Adult 4 Learn to Skate (journeybacktotheice) #adultsskatetoo

Hi guys, welcome back to my adult learn to skate series. Today we'll be focusing on adult 4 for the USFSA adult learn to skate series. I just want to cut in here real quick and say I am so sorry that this one was posted really late. I keep having issues with the audio, but I promise that the next two videos in the series will be posted on Saturday like they normally are. First, a really quick disclaimer. I am not a certified coach. I do have experience teaching learn to skate, but I am just another skater sharing some tips for the adult 1 through 6 levels. This is not meant to replace lessons or coaching of any kind. I highly encourage you to go sign up for a learn to skate class, so I will leave that information in the description box below. Now we can get into the video. The first item on adult 4 is going to be a forward outside edge on a circle, both right and left. I highly recommend having a nice strong one foot glide before you try this, so make sure you go back and watch my adult 2 video. I'll leave it linked somewhere in the video here, but let's get started. So I'm going to be honest, the forward one foot glides around the circle are definitely going to take some time and some practice, mostly because you just need to get used to having a nice strong core for doing this, but I will go over some tips and tricks that will help you so when you practice, it will be easier and easier every time. The first thing I'm going to talk about is our body position. This is very important. Just like our regular one foot glide, we're going to make sure our foot is a little bit off the ground, not too far away from us, and it's touching our ankle. For these one foot glides around the circle, you want to make sure you have control, so you don't want to be kicking your leg too far out in front, too far out to the side. You want to make sure everything is nice and close to you. The other important thing I want to talk about is engaging your core, and basically what I mean by this is squeezing your stomach muscles super tight so you can hold this one foot glide right on that red circle. A common mistake I see a lot of beginner skaters make when they're trying to do their one foot glide around the circle is being too loose with their body position. Either they're waving their arms around, they're kicking their leg out as a counterbalance, or they're not squeezing their stomach muscles, and honestly, squeezing your stomach muscles is a very small change that you can make to improve this a lot. Now let's talk about what to do with your arms. Now in skating, there is definitely a right and a wrong way to do things, but not every skater is the same, and every skater is going to struggle with different things. So one entrance might work for someone, but it might not work for someone else. Same thing with arm positions with this one foot glide around the circle. Obviously when doing our one foot glide, we want to make sure that our arms are not glued to our side. We want to keep them up nice and strong, like the T position that we've been talking about in the past couple videos. The other very common mistake a lot of skaters make is keeping their T position with an arm out to the side and arm out to the side, forgetting that when you work on something on the circle, you want to rotate your shoulders a certain direction. Now the way I teach the arms for the one foot glides around the circle might be completely different from how you've learned it, I've just found that this seems to be a lot easier for many skaters. So instead of traditionally hugging the circle like we have with our forward swizzle pumps in the last video, I like to keep my arms facing the outside of the circle while I lean my body weight up against it. As you can see here, I'm leaning my body weight towards the inside of the circle. This helps me control my circle and make sure that it doesn't go too small and that I can stay following that red line. So if you find that you are struggling with holding your one foot glide on the red circle, I highly recommend just switching your arms so they face the outside of the circle and start leaning inside the circle rather than hugging the inside. Now if you find that hugging the inside is working better for you, I would stick with that. Next is our forward inside edge, both right and left around the circle. Just like our forward outside edge, we're going to be following the red circle except this time we'll be picking up our inside foot instead of our outside foot. I went over our body position with the forward outside edges and it's basically the exact same for our forward inside. Even though we are picking up a different foot, we are still leaning our weight the same direction which is inside the circle. To get into both your outside and inside one foot glides around the circle, you can either take a few pushes or you can do those forward half swizzle pumps that we talked about in the other level and gradually pick up your foot when you feel comfortable. Now you do not have to hold this for the whole circle, I recommend trying to hold it for at least five seconds and then moving up to 10 to 15 as you get more comfortable with it. Let's quickly talk about what makes it an inside edge and what makes it an outside edge because I know that can be completely confusing. While it might seem like it, an inside edge and an outside edge are not determined by which foot you pick up, they're actually determined by the edges on our blade. The foot we pick up on the circle is basically just determining the direction we are going and making sure that we practice our inside and outside edges both on our left and our right foot. This is important because the next item we'll be talking about is our forward crossovers and we will need to know both our forward inside and outside edges for this. Which brings us into our next item on adult four, forward crossovers. And I know these are tricky so I will do my best to break these down into really small steps because I think if you look at it in smaller steps it will feel a lot less intimidating and it might make a little bit more sense. So the very first thing I have all of my students do is to find a line and we're just going to practice something I call the grapevine. This is going to help us with the weight transfer from going to our forward outside to our forward inside edges. I also like to start in a line so it's less intimidating because sometimes when you put it on the circle you feel pressured to do a crossover where here on the line there is no curves, we are just stepping one foot over the other. If you feel a little hesitant to try it by yourself we can bring it to the wall and practice there first. For this we're going to have our body facing the wall we're going to gently pick one foot and cross it over the other and when we pick up the back foot we are going to make sure that we don't put our toe pick in the ice and we set it right next to the other one. We are then going to repeat this process going the other direction so same thing we're just going to pick up the opposite foot and cross it over the other leg. Once you feel comfortable doing it by the wall let's go take it to that line and do it by ourselves so we can hold ourselves up and feel what that weight transfer feels like without holding on to anything. This is the same exact process as picking a foot up and crossing it over the other one except this time we're just going to keep going one direction