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.
Showing posts with label skating journal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label skating journal. Show all posts
Monday, December 16, 2013
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
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.
Monday, December 2, 2013
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.
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.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
8/31/13
The date of my last update to this blog. The last time I had a draft saved was 9/7/13.
Life is starting to sort itself out again, just in time for Thanksgiving and the rest of the holiday season to throw it out of whack. Again.
Intramural hockey season for the 2013-14 school year was supposed to have started this past week, but it's been delayed a week because of reasons. So hopefully that will start up this week.
I will have many updates on random tidbits in the coming weeks, but this is a post to let you all know I'm back from my unannounced blogging hiatus and to expect a video with the next post here. I won't be posting every day, and I'm not entirely sure how I managed to post as often as I did when I restarted this blog the first time.
Life is starting to sort itself out again, just in time for Thanksgiving and the rest of the holiday season to throw it out of whack. Again.
Intramural hockey season for the 2013-14 school year was supposed to have started this past week, but it's been delayed a week because of reasons. So hopefully that will start up this week.
I will have many updates on random tidbits in the coming weeks, but this is a post to let you all know I'm back from my unannounced blogging hiatus and to expect a video with the next post here. I won't be posting every day, and I'm not entirely sure how I managed to post as often as I did when I restarted this blog the first time.
Monday, July 29, 2013
Skating Journal 7-29-13
I discovered a section of the Valley Ice Center's website dedicated to adult skating sessions. I had a feeling that these would be like skating at the rink at school, except with older adults instead of college students and maybe a couple faculty. And to my utter non-surprise, I turned out right. Same open ice because there aren't that many people, no huge amounts of kids that a regular public session would have, it's on the big and clean ice, and it's at a reasonable time at noon instead of the 9:30am public session on the curling ice which just kills all motivation to skate. However, unlike at school, I wasn't fearing for my life because none of the figure skaters were skating backwards with their legs up in the air and blades sticking out.
So I went to the adult skating session on Friday afternoon. Despite it being pricier than a regular public session, I definitely think it was worth the extra money to get much more open ice on the regular rink instead of the curling rink. I came away from the rink with a much more intense workout under my belt than I normally get when I go to the morning public session on the curling rink. So I think this is definitely money well spent.
I started with sprints. While I don't think my hockey lessons are quite at the level I want to be skill-wise, I definitely think I get winded way too easily. So after I did some crossovers and went around the ice for a couple minutes, I got on the goal line and went blue line and back, red line and back, other blue line and back, other goal line and back. After a minute rest, I got back on the line and went half rink and back, whole rink and back. Heart rate up, I thought about going whole rink one more time before doing more skill drills, but I figured I would have plenty of time to do more conditioning later on. My only skill criticism is that as I got fatigued, my confidence in stopping at high speed dropped exponentially, so that when I went the whole rink and back on the second set, I was stuttering on my stops. Fatigue definitely factored in, but I really need to get over my fear of falling on the ice without equipment on.
I wanted to focus on back skating, especially back crossovers, because I definitely feel that my back skating of late has fallen off a cliff, especially after a little scrimmage game at sticktime on Monday where I wasn't at all smooth trying to keep guys in front of me while I played back. But before I got into the teeth of my workout, I wanted to do some detail work on tight turns. I'm convinced that I won't get my tight turns right until I get another pair of skates because the off-fit of my left boot gets really distracting and even disconcerting performing certain skills at high speeds. But I did try to do some tight turns at medium speed before picking up the pace, and I feel much better after doing that bit of detail work because I developed the habit of moving with my hips and legs and not leading with my head and shoulders. My turns are still wider than I would like them to be, but at least I'm not throwing my body into them and instead am letting my shoulders lead me into them. (Also: watch Pavel Datsyuk own at tight turns.)
For the remaining 60 minutes or so on the ice, I spent at least 50 of them on back skating work. At a certain point, everything became a blur both because of my overall focus on my workout and because of my legs crying out from fatigue from the nonstop movement, so I truthfully don't know where to begin.
