I'm supposed to watch the edge. Um, what's an edge?

Forget the edges. Forget the toe picks. Forget flutzing.

If you're watching the Olympics and can't tell what jump they're doing, here's some advice:

Don't worry about it.

Seriously, unless you're planning to become a fan, and watch all the time, and look at the protocols (never mind), it literally doesn't matter what jump they're going to do. They all look alike in the air. This is because they all ARE alike in the air. Once the skater has achieved orbit, the position and rotation and landing are identical for every jump.

Okay, incipient geeks, yes I hear you-- some skaters rotate to the left, some skaters rotate to the right. This changes the dominant side, but not the basic position. 'K? Can I get back to my post now?

Ditto the footwork-- 3-turns, choctaws, counters, rockers, brackets, walleys, twizzles, I could start making up words at this point and you'd have no clue.

But it doesn't matter. Just enjoy.

Now, that said, if you really want to know what's going on, forget about edges and toe picks. You have to watch a lot of skating to be able to pick up on this in the fraction of a second in which it occurs. You want to watch the entrance.

Axel
We'll start with the easy one. Everyone recognizes the axel because it takes off forwards. (Skating geeks shut up-- I know that all jumps take off more or less forwards. You're just confusing the issue.) The axel has no backwards set up. In fact, doing a challenging backwards pattern before entering the forward take-off edge will earn you points. (Listen for comments about "difficult entry to that axel.")

And this is the secret of recognizing jumps. You'll often notice that the commentators know what the athlete is going to do before they do it. This is partly because they have a cheat sheet, but also because they know the set ups-- they are primed to watch for a certain jump because the set up is part of the skill. Skaters who don't "telegraph" their jumps (Yuna Kim, Jason Brown, Patrick Chan, and Michelle Kwan come to mind) are a lot of fun to watch because of this; it is also one of the things that makes their programs flow so beautifully.

Lutz
Technically a toe-assisted counter jump off a back outside edge. Forget it. Watch for a long shallow edge, usually the longest entry edge of all the jumps, and skaters tend not to precede it with footwork. This is because it is a "counter" jump-- the rotation is in the opposite curve of the entry edge (for people who jump to the left, it will be a clockwise entry edge and a ccw rotation). This is changing, because any difficult entry gets you points. Again, listen for the comment about difficult entry.

Skaters often put the lutz in a corner, to give them the maximum entry distance. One of the things that used to make Yuna Kim's lutzes difficult to spot were short entry edges, and she would place them in the middle of the ice, where no one ever does lutzes.

The lutz is the jump where skaters put one or both arms over their heads, the "Tano" or "Rippon" positions. I've also seen this done with the axel.

This is the jump with the most "edge calls"-- taking off from the wrong edge-- because the counter rotation can force the foot onto the wrong edge at the last minute if you don't time it just right.

Flip
The flip is a toe assisted jump from a back inside edge, but watch for a long forward edge and/or a short (two-three moves) footwork sequence before the skater does a quick turn for the back take off.  Ironically, after judges starting really hammering skaters for "flutzing" their lutzes (flipping to an inside edge at the last moment, which makes it a flip), skaters fixed that and started "flupping" their flips-- turning to an outside edge, making it a lutz. The only reason you care, is because a take off from the wrong edge is one of the things that mysteriously lowers the scores.

Loop
Outside edge jump with no toe assist. However, you want to watch for another longish entry, on a much tighter curve than either the Lutz or the Flip. Skaters will often cross their feet and appear to be lifting off a crossed two-foot glide. This is also a common second or third jump in a combination.

Toe loop
Same entry as the loop, but with a toe assist. This is one of the hardest jumps to spot, as most skaters find it easy, so they throw it in willy nilly, especially if they've missed an earlier jump and need to add points. It's a common first quad jump, and also common in the "bonus"-- the second half of the program where you get extra points for every jump. Another common jump in combination.

