How to Do a Bunny Hop Ice Skating (journeybacktotheice) 5 MINUTE FRIDAYS

Hello and welcome back to my channel! Hi, my name is Ava. If you are new, I'm a competitive adult figure skater. I started skating as an adult and I am starting a new series here on my channel called 5 Minute Fridays where I am doing a very quick beginner-friendly tutorial every Friday. We are going to start the series off with one of my most popular tutorial videos on TikTok, and that is the bunny hop. If you're not already, make sure you subscribe and hit the notifications bell so you can stay up to date on all the new videos that I drop. With all that being said, let's get right into today's video. Besides the hop on two feet that you will do in a learn to skate class, the bunny hop is the first official jump that you will learn. The bunny hop is also going to be our foundational jump for our waltz jump and eventually our single axle. When learning the bunny hop, I like to start on one of the lines on the ice. I am a visual learner and I love this because it's a great way to demonstrate what you are jumping over. So we are going to start standing up nice and tall in that T position, something you'll hear me say a lot, especially if you've been watching my Adult 136 Learn to Skate series that I have here on my YouTube channel. It's important that we also have our feet in a T position. If you are a counterclockwise skater, you're going to have your left foot facing forward and your right foot behind it facing out to the side. If you jump the opposite direction, you're just going to reverse what I said. That's perfectly fine. I highly recommend trying a bunny hop from both feet in both starting positions because this will help you decide if you are going to be a lefty or a righty. We are going to start our bunny hop by pushing off onto one foot. As we glide forward on the one foot, we are going to bend the knee that is on the ice and roll up onto our toe pick. This will get us up into the air for our jump. When we go up into the air for our bunny hop, we are going to go into something called an H position. This is something really important for all of your jumps after the bunny hop. So get into that H position. As we are rolling up onto the toe pick with our foot that is on the ice, that leg that is behind us is going to come through and swing up into the H position. I highly recommend practicing this just standing on the line in the H position in a standstill or going over to the boards and just practicing bringing your leg through to this position. It's really important for your bunny hop to be successful. So once we have rolled off our toe pick on that one foot, we want to make sure that we straighten that leg while we're in the air. Our free leg, which is the other leg that is bent into the H position, is then going to come down and with a kicking sweeping motion behind us, we're going to land on our toe pick. While this is happening, that leg that we had straight in the air is going to come down and land on a gliding edge going forward. I like to say gliding edge going forward instead of a one foot glide because sometimes this helps skaters visualize the fact that once you land your bunny hop, you should be exiting it moving forward. And when we exit our bunny hop, we want to make sure that that back leg is now straight into a forward extension or sometimes what I like to refer to as a forward landing position. The last thing that I did forget to film is what to do with your arms. As someone who learned this as an adult, I think what to do with your arms is the last step. Yes, it does make your bunny hop a lot easier, but I honestly think it's already challenging enough as a beginner just to get comfortable with the fact that you're jumping and throwing yourself up into the air then landing on a toe pick and exiting forward. So the arm part can be the last thing in the series of learning your bunny hop. There are quite a few other bunny hop tutorials on YouTube, so I won't go into super detail about what to do with your arms, but basically you are slicing them through. I used to tell skaters to think of it as your arms are scissors. Instead of keeping them stationary in that T position, you're just going to kind of do a running man scissor motion. I did kind of do it in this one clip, so I'll include that here to show slightly what I'm talking about, but you will want to make a more exaggerated version of this to help you get lift up into the air and then bring back down. But anyways, that is it for today's 5-minute Friday tutorial. I will see you next Friday for another quick and easy beginner-friendly tutorial. As always, thank you so much for watching and I will see you again soon.