Bad Figure Skating Habits That Drive Coaches Crazy (Are You Guilty?)

Hey, it's Stace here from Nexah Tutorials. In today's lesson, I'm going to show you bad habits that drive me crazy. So as a coach, there are two things I'm trying to help skaters with, a mistake or a bad habit. A mistake is something more technical. Maybe you don't understand how to do that jump or the spin. A bad habit is something that you know you shouldn't be doing, but you continue to do it. I'm going to be showing you five bad habits that drive me crazy. All right, the first bad habit that we're going to be looking at is just arms dangling down by your side, and your arms are here when you skate, which then makes your posture bad, and you're going to be leaning forward, skating here, which then when I see skaters get on the ice and they're here, it makes me think, do they want to be here? Do they want to be on the ice practicing? So what I want you to do when you take the ice, I want you to pull up in your upper body and hold your arms out when you skate. Okay, so maybe we don't want to do this the whole entire time. You can still have your arms by your side, but they're moving with your body. They're just not here. They're pulled up when you skate. Holding. It really affects your overall skating when you're not pulled up. So the next time you take the ice, I want you to think about, okay, my arms. I'm aware of my arms and what they're doing. All right, the second bad habit that we're going to be looking at is head down. I see too many skaters get on the ice and their head is down. Okay, now they're starting to learn jumps and now they've taken this bad habit of looking down and they've now applied it to their jumps. All of a sudden, you're like, wait, why is my skating always looking down? It's because you've allowed that bad habit to creep in and you haven't fixed it. So the next time you're on the ice, I want you to be aware of this. Start on just simple skating skills, just looking out a bit more. Holding here. Especially when you skate backwards, make sure you look where you're going. Always looking. It's going to keep you safe on the ice because if you're skating backwards and you're not looking where you're going, you risk colliding with someone and then you are off the ice with an injury because you got hurt, all because you did not look where you're going. So please remember in skating, we have to look where we're going. All right, before we move on, I want you to click on the link below in the description for your free PDF guide on how to get your figure skating journey started. If you have always wanted to be a figure skater, I want you to click on this link because it goes over everything. Finding your local ice rink, signing up for skate school, finding a coach. It just lays everything out for you so that you don't have to think. All right, this third bad habit we're going to be looking at is adding extra steps that should not be there. And what I mean by this, let's just say you're in pattern of an exercise. You're supposed to be doing crossover, stroke, stroke, crossover, and then your exercise, whatever it may be. But now you've started doing this. Crossover, step, step, crossover, and now you did your exercise. Well, let me tell you, you might not think that that is a bad habit, but it is because now all of a sudden, between your axel and your double salchow in a program, you've started doing these extra steps. And it might look something like this. You land your axel, crossover, and then you go for your sal. It looks sloppy to a coach's eye or a judge's eye. They're going to be like, what is that, what's happening in between? I don't understand. And then your choreographer might be like, I did not choreograph that. You have to understand what you do in practice is going to relate to your program. So you want to make sure that you don't add extra steps. Whatever your coach or your choreographer gives you, please make sure that you do them every single time. It's going to help that second mark out in your program. All right, this fourth bad habit is toe pick pushing. Now, when you're just starting out, no problem because you're just getting used to the ice and how your blades work, but you're really trying to step it up to that next level. We cannot do toe pick pushing. Toe pick pushing looks like this. Sure, I am gaining speed by pushing through my toes, but it's very hard to skate on edges when you toe pick push. And I've also seen if you don't stop this bad habit, it creeps into competition. So you have to stop this bad habit and just be aware of it. Try to make sure you push from the whole blade when you skate. Whole blade, whole blade, and push and hold. It's just you're not finishing correct when you finish through the toe. So make sure that you bend and push and use the whole entire blade when you skate. All right, this fifth bad habit that drives me crazy is after you land a jump, you immediately put your foot down. So what does that look like? You do the jump, good jump, and foot down. And you might say, oh Stacy, you're off balance. That's why you put your foot down. No, it becomes such a bad habit that skaters do putting that foot down. And another thing is good luck doing a combination jump when that foot goes down. We need that stretch before we tap in. So what I want you to practice when doing jumps, out of all of your jumps, even if it's a simple waltz jump, holding your landing for three counts and maybe doing some slaloms and then push forward. That is a great exercise that forces you to stay in that landing position and use that blade. Another thing that you can do to stop this really bad habit is after a landing, after you hold it for three counts, you're going to push forward. So you're going to do whatever jump you have, hold, then you're going to push forward. This will help stop that bad habit of always putting your foot down. And it's dangerous. You don't want to fall on a jump after you just did all of that hard work to get up into the air, to land the jump, to put the foot down. So this bad habit probably drives me like the most crazy out of all these habits because the skaters have worked so hard. They completed the jump and then they put their foot down. So this is how you can correct that bad habit. All right, there you have it. Those are my five bad habits. Now what I want you to remember is that you can also have good habits like always smiling on the ice or always finishing your extension. What we have to remember is we want more good habits than bad habits. Thanks for watching Next Edge Tutorials and looking forward to seeing you in our next lesson.