How to Heel/Toe Spin on Roller Skates - Tutorial

Hey, my name is Nicole Fiore and I roller skate. You know the old school roller skates, two in front, two in back? Yeah, those ones. I'm gonna be teaching you how to roll and entertaining you along the way. Come roll with me. All right, part three, learning how to spin. Today, we are going to learn how to do this. And I'm gonna try my best not to get too dizzy. Two weeks ago, we learned how to do this. Last week, we learned how to do this. So hopefully, if you've been practicing and following along, you are ready to learn a heel-toe, two-foot spin and really spin that fast. The hardest part about spinning a heel-toe spin is keeping your body tight and keeping your weight centered so that you don't drift. I do, and I was taught to do, I don't know if people do the other way, but my left toe and my right heel. So in order to really feel where you can put your weight, because a lot of us are wearing a toe stop, so putting your weight forward onto your toes, a little scary because there's a toe stop there, you don't wanna hit it. Although, if you do hit it, if you really look in detail at my spins, I often use my toe stop because I feel like for a music video, if they need certain timing on your spin, you need to count how many rotations you do and really stop yourself. And it's easiest to use your toe stop as you spin. You just put a little bit of weight on it like that, not like really stopping yourself. You just lightly put your toe down. You kind of have to take your time on this one. I really want you to take your time on this one. Don't just jump right into it. Do it really slowly. First, practice putting your toe down just enough so that your toe stop doesn't hit, but just forward enough that it will roll. And then the right heel, you want to put it up like that. So you wanna practice kind of popping. So from like a slightly bent knee, popping to heel toe, which is kind of a dance move anyway. If you really wanna go low, that's how I go into a split. I do the other foot, but that's how I drop into a split. I anchor down my right foot with my toe stop and then I slide forward with my left heel. You really gotta use that inner thigh though. Inner thigh strength is very important on this because if you're loose, I don't even know how you could spin doing that, but it won't be cute. So you want to make sure you are keeping your inner thighs tight so you can pull your spin in. When you pull your spin in, it goes faster. That's why anytime you rotate, we pull our arms in because think about that, aerodynamics or whatever science, you want it to come in so that you rotate faster. Simple. So just try for half a time around first, bend, then try to do one full rotation doing heel toe. The body, everything is the same as two tutorials ago and last week's tutorial. The abs, the upper back are tight, your knees are always slightly bent, never on a straight leg. I don't know that I've ever broken this down. Like I don't know if I've ever thought about the science of doing this. Make sure when you do go up on your right heel that you don't rock your weight back. You want your weight to be very centered over your skates. When I teach, I'll explain this I'm sure later on, but you think of like a string going through your entire body and then lifting up from the center, kind of like if you're a puppet, like you want to lift through the center of your body. You don't want to skate like this. Now, my favorite way to hold my arms, you'll see people do a bunch of crazy stuff with their arms when they're doing these spins. My favorite, which you probably noticed if you do follow me, is to go up on a two foot spin. To me, just like that string thing I was just saying, you want to pull straight up from the center of your head, straight up. That keeps my weight centered and for the most part, I'm able to keep it really tight and stop it on cue. Another way is to hold your head like this. This is often just to keep my hair in place if I have something crazy going on for a shoot or a hat if I have a hat on. You'll notice I put my hands like this because I'm afraid my hat's gonna fall off or sunglasses. If you have sunglasses, you probably want to hold it. Another way, if you're really trying to get the momentum down, you may want to cross your arms like this, like for jumping, for spinning, everything. I cross my right one to my chest and I make a fist like this, then my left one over it and I cross at my wrists. The key to making sure you still spin is to move your head in that direction. So I'm spinning to my left, so I'll put my head over my left shoulder and try not to look down at your shoulder. You want to keep your eyes up and really give a profile shot. Make sure you really practice it one rotation, then maybe advance yourself to two and then work your way to three. You can spin however long you want, however long you can go, but for the most part, like when you're filming anything, like I did a music video last week with some friends and we were debating because the song was really like two times around. It was in between two and three and if we did three times around, we had to stop ourselves really quick and it was really hard. So we tried three and then we all started stopping like and then we had to pick up the next piece of choreography and we had to recenter ourselves and it was a little weird. So we ended up doing two and if you're trying to match, if you're like doing a routine or filming something with someone else, really try to match your arms. So whether you come in this way, this way, up, whatever you want, make sure that is something you guys are discussing. How many times around you're gonna go and what your arms are going to do. And then when I stop myself, when I come out of the spin, I just put my wheels down. So I go from this down to normal and I slightly bend. So I start with a bend and I end with a bend. Check yourself before you wreck yourself. When we're taught to arch our backs in skating, I know I'm wearing a big shirt, but when you're taught to arch your back, I teach to tighten your upper back muscles like you're flexing because that takes some of the strain off of your lower back. A lot of times when people are told to arch, they really strain their lower backs. Another way to think about it, there's no right way to do this and there's no right way to think about it as a skater, but another way to think about it is to pull your upper abs up and really stretch them because that will give you the look that you want. Awesome. Let me know what you guys want to learn. I'm thinking we'll go into the turns and by that, I don't mean rotating a spin or a jump. I mean actual turns with your foot. But yeah, let me know if you guys want something different. Yeah, see you next week. Well, wasn't that educational? Go ahead and like this video and subscribe to my channel while you're at it. You know, if you want to learn how to be cool and not fall down so much.