Skating Journal 12-16-13

I went skating at Meehan Auditorium on Thursday afternoon, and I also went to the Kennedy Plaza rink on Friday because I was absolutely craving ice time even if on a small sheet with a lot of people on it. I only got about a half hour time for each session, but I did have just one focus for the entirety of my weekend ice time: knee bend.

In my last video post, it was incredibly obvious that my legs were practically straight on the ice. This phenomenon, despite my conscious effort to bend my knees and try to avoid being straight-legged on the ice. So on Thursday at Meehan, I did the strides drill from HowToHockey's second video on skating fundamentals.

In starting out, I wanted to take things to an extreme, so I made sure to keep my knees really bent, feeling almost like I'm in a seated position. The short time on the ice (as well as the fact that Kennedy Plaza is a very public skate) didn't allow me to capture any video, but I definitely felt closer to the ice than before. The difference in my balance is drastic. While I felt pretty steady even before focusing on my knee bend, keeping myself that low to the ice really secured the feeling on my skates and allowed me to take confident strides. The low level also helped with my speed because of the coverage I got with a single stride; the extreme knee bend eliminated any feelings of sluggishness and limited speed I would occasionally get from feeling like I was pushing and making an effort but still moving more slowly than I usually do.

The problem I noticed coming up the most that seems to have corrected itself with a shift in focus has to do with maintaining the knee bend well throughout my skating. As Scott and Jeremy mention in the video, one of the big problems people have with skating this way is maintaining the knee bend. It can happen for various reasons, from fatigue to laziness to lack of mental awareness. But focusing on my legs and making sure I stayed low to the ice, keeping my knees bent and over my toes, helped me keep my head on the same horizontal plane so that I wasn't shifting up and down and wasting energy picking up my knees then bending low again.

I'm noticing having a good, solid knee bend is actually helping my overall skating ability out quite a bit. The next step is to make it a habit, to make it automatic. Like every skating ability, I should just do it without needing to think about it.

Skating Journal Updates (video)

So it finally worked! Blogger finally uploaded this video, and I can finally do some analysis of my skating before my game tonight!

0:00-0:41
One-step lateral movement drill, forward and backward. Probably the one good thing I do in this drill is keep my head up. (And that's probably also the only good thing I do throughout this video.) It's one thing to be on the ice and think that I'm bending my knees, and a pretty surreal experience to see myself on video and see almost no knee-bend whatsoever. A good, solid knee-bend would certainly go a long way toward making sure I do this drill right and make it at least look competent.

I can pinpoint two other things I can improve on. The first is that when I stop on the side, I'm sliding across the ice most of the time instead of getting to the other side as quickly as possible. That may partially be an equipment issue because I haven't sharpened my skates since the summer, and as I've mentioned numerous times before, my skates aren't the best possible fit since my left boot is just slightly too big that I can notice it affect my skating ability. But a better push off the side should help me with those quick stops and get moving to the other side more quickly.

The second point of improvement deals with my actual movement side to side. My inside leg is static. A better knee-bend will help because I'll actually have something to use and somewhere to go, but I need a much better push on my inside leg when I crossover to the other side. So I load up my weight on the outside leg, push off that leg, crossover, and as I'm crossing over, my leg that's staying on the ice can do a better job of pushing me toward the side. As a lateral movement drill, the point is that I should be able to move side to side and also cover as much ice as I possibly can. In my first game this season (post coming soon!), I got beat a few times to the outside because I couldn't step in front of the guys quickly enough because I couldn't cover enough ice laterally, so I got turned much more than I would like or should be considered acceptable.

0:42-1:27
Two-step lateral movement drill, forward and backward. I think some of the problems with my one-step lateral movement drill just become exaggerated when I do this drill. I'll work on the one-step and see what happens with the two-step once I make those adjustments.

I will say though that I do have a somewhat difficult time adjusting to this drill and keeping it from becoming a backwards crossovers drill once I go from forward to backward. Here's an instance of where I really feel my skate sizing issue affects my skating ability because my left foot can never seem to land comfortably, and it always seems to want to cut its own path in the ice. Short of getting another pair of skates, I'm not entirely sure what to do about this problem other than keep trying and see if it corrects itself when I make other adjustments and get more comfortable in my skating.

1:28-1:59
Agility drill. My arms flail around because they're not holding anything. I've done this drill with a hockey stick before (off camera), and my hands were much more in control when they had something in them like my hockey stick.

Aside from my hands flailing, I think my pivots are actually getting better. I need to work on not making them pull me off to the side so much like at the end around 1:55 where I pivot to the last part of the drill where I back-skate to the other side of the circle.

Here, you can see the obvious deficiencies in my lateral movement. I slowed down a lot going from left to right to avoid falling. I see Jeremy Weiss demonstrate this drill in his video describing it, and I wonder how I can get my lateral movement to look anything close to that. Just some things to work on when I get back home for winter break and can get more stick-and-puck time as well as skating space.

Skating Journal 12-2-13

So I was originally going to post this with a video, but Blogger is being quite unhelpful with uploading a video with this post. The video itself is nothing terribly remarkable, but it's much more helpful to actually see what's going on instead of just have me attempt to describe it here. There were lateral movement drills and an agility drill, but I can't really talk about what specifically happens in the video unless the video can be uploaded. Instead, I'll talk about something else that's come up in recent weeks.

I haven't been able to skate as much as I thought I would be able to this semester, but there are definitely other hockey related skills-building things I've done in the meantime to try to make up for the lack of ice time.

On the ice, though, it's been an interesting last few months. I've been trying to find ways to improve, and aside from learning skills that I don't yet know how to do or do very poorly, I've been trying to delve deeper into my stride. There are skating sessions where I feel like I'm the fastest I've ever been, and the next time out, the ice feels like trying to skate through concrete. I don't particularly consider myself a skilled hockey player in any facet of the game, but I do think my best asset is my skating ability, so developing consistency there would go a long way toward shoring up the rest of my on-ice skills. It probably helps that skating is the only thing I can work on since there's hardly any time I can get for stick-and-puck practice on ice while I'm here at school.

I love HowToHockey and the video's he's posted on hockey fundamentals, and I think I'm starting to find some answers with his most recent videos on proper skating stance:


And a second:

Going all the way back to my last blog, and even including the video I was planning to upload with this post, something always seemed off to me about my skating stride and stance, especially on lateral movement drills. On the ice, I always felt like I was bending my knees and trying to stay low to the ice to maintain my power skating stance; after video review though, my legs make it look like I never bend my knees while skating, and it was very apparent in the video I was planning to post today that my knee-bend looked non-existent on video.

I've already played one game of intramural ice hockey this season (which will be its own separate post if I ever get around to it), and while I didn't get a chance to really work on my skating to try to implement this insight into knee-bend and adjust my skating stride before the game, I did make a conscious effort during the game to get low especially in races for the puck. I definitely felt faster than I had been in recent weeks, and even though the ice was really choppy because we were the second game that night and there was no zamboni between games, the ice didn't feel like trying to skate through concrete when I made a conscious effort to bend my knees more than I might have considered necessary. It didn't detract from my balance even though I hadn't worked on my stride in a while (in fact, the lower stance helped my balance overall especially when I tried skating at full speed in puck races), and it also didn't hinder any of stick skills, which is encouraging because I've been experimenting with my hockey sticks lately after finding something absolutely fascinating on the Internet (topic for another post).

Whenever I can actually make it to the rink to practice my skating again, I'll definitely be working on maintaining my knee-bend as a conditioning exercise, as a leg workout, and as a speed exercise.