The two big things were back crossovers and back quick starts. I stayed in one end of the rink, using the faceoff circles as a guide and trying to do back crossovers at medium speed while staying along the circle. The first sign I was having trouble with this exercise was that I could not maintain my pacing for my exercise. Although I would try to work up to full speed, I kept trying to maintain half speed so that I could hyper-focus on my movement during the skill, but the choppy motion of moving one leg over the other meant that I was picking up more speed than I wanted to and that I couldn't really do much detail work. I eventually got the motion figured out, on both sides, so while I was still having some speed control issues, I felt like I was getting more fluid in my motion, though I was still stronger crossing left over right than right over left. Part of the issue that I'm figuring out now involves my not being incredibly stable skating backwards on one foot. This instability leads to me putting my crossover foot back down sooner than I want to if I want to go at less than full speed.
Oy, back quick starts. I'm not terribly good with them if my left foot is in front, but I'm comfortable doing it from that side. Conversely, I'm not too comfortable with them if my right foot is in front, but when I can execute it, I do it much better on that side.
I have plenty of problems with form. I'm getting better at the initial dig into the ice, but when my left foot is doing the initial dig, I have a tendency to go more sideways than straight back. On both sides, I'm definitely not keeping my head up or my body aligned so that I can see what's in front of me since the point of this exercise is to get me used to skating back quickly while still being able to see the ice and follow where the play is going as everybody moves into my defensive zone. When I lead with my left foot, I end up looking at my skates too much, not so much to the point where my entire upper body is leaning down or hunched over, but my head is definitely down and looking at the toes of my skates as I execute the drill. When I lead with my right foot, my entire body, not just from the waist down, is perpendicular to where I should be looking or where I should be skating backwards. I'm not entirely sure there's something I can do about this problem aside from recognizing it and trying to keep my head up.
I'm the most comfortable I've ever been just back skating in general, but my back crossovers and back quick starts definitely need a lot more work. I don't know if I've actually managed to get my backwards skating speed to be as fast as my forward skating, but I'm definitely at the fastest I've ever been while skating backwards. I don't know when the next time I'll go to a dedicated skating session will be, but I'll see if I can't start working to incorporate some skating drills into my sticktime practices.
I'll definitely need to do something about my skates in the future. I've talked before about how my skates are very likely half a size too big for me to fully utilize their potential, but I've also noticed in recent weeks that my left skate isn't oriented the same way as my right skate. I don't know if this is the product of stopping too much leading with my left foot (since I'm most comfortable stopping left foot first) or if it came to me this way when I bought it and didn't notice it until now, but my left runner and holder look and feel like they're pointed slightly to the right of center underneath my toe. It would certainly explain why I don't seem to have any ability to use my outside edge on my left skate, especially on crossovers (either direction), but I've managed to not be a total train wreck on skates with them so far. I definitely want to correct the sizing issue at some point when I have enough funds, but I'll probably also want to pay attention to the holder and runner too. I know Easton's recent Mako skate intentionally has an asymmetric design for better turns, but I'm not so convinced my Bauer Vapor X3.0's were supposed to be created the same way. Maybe they were and I just wasn't paying attention or a good enough skater yet to know the difference, but it's definitely something new to keep my eye on the next time I buy a pair of skates.
So I went to the adult skating session on Friday afternoon. Despite it being pricier than a regular public session, I definitely think it was worth the extra money to get much more open ice on the regular rink instead of the curling rink. I came away from the rink with a much more intense workout under my belt than I normally get when I go to the morning public session on the curling rink. So I think this is definitely money well spent.
I started with sprints. While I don't think my hockey lessons are quite at the level I want to be skill-wise, I definitely think I get winded way too easily. So after I did some crossovers and went around the ice for a couple minutes, I got on the goal line and went blue line and back, red line and back, other blue line and back, other goal line and back. After a minute rest, I got back on the line and went half rink and back, whole rink and back. Heart rate up, I thought about going whole rink one more time before doing more skill drills, but I figured I would have plenty of time to do more conditioning later on. My only skill criticism is that as I got fatigued, my confidence in stopping at high speed dropped exponentially, so that when I went the whole rink and back on the second set, I was stuttering on my stops. Fatigue definitely factored in, but I really need to get over my fear of falling on the ice without equipment on.
