Learn a Pirouette the Easy Way for Beginners! Ballet, Figure Skating Exercise From Home!

Welcome to Ice Coach Online at Home Edition. Today we're going to learn how to do a pirouette, which can help you with your spins and twizzles on the ice. A pirouette in French means the act of spinning or turning on one foot, and we do this move a lot in ballet. Let me show you what it looks like. So before we really get into this, I recommend maybe doing it on a carpeted area first, unless you feel confident enough to do it on hardwood floor, like I am, and I just put some socks on so that I can spin a little bit easier. So a pirouette is essentially like a twizzle, but we'll be doing it on the balls of our feet. So first we're going to start by doing this with the free leg turned in, closed, and then turned out. Let's get started. Now before we start turning, let's just establish the position that we want during the turn, and that is a passé. And a passé looks like this, really with the leg turned out, but we're going to do it with our free leg turned in, and try to do it on the ball of your foot, like so. If you need help balancing, hold on to a wall like this, go here, and then go up on the ball of your foot, and try balancing without the wall, and see how long you can balance for. Now, it's really important that when you're balancing on one foot, and on the ball of your foot like this, to engage your core and lift up. You don't want to be slouching, you don't want your tummy out, and your butt out, everything should feel like in one line, and lifting. And that's what's going to help you stay there and balance. Now once you're feeling really confident with your balance in that, try to put your arms from this neutral position to here, because on the ice, when you're doing a spin or a twizzle, more often than not, your arms are either going to be here or here. So let's go to our passé, we're balancing, and just bring the arms there. Ideally, the shape that you want for your arms is as if you are hugging a nice big beach ball. So this round, kind of oval shape, and your hands should be across from where your belly button would be. So now that we've established the position that we want during the pirouette, let's get turning. So in ballet, we do a pirouette from what is called fourth position, and I'm going to show you a parallel fourth position, since we are doing a turned-in position in our pirouette. So you'll want to put your right foot in front, left foot behind, with about four to five inches in between, so that you're in one straight line, nice and parallel. And then you're going to put your left arm in front, bend your knees, both at the same time, and go to that passé en relevé, and try to balance there. That wasn't a good example, but let me try again. So bend, and once you've found your balance in that passé from your fourth position, now we are ready to add the turn, and we're just going to do one turn and one turn only. So go to your parallel fourth position, left arm in front, right arm to the side, bend, and up. Notice when I did the turn, I did what we call spotting, and what that is, is you want to focus on something in front of you, and try to keep your gaze there for as long as you can, and then go back to it. Now spotting helps with your balance in your pirouette, and although you won't see skaters do this in their spins, some of them might do that during their twizzles. Let's talk about how we generate the rotation. So notice how from here, I just bring my right arm to my left in that sort of beach ball position. I don't open my left arm, I just keep it there, and the right arm comes to it. Sorry, I did a double there. It's like you're rotating as one unit. Your hips and your shoulders are very square, there's no opening or twisting whatsoever, and continue engaging your core and lifting up during that pirouette. Now how do you land your pirouette? In ballet, you land your pirouette in this large, open fourth position with your front leg bent and your back leg straight. Even though we're doing this pirouette right now from a parallel position, I want you to try to land in this open fourth position, just because it's going to be much more comfortable. I've been struggling myself trying to land in this sort of parallel position, so let's try it with an open fourth position for your landing. So bend out. So once you've tried that a few times, now let's look at doing it with an open leg in your pirouette. Let's backtrack a little bit and just do a balancing passe, but with our free leg open instead of parallel. So your standing leg will still be parallel because that's how it would be on the ice, and we're just going to open that right leg up like this. The only difference from this turned out passe versus your parallel passe is just that the leg is open. Everything else is the same. Your core is engaged, you're lifting up, arm position is the same, the whole technique for this pirouette is the same, it's just that your left leg is going to open up. So if you'd like, you can go back to the wall and do that little balancing test, but with your passe open like this. Now before we start turning in this turned out passe, let's do our turned out fourth position, which is just like our parallel one that we did earlier, except now you're going to turn your feet out slightly. And the distance that you want between both feet is about one foot. It's about the distance of your foot. So just like that, that's what you want it to look like. And that is your prep for your pirouette. So the next step is doing our turned out passe releve from our turned out fourth position. So we'll go here, left arm in front, right arm to the side, bend, passe up, and back down in your fourth position. You want to repeat this a couple times until you're comfortable in that kind of turned out passe position and landing in that fourth position. The last and final step is adding that rotation and your nice grand landing position. And keep in mind, everything that we talked about earlier with the spotting, finding that focal point on the wall and keeping your gaze there until you land. Think about keeping that core engaged and lifting up to the sky. I hope you enjoyed this video from me. If you did, give us a like, subscribe to the channel, comment below and let us know what you want to see in the future. Thank you!