How To Do A Shoot The Duck! - 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 chute to duck for you guys and basically a chute to duck is a gliding element and no it doesn't involve any ducks but it will help a lot when you're learning sit spins or cannonballs or whatever you call those and basically you're just going to be gliding down the ice in like a sit position. So today we're going to be going over how to do it. It's a really basic move and I feel like it's like a good skill to have because you can put it in programs, you can just use it for so many things and eventually it will help with both your sit spins and cannonballs. Alright so basically one of the main elements that you're going to be needing to do for before you start your chute to duck is a nice solid long one foot glide. You want to make sure that you're able to glide on this one foot for as long as you can, almost make it all the way to the other end of the ice and you want to make sure that you're nice and stable and you have all of your balance because when we start doing our chute to duck then we're going to go all the way down on the ice and we're going to have to be nice and strong on the leg and I recommend doing both legs because that way it'll help with both forward and backward sit in the future and it's also just great to be able to do things on both legs and yeah it's just basically important to be able to have a nice solid one foot glide because you're going to be moving up and down on this leg and you want to make sure that you can support your weight. First thing that we're going to go over is basically how you're going to be in the position. So basically for a chute to duck I like to go all the way down here and most of the time when I go down I hold on to my ankle with both my hands like basically like this and I'm holding my foot up. I've seen a lot of people do it where they don't hold their foot like this but I feel like that's a little bit harder because then if your heel gets stuck then you're automatically going to go down. So basically just holding on it and also if you think about it in a cannonball you're also holding on to your foot so you can basically do it however you want whichever one works better for you. If you're able to do it like this and able to hold your foot up without having to do it that's great honestly because that's even harder and it takes more leg strength. So you can work on whichever one is better. But another thing that especially when I'm teaching younger kids how to do their chute to ducks I've noticed so many kids they like to go like this and instead of going bending down they bend forward like this and this is their chute to duck position. So basically you want to make sure that your foot is in front of you your back is going to be obviously bent over because you're reaching for your leg and you're going to be like this but I've seen so many kids they they're gliding like this in this position and that's not a chute to duck. So we want to make sure that when we're doing it we want to have our back and our chest up and we're bending at our knee and not like at our hips and that's just going to make sure that we're able to get lower and basically we just want to work on that balance of being far enough back on your blade so that you're able to stay in that position. An off-ice exercise that you guys can do before you start doing it on the ice it just basically helps with leg strength and being able to go up and down in that position and it's called pistol squats. I'll insert a video of me doing them off-ice right here somewhere on the screen so that you guys can kind of see like visually what they're supposed to look like. I would complete like five to ten reps on each leg and basically just work on them and make sure that you're able to like go down and up because that's a major help especially with your sit spins and it'll also help you a lot when you're going down into your chute to duck and also after being able to get back up because it takes a lot of leg strength. I've seen so many people go into their chute to ducks and like a bunch of different ways you guys can basically get down however you want as long as you get into the position and you're able to get back up afterwards. So I'm just going to show you guys the way that I do it because I personally find this is the easiest one and this is the one I've been doing since I was like a kid because we've been doing like I used to do like chute to duck exercises all the time like chute to duck into spiral and stuff like that but this is just the one that works best for me but you guys can also try and come up with your own ways to do it or if you see anybody trying to do it a different way then maybe you can try that one and see if it works for you. For me personally this one is the best one and I feel like it helps a lot especially with keeping your leg up and being able to go down all the way. So basically for mine what I do is I'm going to glide forward we're just going to start with getting into the position first so we're going to take a couple of nice slow steps we're going to go pretty slow we don't need a lot of speed for this first try so we're just going to take a couple of strokes we're going to go forward a little bit and then what I do is I bring my foot out in front of me and I just grab onto it with both my legs or both my hands like this kind of and it's almost in an L position so my standing leg automatically isn't super straight so as you can tell I'm kind of bent on it which is also going to get me a little bit started with going down but my leg that I am holding is straight because you want to make sure that it's nice and straight like this you don't want it bent because then obviously your heel is going to get stuck in the ice and we don't want that to happen because we're going to fall. So basically what we're going to be doing is we're just going to stroke one foot glide and then we're going to just hold our foot like this with both our hands and we're just going to work on this position until we get comfortable with gliding like that. A trick that I see a lot of people try and do when they're doing their shoot to ducks is they try and bring their chest to their leg or their hands to their legs instead of bringing their legs to their hands and this is what mainly causes whenever you're gliding forwards and if you just bring your chest to your leg then that's when you're going to end up in a position like this but when I bring my leg all the way up to my hands then that's how I get into like this kind of like upside down L shape and this is what we want. We don't want to be leaning over because it's going to be a lot harder to get bend down and get into that shoot to duck position we want to make sure that our upper body is nice and strong and our foot is in front of us so that we can go all the way down. Now what we're going to be doing is we're slowly going to start to slow like lower down into our sit position so ideally we want to try and get into a 90 degree position or even lower if you can. I've seen so many people be able to like go all the way down and that's great if you can because it works on leg strength obviously going all the way down without falling and then getting up afterwards. So basically what I'm going to be doing is you want to just