camel spin in figure skating. Hello and welcome back to my channel. In today's video, I'll be talking about how to do a camel spin in figure skating. This is one of my most requested tutorial videos and I did put out a poll a few weeks ago asking which one you'd like to see and camel spin did win. For this video, I am just going to be going over the basics of how to do a camel spin. I do want to film a more in-depth tutorial and I just haven't had time. So today's video is going to be showing you how to do the camel spin and I'll be making more camel spin tips and tricks and tutorial videos later on. If you watched my previous video here on my channel, I talked about the three basic positions for spins in figure skating and the camel spin position is one of them. I also mentioned in a previous video that the camel spin is one of the trickiest spins for beginners to learn, mostly because of the position that you're in. You're not in a compact position like you are for the sit spin or for any of your upright spins. This one is a little bit more difficult because you have your head all the way out in front, your leg all the way out behind and you have to balance in the middle. So before starting your camel spin, here are a couple things you should know how to do that are just going to make this a lot easier. Before starting your camel spin, I highly recommend skaters are able to do a strong one foot glide, a strong two foot spin, and a strong one foot spin. Additionally, skaters should know how to do a strong outside spiral prior to starting their camel spin because that is the position you will be in when you are doing this spin. So before we get started, here's a quick checklist of all the items I just mentioned and this is a good checklist to go over prior to starting your camel spin and if you are lacking in any of these areas, I highly recommend working on them till you feel comfortable and then you can start your camel spin. This will just make learning the camel spin a lot easier. The very first step before trying this spin is making sure that you have stretched a little bit at the boards to get warmed up and preferably done a few spirals around the rink so you feel comfortable and For this video, I will only be showing how to enter your camel spin from backward crossovers or from a forward inside three turn mostly because I do not have any clips of myself doing it from a standstill so that will be in a separate video. When entering your camel spin from a backward crossover, you want to make sure you have enough speed to maintain the momentum of the spin. Because our body is in such an open position for this type of spin, you need a lot of momentum to and to stay in the spin comfortably. The most important part about our wind up into the spin or our backward crossover is going to be pushing into our circle. So when you're doing your back crossover, make sure that you are leaning like I am showing here in the video towards the inside of our circle and our arms are in an L shape or a slight L shape towards the outside of our circle. While we're winding up, this is going to help gain speed and momentum and make the entrance into our spin a little bit more effortless. Another key part of this entrance is making sure that our crossover is nice and strong. Like I had mentioned in my crossover tutorial video, there are two pushes for your crossovers. When you are holding this position here that I'm showing on screen, you have completed your first push and you are now holding your second push. This is very important because this is going to help wind us up into the spin. So you want to make sure that instead of standing up nice and tall with some straight leg, you really want to have a nice deep knee bend as you are leaning towards the inside of your circle. From here, the next step is to step forward. Just like I talked about in the one foot spin tutorial video, this is the part where you are now going to step forward and hold an outside edge into your spin. Common mistake that a lot of beginners make when they're going into their spin is not holding a deep enough edge into the spin on the full entrance part. So once you've completed the three turn or back crossover, a lot of beginners will continue straight like they're doing a one foot glide rather than pivoting around into a circle. And I'll show a really slowed down video here of one of the entrances showing that I'm going from my back crossover and now I am making almost another circle or half circle that is going to become my spin. So when your coach or instructor says then you are going to step forward, you're not literally going to step forward in a straight line. You are actually going to step forward onto a curved outside edge. Another thing you can work on is edges on the line, your outside edges on the line and your inside edges on the line if you want. This will definitely help you improve the entrance into any of your spins. The next tricky part about our entrance when going into the camel spin is making sure that we stay down with our free leg out behind us. Unlike our upright spin where when we are entering, we come around and then we're going to pop up because our spin isn't upright, we are staying upright. I like to think of the camel spin entrance as a combination of our sit spin entrance and our upright spin entrance. On our sit spin, as I said previously, you are staying down nice and low into the spin. And on our upright, we're staying upright. So for our camel spin, you are going to start low and as you are gathering momentum around this forward outside edge into the spin or before you hook the spin, you are going to be nice and low with your free leg out behind you. And as you come around, that free leg still stays behind you the entire time. But once you've hooked the spin, everything is going to pop up into our camel spin position or as some people call it, the tabletop position. There are a few different ways you can visually think about this. Some of my students like to think about it as an airplane taking off from a runway. So you're staying nice and low. And as you're increasing speed or about to take off from the ground, your free leg goes from the ground all the way up into the camel spin position. And when you are doing this, your leg doesn't come around to the side. Your leg stays behind you the entire time. And that is one of the hardest parts about the camel spin. The other hard part about this entrance is while you are staying nice and low before you pop up into your camel spin, your chest is not going to pop all the way up to the ceiling of the rink. Your chest is going to stay nice and low. So basically, you're going to go from a bent knee to a straight leg. Your chest should not be lifting and rising too much. There is some natural lift and rise, but you shouldn't be going from hunched over to all the way in an upright. When you are doing your camel spin, the motion of going from the ground to up in our actual camel spin position mostly comes from our arms and our shoulders. We arch our back and open our shoulders a little bit, as well as open our arms. That is an important part to think about is that your chest is not doing the work. It is really your back and shoulder muscles that are going to go from more of a slightly hunched forward position to a more open spiral position. The last thing I want to talk about is what your arms should be doing in the camel spin entrance. This is also a very important piece of making sure that your camel spin is a camel spin. Once we have finished our crossover or a forward inside three turn, you want to make sure that your arms are in front of you like you're just about to dive into a pool or you're going to push a door open. As you are doing that forward outside edge into your spin or into hooking the spin, you want to make sure that they come around in front. Once we have hooked the spin, then they can open up and present like we're going to serve pizza or whatever kind of food you would like to have. It's very important that on our forward outside edge into our camel spin, our arms stay in front because this is going to help us maintain our balance. This is also going to gather up some speed and help us hold that position. If we step onto that forward outside edge with our arms wide open or we open our arms up early, we're going to have a harder time getting into the spin position or holding onto our camel spin because once our arms are out to the side like I'm showing here in the camel spin position, it's a lot harder to control everything where when we're nice and compact on the entrance, their free leg out behind us, we're a little bit down low and our arms are in front guiding us into that spin. It's a lot easier to control everything and to hook our camel spin effortlessly. The last piece of advice I have for your camel spin before I finish the video is how to maintain the spin. This is another challenge, which is why camel spins are pretty difficult. So once you have entered your camel spin and you are now spinning in one spot in that camel position, you want to make sure that to maintain this, you keep your legs straight out behind you. Your shoulder blades are open a little bit. Your back is slightly arched. And instead of having your head looking up to the ceiling or looking straight down at the ground, you want to make eye contact with the very top of the hockey boards. You really want to engage your core for this spin. So make sure you squeeze your stomach muscles. Think of it like you're doing a plank while you're in a spin. You want to keep everything nice and still because if we're wobbling around, if our leg is flailing around, we're actually going to fall out of the camel spin and lose all of our momentum. Or if we're in one spot, nice and still engaging our core, we're going to spin in one spot and have a nice centered camel spin. Anyways, that is it for today's video. I hope it helped you with your camel spin. I will definitely be making more videos about this spin and other spins in the future. Let me know what spins you're currently working on in the comment section below, and I will see you in the next video.