the Get Rolling Orbit

Some experts believe it takes ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in any particular area. That means if you average ten hours of skating a week (assuming other time commitments to family and a job), achieving world-class skills would take about 20 years. The studies showed it wasn’t innate talent that brought success to the now-famous people, it was lots and lots of hours doing something they were passionate about.

Whether or not you’re aiming to become a world-class skater, it is smart to tailor your hours of practice to achieve improvements sooner rather than later. Below I share tips that have helped my students over the years, and that continue to help me when I’m learning something new (always).

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Quality Practice Time

• Skate at every opportunity, three times a week at a minimum; otherwise progress is slow and may even regress.
• Build your skating skills in the most beneficial sequence, starting with foundational moves. (See right.)

• Once you learn the proper mechanics of a move, do repetitive drilling to build intuitive muscle memory.

• If a group of skaters in your area meets regularly to roll around town, join them whenever you can.
• Skate with more advanced partners to get tips and and try their moves.

• Skating agility is just as important as efficient, powerful forward motion. Spend plenty of practice time working on drills that focus on balance, turning skills, flexibility and quick responses.

• Find ways to measure your progress. For example, track distance skated, completion time, and improvements related to your repeated drilling.

Dealing with Fear

Those skaters who look so fearless whizzing down a long, steep slope or doing gravity-defying tricks have encountered and dealt with many, many situations over the years. They look confident and coordinated because years of experience has taught them what tools work and when to use them.

Without that depth of experience, new or dicey situations will make most adult learners tense if not outright terrified. Tenseness and fear create a physical tightness that may result in real danger because it can change our center of gravity and limit our range of motion and flexibility.

Here are some tips to reduce the fearfulness and build more confidence:

• Spend lots of time practicing your skills (see above)!
• Learn and obey the Rules of the Road. You’ll see experts disobey, but save those shortcuts for later when you have the skills to deal with the situations they present.
• Repeatedly replay in your head your favorite “good save” when you did something right to avoid a big crash or mistake.
• When tenseness is freezing you up, slow and deepen your breathing and tell yourself, “Pretend I’m relaxed!” This may melt some of that tension away and make you safer.
• One less thing to worry about: keep your gear in great shape by performing regular maintenance.

Based on the article “Plumb Perfect,” written for the May/June 2004 edition of Yoga Journal by Roger Cole, PhD, a certified yoga instructor and research scientist.

I like to encourage skaters at all levels to practice one-foot balance poses to improve agility, coordination and confidence. Such practice also delivers better control over a constantly shifting center of gravity during the motions of skating so we can become more efficient with each stroke. This article discusses how alignment, strength and attention affect your balance practice.

Alignment

Balance is the result of aligning our bodies with the earth’s gravitational pull. With both feet firmly planted on the floor, you may be unaware of the fine adjustments going on within your feet, spine and legs to keep yourself upright. You mastered this first balancing act in early childhood even before learning to walk.

Imagine you are standing erect with a lead-weighted fishing line dangling from the ceiling right in front of your nose. When you shift from standing on both feet to a one-footed balance pose such as Yoga’s Tree Pose, the bulk of your body moves slightly to one side and the plumb line will no longer line up with your nose. On raising your knee, you automatically shifted and re-centered your weight to compensate for the new asymmetrical position in order to stay balanced upright.

Strength

One-footed balancing requires strength to compensate for the extra work that prevents you from toppling. In order to stabilize your alignment with gravity, you naturally engage the muscles located at the outside of the hip joints (called the gluteus medius and gluteus minimus). Muscles in your support leg’s shin, outer calf and foot are also working hard.

The great news is that with practice, the amount of muscular involvement diminishes. “The better you get at balances, the less muscular effort you need to maintain them,” says Dr. Roger Cole, PhD, certified yoga instructor and research scientist. “This is because you become more skilled at using your bone structure to support your weight, rather than wasting muscle energy to do so. You also waver less, so you need to make fewer and smaller muscular corrections.”

Even if you do your balances close to a wall for support, each attempt to hold a difficult one-foot balance makes you that much stronger and closer to attaining it.

Attention

Sensors in all parts of our bodies are constantly sending signals to the brain. Our eyes help us interpret which direction is up, and the mechanisms in our inner ear dictate the sense of balance. Nerve endings in our limbs and in the bottoms of our feet indicate current body position.

