How To Do An I-Spin! - Tips For Beginners - Figure Skating Tutorial

Hey Sparkle Squad, welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, I'm Jasmine and welcome to my channel. Today's video, I'm going to be doing a tutorial on how to do a I-spin or a Sasha spin, whatever you want to call it. I call it a Sasha spin because if you guys knew, Sasha Cohen is like the person who's basically known for this spin. She does a beautiful one and it's like absolutely gorgeous and I feel like a lot of people call it an I-spin, but I like giving her credit and if I can fit it somewhere on the screen, I'll put one of her spins because it's absolutely gorgeous and you guys need to see it. But today, I'm going to be giving you guys a tutorial on how to do it and this is a more advanced spin, so don't worry if you can't get it perfect the first time. It'll take a lot of practice and it definitely did take me a lot of time to get this like perfectly where it is today and it also requires a lot of flexibility, so I recommend stretching a lot before you do this. All right, so basically a Sasha spin is a backwards spin, so you're going to be spinning on your back foot and for me, since I'm a righty, that is my right foot and I'm going to be spinning backwards and if you are a lefty, then you're going to be spinning on your left foot and you're going to be spinning backwards. So basically, we have to make sure that we're able to do like a nice backward scratch or backward one-foot spin on whichever foot that we have to do if we're a righty or lefty depending and we want to make sure that we can hold this and that we're nice and stable at it because we're going to be lifting our foot above our head and we want to make sure that we are nice and safe and stable. We don't want to be like shaking and spinning super slow, so you just want to make sure that you have a nice and solid back scratch. All right, so now we're going to come over to the boards and as you guys can tell, I'm going to be standing on the same foot that I have on my back scratch and I'm going to have this one closer to the boards, so I'm not going to be standing like this to the boards because that's going to be wrong. We want to make sure that our hip of the same leg that we're going to be spinning on when we're doing this spin is up against the boards and we're going to use it to help balance ourselves because we're going to be lifting our foot up, so you want to make sure that you're nice and secure, you're nice and stable, and you can move around and you're not going to slip backwards, but if you guys are a little bit afraid, I recommend getting some help from either a friend or a coach and they can help you especially here so that you can maybe like hold on to the boards or something, but what we're going to be doing is we're going to go here and we're going to grab our free leg. I'm going to go over how to grab for the spin and there's a bunch of different ways, but I'm going to be sharing with you guys the one that I usually do. So I usually grab right here, I grab the outside of like my ankle. I see a lot of people also grab their heel, which is perfectly fine, but I have really long legs so for me that doesn't work and I can't get my leg up, but I have to grab here like above right above where my boot is and sometimes I'll grab a little bit lower depending on how it is, but I usually grab right here and then I take my opposite hand or my right hand, the same as my foot, and I go and I grab the front of my toe pick. So I have revolution blades and for a lot of people if you have like just regular blades or something the hold might be a little bit different. So basically you just want to grab it near the front of your toe pick and there's most blades have a hole right there so that's where you're going to grab and that's where you're going to try and go and if your blades have like a smaller hole like how mine does you don't want to stick your finger in there because you're not going to be able to fit it and then you're not going to be able to lift your foot up. So we're just going to grab it here and I usually stick all four of my fingers in there and I just take my thumb and I wrap it around like the front of my toe pick and this also like prevents it from hurting because when if you go up here and like you grab it like this it'll like jab into your fingers and it'll hurt really bad so that's what I do to prevent that. Anyways so if we put everything together I'm going to grab my toe pick and then I'm going to grab my heel or my ankle or whatever and I'm going to just slowly slowly slowly pull my foot up as high as I can and I'm going to try and get it above my head. So you can work on this off ice before you get your skates on it's basically the same if you have sneakers on if you are barefoot you'll just grab your foot grab your toes and then grab your wherever you want to grab and then just pull it up and also stretching your splits definitely helps a lot with this because you're going to try and basically get into a split position. So on ice for the spin you don't basically have to stretch both feet you only have to do the one that you're going to be doing as your spin position but off ice I do recommend stretching both sides so that you'll be able to like equally be able to do both sides and it just makes it easier for other positions and other spins and just makes sure that you're flexible both ways and that you are like more open to like different spin positions and stuff like that but on the ice when we're doing it we only have to stretch the one foot that we're going to be spinning on. All right so one thing that I actually wanted to go over one more time quickly while we were still at the boards I wanted to tell you guys that when we grab our leg I see that a lot of people whenever they're trying to do a saucher and ice spin they try and pull it straight in front of their face and that is what makes it so hard and it's going to make it really really hard to get over your head because that's going to be like basically a more split position but if you look at like all of like people doing like ice spins or Sasha spins or even if you watch the video that I might have posted earlier of Sasha doing her spin her their legs are usually like right here right next to like their face and it's going to be like this so a trick to be able to get your leg as high as you want it to be is you want to basically bring it around so my knee is kind of like where my armpit is it's going to be right there and while I'm pulling it up it's going to be basically moving already to the side of me so that it's already once I pick it