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.