Bracketed
Awesome edge class tonight! We learned counters and brackets, which...okay, I'm not even going to try explaining them, I'll just say they're turns on one foot and let Wikipedia handle the specifics (brackets, counters). My counters never made it off of two feet, but I actually could do brackets on one foot very quickly. Well, in one direction. I've give you two guesses which it was, and the first doesn't count.
(I'm still surprised I don't spin and jump clockwise. I should give it another go in that direction now that I know better how to get into a two-foot spin.)
I like brackets better than three turns, which continue to bedevil me. The counterrotation actually makes more sense and feels more stable than rotating the top half of my body in the direction I want to turn.
Speaking of three turns...ugh. I had a lesson with C yesterday since the competition is tomorrow and there won't be ice time for anyone else, and it didn't go as well as I would like. My fault entirely; I forgot we had an event scheduled for across campus that ended 45 minutes before my lesson started, so I literally had to run the half-mile back to my office, get changed, get to the rink, and get on the ice in a really short amount of time. I got my skates tied about 30 seconds before my lesson started. On the other hand, I was super warmed up from the running.
So I was already frazzled because of rushing to get there and an insanely busy/stressful day at work, and just not in the right headspace to really learn. Anyway, we were working on checking better when coming out of three turns, especially important for the Waltz Eight. If you don't check at all, you fall down; if you don't check enough, you wind up sort of corkscrewing around the point where you turned instead of gliding away from it. That's where I am now. (Checking, by the way, is the act of rotating your shoulders in opposition to your hips.) The problem is that I don't rotate my back enough along with my shoulders, and I'm not sure how to fix it. We tried just doing the rotation against the wall, and the back muscles C said should feel it...didn't.
I practiced in front of a mirror today, and I thought I had made progress once I realized that looking over my shoulder made swiveling my back much easier, but I tried it on the ice tonight and there was no improvement. Maybe it will be a gradual thing. Or maybe my spine just won't do this. It's never been particularly bendy, even when I was a kid.
So that was depressing. But class perked me up. Yay for brackets! We also did backwards cross rolls, which...went about as well as you might expect, but did provide some entertainment value. J, who is the one person in the class who hasn't been skating for years and years (she has a year on me, though, so I'm definitely at the bottom of the class) and I both managed to get the motion down, but we had a hard time getting them to go anywhere. We were moving our limbs a lot, but basically staying in one place. Maybe we got six inches on each roll. We both pretty much gave up after one (painfully long) attempt down the long axis and collapsed in laughter at the boards. They were kind of fun to do, though, and they look very cool when done right, so I'll have to work on them at practice this week.
This entry was originally posted at http://icepixie.dreamwidth.org/931539.html. It has
comments over there.
(I'm still surprised I don't spin and jump clockwise. I should give it another go in that direction now that I know better how to get into a two-foot spin.)
I like brackets better than three turns, which continue to bedevil me. The counterrotation actually makes more sense and feels more stable than rotating the top half of my body in the direction I want to turn.
Speaking of three turns...ugh. I had a lesson with C yesterday since the competition is tomorrow and there won't be ice time for anyone else, and it didn't go as well as I would like. My fault entirely; I forgot we had an event scheduled for across campus that ended 45 minutes before my lesson started, so I literally had to run the half-mile back to my office, get changed, get to the rink, and get on the ice in a really short amount of time. I got my skates tied about 30 seconds before my lesson started. On the other hand, I was super warmed up from the running.
So I was already frazzled because of rushing to get there and an insanely busy/stressful day at work, and just not in the right headspace to really learn. Anyway, we were working on checking better when coming out of three turns, especially important for the Waltz Eight. If you don't check at all, you fall down; if you don't check enough, you wind up sort of corkscrewing around the point where you turned instead of gliding away from it. That's where I am now. (Checking, by the way, is the act of rotating your shoulders in opposition to your hips.) The problem is that I don't rotate my back enough along with my shoulders, and I'm not sure how to fix it. We tried just doing the rotation against the wall, and the back muscles C said should feel it...didn't.
I practiced in front of a mirror today, and I thought I had made progress once I realized that looking over my shoulder made swiveling my back much easier, but I tried it on the ice tonight and there was no improvement. Maybe it will be a gradual thing. Or maybe my spine just won't do this. It's never been particularly bendy, even when I was a kid.
So that was depressing. But class perked me up. Yay for brackets! We also did backwards cross rolls, which...went about as well as you might expect, but did provide some entertainment value. J, who is the one person in the class who hasn't been skating for years and years (she has a year on me, though, so I'm definitely at the bottom of the class) and I both managed to get the motion down, but we had a hard time getting them to go anywhere. We were moving our limbs a lot, but basically staying in one place. Maybe we got six inches on each roll. We both pretty much gave up after one (painfully long) attempt down the long axis and collapsed in laughter at the boards. They were kind of fun to do, though, and they look very cool when done right, so I'll have to work on them at practice this week.
This entry was originally posted at http://icepixie.dreamwidth.org/931539.html. It has
comments over there.