Salchow
A common "warm up" jump (the other is the double axel), that is, a jump in the first few seconds of the program to get the feel of the ice. This is another "edge" jump, with no toe assist, often telegraphed by a very curvy entry edge and an upper body wind up. This and the toe loop are generally the only quads you'll see (this has to do with the actual number of rotations in the air, which is fewer than four, trust me.) Matthew Savoie used to do a triple (quad?) salchow out of a back hydroblade position. Amazing.

Footwork sequence: jumps
Walleys, bunny hops, albrights (also called scissor and mazurka), splits, falling leafs (falling leaves?), Russian splits (Jason Brown anyone?), and this year one of the women has a one-foot axel in her footwork. (Can't remember who it was, but I almost dropped my coffee.) These generally don't count as jumps; they're calculated in the necessary turns and changes of direction for the footwork.

Footwork sequence: turns
WHO CARES. This is the part of the program where the skaters generally have the chance to create some art, to connect with the audience, to sell the program, to tell a story. If they aren't doing this, if they're just "technical" skaters with the requisite number of turns, edges, changes, etc. then they are doing it wrong.

Any questions?

Triples at 9

You'll see me complaining a lot on this blog about pushing kids too hard, too young.

To a large extent that's because I like to focus on what ordinary kids can get out of the wonderful sport of figure skating, and also to help parents keep in perspective exactly how extraordinary their kids are (or, ahem, are not).

But some kids are extraordinary. We've seen the phenomenon over the past few years of elite boys pushing the age envelope downward, with younger and younger kids winning at Intermediate and Novice before they run up against minimum age restrictions at Junior.

As an email I received queried,

"What if you're talking about a reasonably talented 6 y/o with solid single jumps and axel and there seems a bit of time yet to worry about triples but they've been bitten by the competition bug. ... Do you go with that and delay and possibly limit progress or do you pull them away from competing so they make hastier progress but barely compete for the next few years?"

In fact, I had this exact question from my Alpha students this week. They all claimed to "be really good" at cross overs. And y'know, they are really good at cross overs.

But their cross overs can be better-- more confident, more advanced.

And that's really the crux of the matter.

Whatever skill you're working on right now-- whether it's simple cross overs or a double axel-- it can be better.

So the first answer to "why not move on to the next thing" is actually another question, namely, are you properly identifying what the next thing is? If you've got all the doubles, is the next thing really the triples? Or is it consistently landing all jumps in competition, or improving your GOE, or landing more difficult combinations, or improving the technique?

I like to point out the brilliantly managed career of Jason Brown, a skating phenomenon who was one of those 9 year-olds with all his doubles. But, knowing that he had tons of time because of his young age, his coach has parsed out his milestones. The goal was not "national champ by 17" which he arguably might have pushed for, but rather to hit specific measures-- land the triple axel in competition, then land it in a major competition, then skate a clean program that includes a triple axel, etc. Jason's going to have a long, injury-free career because his coach understood that his youth was not a goal in itself, but rather a gift that allows them time to develop a brilliant skater.

Skating skills in and of themselves are not the goal. They are sign posts along the way. A child with doubles at 9 is certainly going to be landing triples by the time they're done with high school.

The reader asks, essentially, "do you delay their progress or do you have them compete with their age group."

I ask, in return, what, exactly, do you consider "progress?"

What choice have you made, or would you make, with a skater who pulls ahead of their age restrictions in competition?

The limits of talent and desire

I'm the sort of person who does not believe in limits. I especially get my hackles up when confronted with the suggestion that I "can't" do something. My philosophy, and the one I share with discouraged students, is "if someone is doing it, it's possible, and if it's possible you can do it."

But if this was the case, wouldn't every skater have a double axel?

And not to mince words, yes. Every skater that put in the work required IS capable of that double axel. A naturally athletic skater will get it sooner, and more easily. A naturally motivated skater will find the longer athletic slog less onerous because of their inclination to accept hard work. A skater with a lot of time to skate will appear to have learned it quickly, even though they've devoted the same number of hours to it. A more timid skater will have more difficulty than a courageous one. A courageous one may accept falls that she doesn't need to accept, and slow down her progress.

I never tried the harder jumps. I could probably eventually have done them, but I was too scared. So I never tried. In other words, my ability to do an axel is not in question. I believe it. It was my desire to do an axel that got in the way.

