How to Roller Skate - Couples - Forward

Hey skaters, I'm Dirty Debra Harry with the Dirty School of Skate and Sugar Roller Skates and I'm here at the Fountain Valley Skating Center today to talk to you about Couples Dance Skating. Yes, Couples Dance Skating. This is going to be a first in a series of videos that I cannot wait to bring to you. Okay, today's video is brought to you by PigeonSkates.com. They're located here in Long Beach, California, can get you everything you need for skates and guess what? I have a discount code for you. Just plug in D-I-R-T-Y with a big ol' dollar sign and you can get a discount off all the skating products that they offer. Okay? All right skaters, grab your dance skating partner and let's do couples skate. Today we have special guest skaters. May I introduce to you the lovely and talented Barb Luster and Dawn Seavers. These two incredible skaters are going to help us learn how to skate forward couple style. Barb, honey, how long you been skating? 30 plus years. What? About the same. Okay, so we've got a lot of experience, really realistically in this whole group, a lot of experience, but we're going to break it down so it's easy for you, even the beginner skater to do. Okay? Let's assume you found your partner. The very first thing you're going to have to do is figure out how to hold on to that person just right. Because Dawn, I mean, does every woman want to be held in the same way? No. Let me show you the other way. It's close, but it depends on how she likes to be held. Sometimes it's just like this too. Very nice. So if you guys were to help a brand new couple, what do you think is the easiest way to hold them out? This is the easiest way. Right. So I love this positioning because to me, when I skate with someone like this, I like to have this connection right here. So the back of your arm against their chest, you're pushing forward, she's pushing a little back so you're helping hold each other up. Am I correct? The other thing I really like what they're doing is this hand positioning. What I love about their hand positioning is Dawn is literally holding her hand up and she's placing her hand on top of his. So when he wants her to move, he can simply bring it up or down and she's going to follow. There's no pain involved. Am I right? No. No pain involved. Also, it looks good. A man's job, Dawn, correct me if I'm wrong, your job here is to make her look good. Am I right? That is correct. Actually, my job is to make him look good. But this simple idea that he is presenting her, I love. And I love this kind of upward stance to it. So you know what? Never miss an opportunity to look good. The other thing, let's come around here and check out the handhold behind the back. So he's got her behind the back and they are in close proximity to each other. What you don't want is a whole bunch of space. If you have a bunch of space in between you two, don't you feel like there's a disconnect here? Like, I don't know what he's doing. You don't. Yeah. And then you start to struggle and crush hands and whatnot. The handholding over here too is really, really, I'm just going to appreciate this. It's pretty. I feel like she's comfortable here. I feel like he's got a good positioning on her hip so he can move her forward. He can move her backward. Okay. These things are important. I get that they're details, but they're very, very important. So when you guys go to take off, do you already have a standard of like, I'm going to take off to the left. I'm going to take off to the right. Either way, but we have to know what we're going to do first. So do you verbally like talk about that? So you're going to take off on the left. When you say take off on the left, you're meaning pushing your body weight to your left skate to skate? I mean, all of my weight is on my left foot. Then I'm going to take an inside edge and push off that left foot back onto my right. Okay. Excellent. Let's take a look at that. Okay. So we're going to go up. I'm pushing off the left onto the right. Outside edge, back to an inside. Alrighty. The weight is on the left and back onto the right. This is the crossover. Okay. You guys look good. Let me just say that you look good. So what I'm seeing is they are moving as one unit. It is like we're moving to the left, switch right, left, right. You know what I love, love, love about this? I feel like I'm going to say that a hundred times because I love so much about this, but they are not pushing. There is not this thing of like, we got to go here. We got to go there. And we're trying to gain speed or power. What's happening is because they're edging, they're skating off their edges. They are able to gain speed and momentum that's under control as they shift their body weight from side to side. Let's talk a little bit about feet. A lot of times when we're dance skating or really just skating in general, people are always like, what do we do with our feet? What do we do with our feet? Missing out on the idea that it's really just skating on your edges first, right? Things we don't want to do is literally try to walk forward, right? Or kick back. So I noticed that when you two skate, it's a very gentle rocking from side to side. Do you ever feel like, oh, if I