Skating Fridays

A new jump drill

My jump coach used to have his skaters work on a drill where they grab the underside of their free leg/knee. There were several purposes for this exercise:

1. It forces the body to tilt forward, which makes up the ideal air and landing positions
2. It creates the perfect “h” position for takeoff into a jump
3. When the free foot is flexed, it creates more air time for a jump

For whatever reason, he didn’t use this exercise for many years but recently revived it. He said that it’s helped his skaters improve their air times dramatically. In fact, he’s had several skaters DOUBLE their air time because of this drill.

My coach said that this drill can be used for all the jumps. The timing is to swing the arms back and grab the underside of the free knee as the arms and legs come through. I’m demonstrating it here on a salchow attempt.

Once these drills have been mastered, the hope is that the skater can apply this technique (minus the actual grabbing part) and get a much bigger jump. We are hoping to apply this to the axel and double salchow to see if it gives me more time to rotate in the air.

We’ll see how it goes. I haven’t actually graduated to trying this in the real jumps yet. That might be the next step in the next lesson!

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