This is what I see over and over--skaters, and their mothers, blame their failures, if you want to see it that way, on their native ability, narrowly defining that as meaning athletic ability. But ability is the same thing as body type; it's just another quality that you need to understand and accommodate. The skater gets discouraged, and stops being responsive in lessons. She doesn't practice. She takes one lesson a week. She won't make attempts when the coach isn't there. She jumps from coach to coach, looking for the one who will "give" her the axel (or the double, or the jump sit...).

It is okay to give up a goal. But be honest with yourself. If this goal remains important in itself, for you and not for your mother or your popularity, then don't give up on it. If you're just going through the motions, then rethink the goal. I decided the skating tests and higher freestyle skills were not the best use of my time, and put my energy into the PSA ratings instead.

Understand what you desire and why you desire it. Understand where your talent lies and use that to achieve your goal. Pointless to rely on athletic ability alone, if your talent is persistence.

There are no limits to talent or desire. You only limit yourself.

Where your axel went wrong

When I first start teaching bunny hops, I always ask the kids-- do you know what you're learning? They all shout "BUNNY HOPS!" "Nope," I tell them, "you're learning axels."

The complex high free style skills are not something you "get to." You don't learn an axel in FS5 or Prelim, or Freeskate 6. You build an axel, and a double toe loop, and a lutz, and all your triples and complex spins over time, starting from the first moment you totter onto the ice.

Here's some of the basic skating moves that people gloss over, making the axel hard, if not unattainable:

Bunny hop
The first jump is not the waltz jump- it's the bunny hop. This is where you learn how to swing your arms properly, and where your free foot should be in the air (toe pick out in front, not underneath or behind you). It's not just about getting into the air. There's technique and it's important.

Basic back outside edges
The basic skating position. An effortless, clean back outside edge over your landing foot (right side for CCW, left side for CW jumpers) is the basis of the back spin, air position, and all landings. It mystifies me that coaches let back edges slide (haha), especially if they are older coaches that came up when School Figures were compulsory.

Waltz jump
Think of it as a one-third axel. The biggest mistake? Bringing your free leg through too soon; if it's already behind you when you land, how are you going to snap into the air position (free leg in front). To test for this error, try a waltz-jump/loop combination. If your free leg is in the wrong place when you land, you can't do the loop. Second runner up error: over-rotating the shoulders on the launch. When you see these two errors in the waltz jump, you're going to see them in the (non-existent) axel.

Back spin
Outside edge please, nine rotations. Biggest barrier to the axel--not getting over the outside edge right away. Doesn't count if you get over the back outside edge after a couple of rotations. If you cannot get quickly into a proper back spin position, you're not going to be able to do that axel. If the first two or three rotations are on the inside edge-- a very common error-- you are not going to have the understanding about the tiny amount of time you have to snap into that position in midair on the axel. You don't have time to do a couple of rotations over the wrong edge. You can't do it in the axel, and you shouldn't do it in the back spin. And coaches shouldn't be passing them (and the back spin should not be in the same level as the axel, it should be in the level before-- ISI are you listening?)

So, where did your axel go wrong? Basic 7 & 8. Delta-FS1. That's where. When your coach skipped you quickly past these levels, she wasn't doing you any favors.

Don't think about elephants

Ah, The Dreaded Axel. (cue ominous music).

There seem to be more tricks and angles to teaching axels than anything except the mohawk. Like the mohawk, the complexity of the skill takes it to a new level. Both of these are skills that break with the basics before them; they are watershed skills. But where the mohawk is a basic skill that emulates natural positions, there's nothing terribly natural about axels. You are making your body do something new with this jump.

The biggest impediment to quickly mastering this skill, however, is not its physical aspects. It's the mental aspect. Even really talented skaters can take months to master this skill; some of the best skaters I know took more than a year.

And once you've been working on this jump for one or two...or three...or four...OR MORE SESSIONS AAAARRGGGHHH, it takes on mythic qualities. It consumes the skater and her mother, and they start to assume that everyone is watching, that everyone is talking about how Suzie is NEVER going to get that axel, she might as well switch to ice dance.