place my foot forward, I'm going to run into him? Do you think it has anything to do with the proximity? So you can tell that she's very comfortable with a close proximity. She stays in her space, like that little lane right there. And then Don knows that there's no point where you're like, let me give you a big old push outward, right? Because you don't want to be knocking your partner on the ground. What is your favorite kind of music to do this to? Mid-tempo or slower. That way you can hold your edges. As you're pushing side to side, you can hold your edges. Do you think when you hold your edges, that's why it looks smooth? Yes, because when you also hold your edges, it helps you keep up your speed. So when we hold our edges and we're going back and forth, we build natural momentum as opposed to that heavy push. Can we see you guys skate together forward? How about with a different arm hold? Can we can we show something like that? Oh, look at this. And if I was to change arm hold. And what a lot of beginners like to do is do this. This is just friendly conversation skating. OK, so there's about, I would say, very roughly maybe three different hand holds or arm holds. Let's just demonstrate them real quickly. We have the one at the beginning, which is your kind of very, like, formal, beautiful. Show me something a little bit more casual. This is a little bit more casual. Aww, friends. Show me something a little interlinked, maybe. Oh, you can go down below. Hey. This is more boyfriend, girlfriend. The other one is like friend zone. And this is like, oh, no, we're together. And what's what's there we go. Now, what's what does this say about the state of your relationship? I call this the conversation roll. You just want to have a conversation while you're rolling. No, no, this is true. This is so true because sometimes. When you weren't around. Mid-session and I got something to tell Don that no one else can hear. And I link in and I go, hey, you do do that very naturally. That's when you're saying something that you don't want the whole world to see. You're like, I got to tell you something that's going on here. Now, let's talk about cornering, because when I saw you guys go around the corner, one of the most interesting things about it was how you put her just a little bit forward. Now, tell me why you did that. I put her forward so I can stay out of her way. And so that we can both make a comfortable crossover step. So let's really look at that, OK, because the positioning around the corner is great. Of course, Don, Don doesn't be like you're dragging her and whipping her around the corner. Well, that would not be good, right? You also don't want to run into each other. So let's look at the corners and see. There we go. So we're talking just staggered just a bit. And here he's going to move her as we go into the corner. Do you see that arm dip down a bit? So let me ask you this. If going around the corner, if people aren't able to really do crossovers in a way that's comfortable for them with the other person, is there a step that you can do after you've placed your partner slightly at a stagger here that you can do that doesn't require a full crossover? OK, we're just going to edge. Side to side? Let's do that. Let's do that. Because we may have skaters who really want to do this. But they want to work their way to the cross. But it does require a little bit more knee bend. Excellent. So I don't know Eagle Eye viewers are seeing this, but Don is basically just shuffling his feet side to side and Barb's doing more of a push out, but keeping her feet close to the floor without any kind of big crossover. Constantly from the left and to the right, bouncing it back and forth. I love it. Don, seriously, how many decades have you been skating? Four. Four decades? Yes. Really? Five. I feel like it's been longer than that. Maybe six. I know his history. I think the real thing here is, people, if you're just starting out with skating and you really want to try something new and fun, get a partner and try this simple thing. Because as I've said, skating is inherently social. You will meet new people and you'll try new things. And this is a nice, beautiful and pleasant way to interact with another human being. I just think this is a very easy way to interact with other people on skates and to learn a new and different skill. So hopefully, you guys will check back in with us when Don and Barb turn around and go backwards. And we're going to learn how to do this simple. We're going to do this simple, but we're going to flip it around and go backwards. So in the meantime, you guys got to practice. Look as good as these two do. I'm hoping with proper practice and decent instruction, it won't take you like seven decades to learn this. None of us have that kind of time. I get it. All right, skaters. So you know what I tell them to do at the end of every video. Tell them. Goodbye and eat your Wheaties. Is that it? OK, Don, that's not it. How do you get the Carnegie Hall? Practice, Barb. Practice, practice. Thank you, Don. Thank you, Barb, for being part of our chat. And have fun doing it. Have fun. Absolutely. OK, you guys, we'll see you next time on the Dirty School of Skate channel. Go practice. Bye-bye. Bye.