all the way up and once I straighten my leg it's already going to be near the side of my face so if I pulled it up straight then that would mean that I would still have to go all the way to the side and that already makes it a lot harder and we're going to lose a lot of speed in the spin so what I basically do is I just go here I grab where I have to grab and then I just go up through the side all the way up to where I have to be into my position all right so one final thing while we were at the boards I wanted to mention another thing when we're grabbing our leg so a lot of people tend to try and stay completely straight while they're grabbing their leg and they don't want to bend so they're like here and they just go down and they try and grab it and you can't reach from there so one of the most important things is you want to try and bend over and it's almost kind of going to be like um a sit spin position or you're going to be leaning over like you're doing a cannonball and that's why a lot of people do it from a sit position because it makes it a lot easier to grab your leg but so basically if you're just going to go into the spin if you're not doing it from any other position you want to lean as forward as you can so that it's easier for you to grab so if you guys can tell I'm leaning forwards and then I'm going to grab if I was up here if my back was straight and I try and bring my foot to my hand then I'm going to like fall backwards because that's not going to work and you're going to have to bring your foot super high up and you're going to lose your balance so you basically want to even out that like force or like that balance and we're going to be basically leaning forward and we're just going to easily grab our leg and then lift it up while we're in the spin all right so now what we're going to be doing is we're going to start getting into that spin position so what we're going to actually do is we're going to go and we're just going to push into a nice open back spin position and then while we're spinning here we're just going to lean forwards and we're just going to grab our leg and we're going to try and just spin in this position and try and hold that and we're not going to lift our foot up right we just want to get a nice balance and make sure that while we're spinning we're able to like lean over and grab our leg. So I'm going to show you guys what it should look like. Once we get used to grabbing our leg in that position and spinning in that position, we're going to start to try and lift our leg up into the actual like position that we need to be in for our I spin. So we're just going to go here, we're going to grab our leg, and we're going to slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, bring our leg up to the side. So we want to remember what I told you guys while we were at the boards, you want to try and bring it up to the side. We don't want to bring it up in front of our face because then it's going to end up in front of us like this. We don't want our foot here, we want our foot here. So we want to make sure that we're bringing it up to the side and not in front of us because that's also going to make it a lot harder. So we're just going to nice and slowly ease into the position. It's okay if you can't perfectly get it nice and straight like right next to your face because it's obviously going to be new and it's obviously going to be a lot harder and something that you're not like completely used to. It's really hard spinning with your foot above your head, so I would recommend being careful. And we're just going to go super slow and even if you only get your leg up to like here and spin like that, that's perfectly fine. Even if you just get it till here, that's perfectly fine. You want to just keep working on it until you're able to get it as high as you want it to be in the spin. All right, so one final thing that you want to make sure that you keep in mind when you're working on this spin is once you grab your leg, we're going to be bending this skating leg or this leg that we're going to be spinning on and we're going to be bent forward and grabbing our leg. As we lift our leg up into the spin, we're going to slowly straighten this leg as we move up because you want to make sure that you're not like down here. Like even if your leg is up here, that doesn't look super nice. So you just want to nice and straighten it and try and straighten it as much as you can. It doesn't have to be like completely perfectly straight on one foot because not everybody does it like that. Most of the time when I do the spin, I still have like a slight bend in my knee because it makes it a little bit easier for me to balance everything when I do it that way. And there's also a lot of people who have perfectly straight legs and it looks gorgeous that way, but I know that it's not going to be perfect. So even if you do need a little bit of a bend, it's perfectly fine, but you just want to make sure that you're not still down here while you're spinning. So just try and straighten your knee as much as you can while you bring your leg up. Okay, so now I'm going to show you guys what my spin is going to look like and keep in mind I've been doing this spin for years. This is one of my favorite spins and I have it in basically every single one of my programs and I've been working on it for a really long time and I also didn't get it immediately when I first started working on it. So basically the key for this and almost anything like any figure skating move in the entire world is you just want to make sure that you have patience and you just want to keep working on it until you finally get it. And it's going to take a while, I know, because I definitely was there and it does take a lot of hard work, but you just have to keep working on it and you have to just keep pushing yourself and one day you will definitely have the results that you want. So I know that you guys can do this, you just have to just keep working on it. All right, so this is the end of the video. I hope that this video helped you guys get your I spin or your Sasha spin and if you weren't able to get it, don't worry, just keep working on it and you'll definitely be able to get it soon. And I also hope that maybe this video gave you some tips and tricks on how to make your spin a little bit better than what you already do have. But I hope that you guys enjoyed this video and if you guys have any other like requests of tutorials that I should do, leave those down below in the comments and I would definitely love to do those for you guys and I will see you guys in my next video. Love you guys, bye!