start with like really small increments and just like work your way all the way down because obviously if you try and go down all at once you're probably going to fall and sometimes even I fall whenever I do it like that you just want to go nice and slow it's not a race just go nice and steady. So basically we're going to skate forward I'm going to bring my foot up and then I'm going to slowly lower myself down to the ice. Another thing I notice a lot when skaters are first trying to learn their chute du duck is they can get into this position but then when they start to lower again they just start to bend forwards like this and they forgot that they have to bend their knee and it's totally fine but you just want to make sure that you're actually lowering yourself with your knee and not with your hips so we don't want to drop our leg if our leg is up here we're going to try and keep it in eyesight and then we're going to slowly start to lower ourselves all the way down keeping our foot in front of us we don't want to let it drop at all so obviously it's okay if you drop it a little bit just make sure that you're not really bending yourself over and if you can't go all the way down at first with your chute du duck even if you can only go like this far that's okay but we want to make sure that we don't go like this because this position is already better and it's going to make it a lot easier when you're starting to learn your sit and if you just keep working on it you're eventually going to get as low as you want now once you're able to get into the position we're just slowly going to start to add some more speed to it and eventually you should be able to go all the way down the ice and even more if you can so we're just going to get some speed as much as you want you don't have to have a lot of speed at first this is just going to help you and you're going to get into your position bring your leg up to your hands and then you're slowly going to lower yourself down into your chute du duck position and you're just going to try and hold it for as long as you can and usually whenever i'm teaching kids how to do their chute du ducks then i tell them it's okay to fall because that means that you're getting as low as you can and obviously if you're falling that means that you're going back and you're not going forwards like this so it's going to make it a lot easier when you're learning how to do a chute du duck so if at first you're not able to hold it for a super long time but you are falling backwards like you're going like this once you get down here if like you fall down or something then that's actually a good sign because that means you're doing it right so basically once you get to that position where you're like falling and you're not able to hold it for super long you just have to basically work on leg strength and that's where those pistol squats i was telling you guys about earlier help a lot and pistol squats have so many different benefits in skating my coaches made me do it for like being able to like hold on to landings on jumps like if you land weird then you're able to get back up but basically it's just working on that leg strength to being able to hold that position for as long as you can and also the more speed that you have the longer you're going to be able to hold it because that's the more momentum you're going to have if you're going slower then you're more likely you're going to fall backwards because you're just eventually going to stop and you can't stand on one foot like stopped but basically just work on getting into that position if you're falling that's a good sign trust me you don't have to be frustrated with yourself and whenever i have a kid who's working on a shoot to duck and i see them that they're like falling over and over again i tell them that's actually great because trust me it actually means that you're doing it right not that you're doing it wrong so we're just going to work on that slowly start to add more speed to it so that you're able to hold it for as long as you can so we're going to go around hold our leg and we're just going to go all the way down and we're going to hold it for as long as we can and now there's a bunch of different ways that you can get up out of your shoot to duck and i'm going to show you guys a couple of the ways that i've seen people do them because it's pretty hard to get back up after that but there are some ways that can make it a little bit easier people go like get up out of their shoot to ducks in a lot of different ways the way i usually get up out of my shoot to duck is i usually just go all the way down and then i just basically come back up and put my foot down but obviously that one takes a lot more leg strength so i have seen a lot of people they'll be going in their shoot to duck and while they're down here they'll go into like a dip kind of gliding on two feet and then they'll stand themselves up and it's basically that just makes it a lot easier to be able to get up so i'll just show you guys kind of what that one looks like so the wind i'll show you guys the one that i do first but obviously this one takes a little bit more leg strength so you're gonna go down and i just come all the way back up and i put my foot down but the way that i've seen most beginners working on their shoot to ducks and getting up is they'll go they'll skate they'll go down into their shoot to duck and then they'll lower their foot and then they'll stand back up there's no problem with that one it makes it a lot easier in the process but eventually once you get more leg strength you want to try and do the other one because one it makes it look a little bit nicer especially in programs but two it also doesn't take up as much time um so basically you're just gonna work on whichever one works best for you and i would say start off with two feet to get back up because if you're doing one foot then if you guys are getting back up you want to make sure that you don't come back too far up so that you fall backwards you have to be super careful with that one and yeah we're just going to work on it i'll show you guys my shoot to duck one more time we're gonna go we're gonna go all the way down like this we're gonna try and hold it for as long as we can then we feel like we can't hold it anymore then we're gonna drop to two feet and then we're gonna stand all the way back up end of the video and i hope that you guys enjoyed and that it helped you guys get your shoot to duck or if you already had your shoot to duck make it a little bit better but i just hope that these tips were able to help some of you guys in getting your shoot to duck because it is a really hard skill at first but once you get a hang of it it can help you with so many different things and trust me the pistol squats that i was telling you guys about earlier in the video do help so i really recommend even if you're even if you already have your shoot to duck still work on them because they're really beneficial for almost every skating element that you're ever going to be doing in your skating career but i hope that you guys enjoyed and if you guys have any other like tutorial ideas that you want me to do leave those down below in the comments and i would be happy to make them for you guys and i will see you guys in my next video love you guys bye