We make adjustments in response to all of these signals to maintain balance. So whether you happen to be standing quietly, balancing on a wobble board, or skating hard and fast, your nervous system is constantly monitoring your position, determining the necessary positional corrections, and sending messages to all the involved muscles to contract or relax.

One way Yoga improves the mind-body connection is through the focused concentration that is required to achieve balance in the more challenging poses. Each time you try one of these, you also get a little stronger in the muscles that shape the pose and make balance possible. And finally, after you master a one-footed pose, the resulting improved agility blesses all of your physical activities—skating and non-skating—with more coordination and confidence.

Me: “You know how I react under the influence of endorphins, right?”

Him: “Yeah, phew, every morning after your workout!”

Me: “Yesterday I had another shower epiphany after spin class. I was like ‘Wow, I love how I feel so self righteous! I’m such a wonderful person! I’m all set for a great day! Exercise is so great for a person’s self esteem.”

Him: “Mmm hmm.”

Me: “And then I was sharing this thought with another lady in the locker room (poor thing), saying, ‘Man, if only I could bottle this stuff! It would be so great if I could share my overabundance of feeling good with somebody else who really needs it!’”

Me continuing: “I mean, it would be so great if I could give you a shot of it! I know you’ve always said that to you ‘Exercise is a 4-letter word.’ But maybe you should start taking a daily walk around the block and get some of your own?”

Him: “Hah! Endorphins are just another drug!”

Me: “Yes, you’re right, but it’s a great one!”

But I should have also said to him: “And it’s free and so easy to get!”

I’ll be giving a lesson, working closely with a student who is making good progress. I’m beaming with pride, thinking to myself, “She’s almost got it!” But I can’t leave well enough alone: I love to watch what happens after I call out, “Now pretend you’re relaxed!” In an instant and without much thought, her spine and arms soften and she looks like she just added on a year’s worth of skating experience. What just happened? It’s not my powers of suggestion (don’t I wish!).

Invariably when I throw this at them, my students instinctively reshape their bodies into a personal memory of what “relaxed” feels like. We both witness an immediate ease and improvement in the way they’re skating. Without realizing quite how, they quit fighting their skates and become more coordinated, if only for the moment. It may be a temporary effect, but I make sure to point out the change so they’ll get a taste of how skating will feel in their future and get a real understanding of the benefits of letting go rather than holding on.

To me, this represents a dramatic demonstration of the inline mind-body connection. By focusing on a more relaxed and familiar body memory, my students have reduced their physical tension and made it possible for the skates to behave.

Relax and Allow

New skaters start out with jerky movements because they are holding tight to a large number of muscles in the attempt to maintain control. Fear and bodily tension hinder the mobility and balanced postures that will one day bring fluid movement. It takes time and experience (and instruction) to eventually grow the right muscle memories that result in 1) better balance and 2) greater confidence so they are 3) able to relax and 4) skate more efficiently.

Of course, you want to look good on skates as soon as possible, right? Your first priority is to start practicing a wide variety of skating moves to build up your mobility and agility. You also need to know what “relaxed” feels like in your own body, so you can deliberately call it up at will. Sound hard? Visit my Mind-Body Connection section of GetRolling.com for lessons that will help you learn to breathe properly, reduce stress through meditation, and gain kinetic and emotional self-awareness that can lead to optimal fitness and performance.

Quality time on skates will eventually lead to letting the skates do their job rather than trying to make them perform.

Grace and Speed

Sustained aerobic-level skating typically results in a natural high from endorphins, a delightful chemical manufactured in the human body. Besides enjoying the optimism and happiness it brings, if you also focus on harnessing the creativity of this mental state, you stand to gain significant technique breakthroughs.

Pay attention to the rhythm of your movements as you repeatedly stride and glide. Visualize a center line in the path ahead and find new ways to smooth out anything that wastes energy or deflects you from a straight-ahead flow along that line. Play around with your favorite stride improvement drills. Breathe.

As you begin to feel tired, employ your creative endorphin high to devise ways to “work smarter, not harder.” Check your posture to make sure your weight remains stacked over your heels, the power-generating part of your skates.

Pretend you’re relaxed! Let your skates do their job.