until we get to the end of the line and then we're going to go back the other way we just came from. You can also practice doing multiple in a row in the same direction at the wall if you feel more comfortable with that. Our body position when practicing it on a line should be both arms straight out to the side like our T position. Before you pick up your leg make sure you are nice and balanced so you can hold yourself on one foot. One way I like to have my students practice just getting stronger with this is doing something called almost like a knee tap to your hands. I don't know how to explain this but it's basically an exaggerated lift of your knee to make sure that you're able to balance and kind of get used to that weight transfer that comes with this. The next thing to focus on is what to do with that back leg to bring it back around so both of our feet are parallel. Notice when I'm doing this I am not digging my toe pick into the ice I am simply lifting my foot up and bringing it back around. The other important thing is to make sure that you are leaning the direction you're going on the grapevine so if you're going to the left you want to lean to the left and if you're going to the right you want to lean your weight over to the right. This will not only make your grapevine faster but it will also help you get ready for that weight transfer we see in the two pushes from the forward crossovers. Once you feel comfortable doing your grapevine on the line we are now going to take it to the circle so we can slowly start to mimic what a crossover is going to feel like. We want our body facing inside the circle the direction we are going. While we are practicing this we also want to add a bit of a push and a glide in between our steps. This will help prepare you for what a forward crossover is going to feel like. Now we're going to try this with even more speed so make sure that your arms are hugging the circle. I know how I said in the forward outside and inside edges that you don't need to hug the circle but for your forward crossovers you do. To start our forward crossover we're going to do an outside edge push. You are going to want to hold a bit of a glide before you cross your outside foot over the foot on the red circle. Because this is still considered a beginner crossover it is completely fine to have a little bit of bend when you are crossing one foot over the other. Just note down the road you will want to start focusing on extension and straightening that leg. After you've completed one crossover bring your feet together for a short two-foot glide before going into the next one. Practice the one crossover then the two-foot glide before going into the next one multiple times around the circle. Slowly add a little bit more speed and confidence. Do not be too hard on yourself if your crossovers don't look like crossovers when you first start working on them. Mine didn't for a long time. It just takes a lot of practice and getting used to it. It's a strange feeling. You should never compare your crossovers to someone who has been skating for years. When you first start learning crossovers they're not going to look perfect and it's probably going to take a while to get there which is why I tried to film a lot of crossovers that didn't look perfect. Obviously I'm not going to do crossovers like this on gold moves. I'm going to have extension. I'm going to have power but when you're first learning we're not going to have any of these. You are basically going to look like you're doing a grapevine on a circle. The next item we have is a backwards one-foot glide and this one is very similar to our forward one-foot glide. For this we're just going to take a few steps backwards. We're going to go into a backwards two-foot glide and when we feel comfortable and stable we are going to lift our foot gently up off the ground and hold a one-foot glide. As always our body is going to be in a T position with our arms straight out to the side and you want to make sure your foot is touching your ankle. When we are doing our backwards one-foot glide we actually want to apply pressure to the ball of our foot. You want to make sure that you avoid putting your toe picks in the ice because you will probably fall forward or it will stop the glide completely. Here is a great exercise to practice this. Just practice lifting your foot up and down for a few seconds and slowly start to increase the time that you have it up off the ice. Overall a majority of this is exactly the same as a forward one-foot glide. We're just doing it backwards so if you want a little bit more detail I would suggest going back and watching my adult two video. The next item we have on this level is backwards half swizzle pumps. Now this is super similar to our forward half swizzle pumps except this time we're going backwards on the circle. For our body position we're going to be standing nice and tall in our T position and we're going to have our arms hug the inside of the circle. You want to make sure that the foot closest to the inside of the circle is on the red line. We are then going to bend our knees and push the outside foot away from us. When you do this you're going to want to think about that outside foot being a little bit pigeon-toed in relationship to the other foot we have on the ice so that you can push it away and bring it back making that half curve on the circle. And just as I mentioned many times before we're going to have that same up and down rhythmic knee bent motion happening as we make our pumps around the circle. This is going to help us get speed and momentum. I'm pushing my foot away from me out to the side and then I am bringing it back in in between my half swizzle pumps. I'm going to be doing a very short two foot glide. You're going to be doing this both counterclockwise and clockwise. Your goal is to get six to eight pumps in a row without stopping. A few important things to remember when we're doing our backwards half swizzle pumps is to make sure that you're always looking over your back shoulder so you can see where you are going. The other important thing to make sure you're doing is that you are leaning inside your circle and when you are pushing your foot away from you you are leaning your weight to the inside. I go over a few of these details in my other adult learned escape videos so I'll leave the playlist link somewhere in the video so you can go back and watch those if you'd like a little bit more information but basically our backwards half swizzle pumps are the same as our forwards we're just going backwards. The last item on adult four is a hockey stop both right and left. A hockey stop is just a more advanced way to stop in skating. All you are going to do is take a few steps and then to stop instead of making the snowplow shape we are just going to twist our feet to the side. When you're doing a hockey stop you want to make sure you lean your weight back instead of going forward with the stop or else you might just kind of keep going and take a tumble. Just like our forward snowplow stop you want to make sure that you bend your knees when you come to a full stop. This will basically help slow you down and brace for the impact of the stop. That's basically it don't forget to practice both sides. Well that is it for adult four I'll see you next Saturday for adult five. Don't forget to like and subscribe I post new skating related videos every week and every Saturday I will be uploading a video for the adult one through six learn to skate series.