The First Inline Skating Skill Everyone Should Learn

Hi everybody! In today's video I'm going to teach you the skill that I think is the first skill every beginner should learn. Today we're going to learn how to do lemon drops, or swizzles, or bubbles, or hourglass, or teardrop. Someone from the Czech Republic told me that they call it sausages there. Someone told me in Finnish it's also called sausages. I think it's a really important beginner skill because it teaches so many important fundamentals. It gets you ready for turning, stopping, flow, control, and it helps you learn your edges. Another reason I really love the lemon drops for beginners is a lot of them actually feel a lot more comfortable learning lemon drops before learning basic strides, and that's because your feet are grounded. They're glued to the ground, and for a lot of beginners the scariest part of learning how to skate is actually picking your feet up. You can start with your lemon drop and get used to that. So in today's video I'm going to teach you how to do it step by step. We'll go over the common mistakes. I want to talk about turning, stopping, edges, everything that it's going to progress you into, and if you're more advanced stay tuned because at the end I'll teach you some more advanced variations of the lemon drop. How to do the lemon drop. You're starting in the shape of a V. Toes out, your knees are bent, your arms are up for balance. So there's two parts of a lemon drop. Part one is going to open. Part two is pushing to close. You'll be using your abductor and leg muscles to be working this. Part one, going to the open. So you're going to bend your knees and you're going to slightly lean forward. You'll feel when you lean forward your feet are just going to naturally start to open. You'll be on your inside edges. Your inside edges is your big toe. So you have your inside edges and your outside edges. And this part is where one of the common mistakes come into play is getting too wide. This is probably actually the most common mistake I see when learning the lemon drops is you open and then your legs just get way too wide. You end up in the middle splits and you're stuck completely like this. If this happens to you, you can put your hands down on the ground to anchor yourself and kind of walk your feet back in. Or if you have the strength you can just sort of squeeze and slowly walk your feet back in. You want to keep it small, not too big at the start for the open. And now we're ready to come back in. When you come back in your feet are going to go into the shape of an A. So you're basically making a diamond shape. So we're going to do our open and now you're going to squeeze, squeeze, squeeze coming into the diamond. Then your feet come back to parallel and you're going to give yourself a little bit of time to glide straight before opening back up. Open, bring your feet together into the V then back to parallel and straight. Open, squeeze, bring your feet back to straight. Honestly I just realized lemon drop is a great name for this because we're squeezing. Open and squeeze. We're making lemonade. Open and squeeze. Open and squeeze. So here's another common mistake is when you come back to close, bringing your toes too close together, touching and tripping yourself down. You don't want to touch your toes together. You want to just bring them to that shape and then get them back into the parallel. So open, bring your toes together but then back into the parallel. One more common mistake is not letting yourself glide and feeling like you just have to constantly be in bubbles. Whoa! When you're skating you're basically gliding from one foot to the other. You push and glide, push and glide. So for the lemon drop it's the same idea. You push, glide, push, glide, push and glide. And also remember with the lemon drop it's a lot about the bend as well. So open and bend, bend. Lemon drops will help you develop an understanding of using pressure for movement and control and flow and rhythm. If you think about it there's a rhythm to this. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. And also using pressure for control. So now we're introducing turning with these skills. So for turning one of the easiest turns is called a monster turn where you sort of go wide in an a-shape, pressure and turn. It's the same shape as a lemon drop but you just put all your pressure on your outside foot to initiate a turn, a real turn. And knowing how to turn on skates is a huge safety skill. I could be skating and then oh no big puddle I gotta do a quick turn out of the way. Another thing a c-cut is when you kind of get speed with one foot making this shape of a c to accelerate. So I can also use c-cuts to make turns. Notice how I'm making a circle right now. That's half of a lemon and we can go the other way. This is a great drill. C-cuts, one-sided lemons. Learning c-cuts is going to get you into the motion of developing speed and turning. Again why this is such a good fundamental skill. Then there's stopping. Probably the most important skill to learn on inline skates is stopping. There's something called a plow stop in my opinion the plow stop is actually the easiest way to stop for a beginner and I think it's a core way to stop that everyone needs to learn. And a stop is that first half of the lemon drop that I taught you. So let's bring it back. First half of a lemon drop is open wide. So for the plow stop you're basically doing a lemon drop but instead of bringing your feet back together to gain speed and flow you're actually going to dig into those edges so hard that it brings you to a stop. So it's kind of interesting how lemon drops can help you build speed and you can use the same motion press harder in your edges as a way to stop. Pretty cool. Lemon drops is also a core of slalom skating which is through cones. You can set up a bunch of cones and sort of practice lemoning through the cones. You could do them really tiny and then you could do them really wide. And this is a fun drill if you're out skating. Let's do a bunch of little lemons. Okay everybody let's do a bunch of big wide ones. Remember the wide ones are harder because you have to squeeze harder. This is why it's a good exercise and drill. How about we do three and three. Little ones. One, two, three. And now we'll do three big ones. One, two, three. Those big ones I'm really getting my speed. Someone once made a comment on one of my videos and they said that they call lemon drops snowmen because it's three at a time. Let's make a snowman that's big, medium, little. Here's a drill that's great if you're learning lemon drops. It's also just a great drill. I call it a rocking horse. You're going to open and close and then you're going to go backwards. And you're just going to go back and forth. This is really going to help train your body for the squeezing, the pulling. It's a good leg workout. Also it takes up almost no space. So on the subject of what can I practice in small spaces, a very commonly asked question. If you're in a small space, a small garage, if it's a rainy day and you're skating in your living room, try out the rocking horse. Just go back and forth. Practice that squeezing. Try not to let your toes or your heels touch or it'll take you down. Little and big. You could add some rhythm to it. You got really to squeeze for that one to stop my momentum. Look at this. We are developing stopping skills. Ah, squeeze. We're developing skills in rhythm and flow and balance. And I'm not going to lie to you guys. My legs are burning. One, two. I'm making this up as I go along. This is how much fun lemon drops are. Just use them to create something fun. Backwards lemon drops. Now, you know how I started this video by saying that a lot of beginner skaters feel a lot more comfortable learning lemon drop before skating. The same goes for skating backwards. A lot of people learn how to skate backwards by starting with backward lemon drops. Shape of an A. We're doing the same movement, but backwards. Arms up for balance, knees bent. Now remember, I'm going to be skating backwards. And when you're skating backwards, it's really important to look over your shoulder where you want to go. It's okay to look forward every now and then, but you need to be over your shoulder every couple steps. Open, and then you pull your legs back together. Open, pull, look over your shoulder. Again, we're creating a little bit of a rhythm. Open, pull back together, look over your shoulder. I have a full length video on how to skate backwards and learning how to take backwards strides. You should learn how to do it that way too. But this is a great intro to backwards skating. Another advanced variation. This is something that will help you get ready for more slalom skating and introduce pivoting, which is like the core of learning skills like the grapevine. So for the lemon twist, it's kind of like sideways skating. So you're in the shape of a V, you lemon drop to your toes, and then you kind of pivot to backwards. Pivot to forwards. This is great back and forth. Lemoning. The most important skating skills are the foundational ones. So now I encourage you to turn off your TV, lace up your skates, go out there and do some lemon drops. Step by step, build your confidence, get more comfortable on your skates, learn your control and your flow, have fun with it. Thank you for watching. Remember, practice is the best teacher. I'll see you in the next video.