Or chess.

Or move to a dessert island in shame.

Truthfully, no one is talking about you, and in fact if you keep your mouth shut, no one has noticed that you've been in Freestyle 5 for 3 sessions. It's important to remember that the axel is not the only thing in skating, and that literally everyone who keeps working on it does in fact eventually land it. This happens on the principal that if someone can do it, it's possible, and if it's possible, you can do it.

It's also vital that the axel not be the goal. You can do plenty in skating without an axel. You can compete "up" in USFS nonqualifying competition-- you won't have that Preliminary test, but you can compete at Prelim without it. ISI now has the Open Freeskate levels and mixed level Artistic events so that you can use your solid Freestyle 5 elements in competition without the axel. And yes, there's ice dance, and synchro, and Moves tests (which you can move through independently of freeskating tests).

Here's what you cannot do: you cannot insist that an entire program or ice show be changed in order to accommodate your skater, who only wants to skate once a week, because she can't get the axel. You can't complain about the "gift" or "pity" passes that other skaters got, when your skater's axel is better than theirs (it's not, trust me). No one's giving anybody pity passes.

You can't switch around from coach to coach looking for the one with the magic wand. Again, trust me, they are all telling your skater the same thing.

And mostly, you cannot invest this jump with all-consuming importance. Believe me, I've been there. It was during the axel-hunt (we're talking 2 1/2 years, from a skater who ended up as a professional show skater) that my daughter banned me from the rink-- wouldn't skate if I was watching. She took ownership, got rid of my noise and anxiety, and finally nailed that jump. Thank god for the wisdom of 10-year-olds.

You will get through this. Your skater will land that axel. Stop worrying about it. I mean that literally.

Something wrong with the math here

Fellow skaters, our intellects have been impugned. Grateful Mom wants to know, if an axel is one and a half rotations, and 1 1/2 x 2 = 3, how come a double axel isn't 3 rotations?

I did not have an answer for this.

Stuck

Lots of anxiety this week about axels and freestyle 5 at the rink and here online. One of the important things to remember is that everyone gets stuck somewhere. My own daughter, now a triple gold medalist (meaning Senior test in Moves, FS, and Dance) had a legendary stint in Freestyle 5: two and a half years. Nine. Sessions. She zoomed up to Freestyle 4, leaving all her age mates in the dust. And then they all starting passing her. And passing her. And passing her.

Yesterday I asked her, on behalf of a former student and her concerned mother, how she got past her fear of the axel. Her response made me understand how figure skating helped her to grow up. In the past I've attributed her increased maturity around this time to a coaching change which happened a few months after she finally nailed that jump, but reading this I think she probably did it on her own, and the axel helped.

I think getting over the falling thing is more of a maturity thing. There's just a point when you stop worrying about it. And that was even after I started working on my doubles. You just have to get over the fact that yes, you are going to fall and yes it is going to hurt sometimes. Just accept it.

The point is, everyone gets stuck somewhere. My former student "Patti" got stuck, incredibly, at Pre Alpha. This was an extraordinary child who found the maturity to reach inside and get over her fear, on her own, at the unheard of age of 6. Watch for her to be president someday. There are places where we expect kids to get stuck-- Gamma (mohawk turns), Freestyle 4 (sit spin), Freestyle 7 (flying camel, wally), and of course, FS 5.

In my opinion, the lower you get stuck, the better off you are. A kid that is pushed through the basic levels almost always has technical deficiencies relating to upper body control, basic understanding of edges and turns, and weak crossovers and stroking.

What you're working on here, as a skater or a parent or a coach, is enabling the skater to find that place inside where understanding clicks into place. You can't give it to her. But you can take it away, by rewarding the wrong thing, or punishing the effort.