I wanted to focus on back skating, especially back crossovers, because I definitely feel that my back skating of late has fallen off a cliff, especially after a little scrimmage game at sticktime on Monday where I wasn't at all smooth trying to keep guys in front of me while I played back. But before I got into the teeth of my workout, I wanted to do some detail work on tight turns. I'm convinced that I won't get my tight turns right until I get another pair of skates because the off-fit of my left boot gets really distracting and even disconcerting performing certain skills at high speeds. But I did try to do some tight turns at medium speed before picking up the pace, and I feel much better after doing that bit of detail work because I developed the habit of moving with my hips and legs and not leading with my head and shoulders. My turns are still wider than I would like them to be, but at least I'm not throwing my body into them and instead am letting my shoulders lead me into them. (Also: watch Pavel Datsyuk own at tight turns.)
For the remaining 60 minutes or so on the ice, I spent at least 50 of them on back skating work. At a certain point, everything became a blur both because of my overall focus on my workout and because of my legs crying out from fatigue from the nonstop movement, so I truthfully don't know where to begin.
The two big things were back crossovers and back quick starts. I stayed in one end of the rink, using the faceoff circles as a guide and trying to do back crossovers at medium speed while staying along the circle. The first sign I was having trouble with this exercise was that I could not maintain my pacing for my exercise. Although I would try to work up to full speed, I kept trying to maintain half speed so that I could hyper-focus on my movement during the skill, but the choppy motion of moving one leg over the other meant that I was picking up more speed than I wanted to and that I couldn't really do much detail work. I eventually got the motion figured out, on both sides, so while I was still having some speed control issues, I felt like I was getting more fluid in my motion, though I was still stronger crossing left over right than right over left. Part of the issue that I'm figuring out now involves my not being incredibly stable skating backwards on one foot. This instability leads to me putting my crossover foot back down sooner than I want to if I want to go at less than full speed.
Oy, back quick starts. I'm not terribly good with them if my left foot is in front, but I'm comfortable doing it from that side. Conversely, I'm not too comfortable with them if my right foot is in front, but when I can execute it, I do it much better on that side.
I have plenty of problems with form. I'm getting better at the initial dig into the ice, but when my left foot is doing the initial dig, I have a tendency to go more sideways than straight back. On both sides, I'm definitely not keeping my head up or my body aligned so that I can see what's in front of me since the point of this exercise is to get me used to skating back quickly while still being able to see the ice and follow where the play is going as everybody moves into my defensive zone. When I lead with my left foot, I end up looking at my skates too much, not so much to the point where my entire upper body is leaning down or hunched over, but my head is definitely down and looking at the toes of my skates as I execute the drill. When I lead with my right foot, my entire body, not just from the waist down, is perpendicular to where I should be looking or where I should be skating backwards. I'm not entirely sure there's something I can do about this problem aside from recognizing it and trying to keep my head up.
I'm the most comfortable I've ever been just back skating in general, but my back crossovers and back quick starts definitely need a lot more work. I don't know if I've actually managed to get my backwards skating speed to be as fast as my forward skating, but I'm definitely at the fastest I've ever been while skating backwards. I don't know when the next time I'll go to a dedicated skating session will be, but I'll see if I can't start working to incorporate some skating drills into my sticktime practices.
I'll definitely need to do something about my skates in the future. I've talked before about how my skates are very likely half a size too big for me to fully utilize their potential, but I've also noticed in recent weeks that my left skate isn't oriented the same way as my right skate. I don't know if this is the product of stopping too much leading with my left foot (since I'm most comfortable stopping left foot first) or if it came to me this way when I bought it and didn't notice it until now, but my left runner and holder look and feel like they're pointed slightly to the right of center underneath my toe. It would certainly explain why I don't seem to have any ability to use my outside edge on my left skate, especially on crossovers (either direction), but I've managed to not be a total train wreck on skates with them so far. I definitely want to correct the sizing issue at some point when I have enough funds, but I'll probably also want to pay attention to the holder and runner too. I know Easton's recent Mako skate intentionally has an asymmetric design for better turns, but I'm not so convinced my Bauer Vapor X3.0's were supposed to be created the same way. Maybe they were and I just wasn't paying attention or a good enough skater yet to know the difference, but it's definitely something new to keep my eye on the next time I buy a pair of skates.
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