Specialty classes-- beyond Freestyle 5

For recreational skaters, figure skating can be much more than a singles skater plowing from jump to jump. Starting with synchronized skating, which pretty much everyone in the sport knows about by now, there are all sorts of team, group, and specialty skills that skaters can learn. Here's a few:

Team skating
The Ice Skating Institute (ISI) has a competition category in Team Skating, namely, groups of 3 to 9 skaters doing freestyle skills as a team, with both group skating and spotlighted skills with everyone on the ice at once.

Rhythmic Skating
Another ISI innovation, Rhythmic Skating is essentially skating with props drawn from Rhythmic Gymnastics-- hoops, ribbons, balls.

Jump and Spin classes
These can be either specific jumps/spins (Axel Workshop, doubles, flying spins) or general classes for skaters with any jumps/spins from the simplest to the most complex. A good general jump class will help the skaters learn how to create jump combinations and sequences (and what the difference is), will work on improving speed and flow into jumps, how to do footwork into a jump and other special skills that utilize the jumps that they have already mastered. Spin class could work on adding features to existing spins (arm and leg positions, reverse rotation, etc.)

Ice Dance class
Best ice dance ad I ever saw: "Hey! You in the hockey skates! Wouldn't you rather skate with a woman?" A great specialty class for adults.

Couples Class
Not pairs-- no throws or high lifts, boys a plus but not required. There are all sorts of skills that kids can learn for skating with a partner, same gender or different-- stroking holds, couples spins, simple lifts, drapes. AND, more kudos to ISI, there's a competition category.

Junior Coaching Class
Why not? Get your tweens and young teens out there with experienced coaches and have them teach how to teach. Right now, the profession more or less assumes that if you're a high test or competitive skater, you can teach skating. Not true. Like any teaching, you need to learn how to do it-- how to manage a class, how to deal with injury, how to make it interesting to teach a swizzle, let alone keep a skater (and their parents) engaged their 9th time through Freestyle 5.

Nine times through freestyle 5-enough already!

With my various professional memberships in the alphabet soup of figure skating federations, come magazines. And in the Edge, ISI's magazine for it professional members, I read a very telling sentence this week:

"Do you really expect your skaters to stay in a Freestyle 4 or 5 class forever?"

But this is exactly what we seem to expect of our skaters. Among some coaches there is almost a contempt for the kids who can't progress past these two rubicons of skating skill (they get stopped by the sit spin at 4, and of course the axel at 5). There are lots of reasons kids stop here-- poor early training and insufficient technical skill, actual lack of ability, perceived lack of ability (usually traceable back to the first reason), insufficient time on the ice.

But looking over the classes offered at rinks around my area, I see very few addressing this problem. And there are ways to address it-- specialty classes. Whether it's unwillingness to risk the several sessions it might take to develop these classes, lack of ice to devote to it, a failure of imagination on the part of management, or the contempt for these kids that I spoke of, little is being done to address the problem.

It is a truism in skating that kids quit at freestyle 4 or 5, or in late tweens and early teens. But few professionals I've spoken with delve very deeply into this, it's just accepted with a shrug of the shoulders. It is also one of the top five topics that parents talk to me about, leading off with "she's just never going to learn that jump in class, so we're dropping classes." This does not sound like a strong business plan for the rinks, to just allow all your higher level students to be siphoned off into private lessons.

For some rinks this can work without much loss of actual revenue-- if you have an extremely robust practice ice program, with lots of after school times for kids to skate, a lot of these kids will move their $9/hour fee from class to practice ice. (Although hourly revenue on practice ice is much lower than for class ice, so your program looks full, in fact it might be losing out on revenue since you can potentially place more kids on the ice in a class). Clearly, parents are willing to switch from paying $9 to $15 per session for class, to paying upwards of $40 per session for the practice ice plus coaching fee. Why do rinks just shrug and let this potential revenue go? Bizarre.

So what can a parent do?

Certainly talk to your child's coach, although they have probably the least power to change things and the strongest self-interest in maintaining this status quo. So go to the skating director, preferably with several other parents and let him or her know that you want specialty classes (more about what kinds of classes you can suggest in another post).

Write a letter to the facility manager, and to his or her boss as well, again with signatures from lots of parents.

You're the customer. If management knows you're pulling your money from the program, they will listen.