Yesterday at the ice rink was really cool. I had an entire night of coaching advanced skaters.
Two of my lessons yesterday were actually with coaches. There is one coach who is still a competitive skater herself, and the other coach wants to both work on her own skating and learn some more teaching technique. In both cases I spent time not only talking about the technical things that they needed to work on, but also how I approach teaching these things. There are a few things that are hard and fast rules like, "Don't let a student make the same mistake more than 3 times." (After the 3rd time they do the same mistake, you change up what you are working on to something that uses similar, but slightly different movement, so that you don't encourage bad muscle memory.) Other things are a lot more amorphous like, "If you explain something one way and it doesn't work, think up another way to explain the same thing," or "be flexible enough to try different ways of getting the same thing done, but remember that on the ice, physics is boss." But most of what we talked about were specific techniques for the things that they were working on or things that they are teaching their students.
Even in the case of moves which these coaches could do just fine themselves, sometimes it was difficult for them to explain how they do the moves. So, I would have them do the move thinking about the way that I break them down, or showing them how I go through the process of breaking moves down for myself.
It dawns on me now that this is something where my computer programming experience probably comes in quite handy. That skill of breaking a larger task down into its component parts is obviously important in programming. In ice skating it makes a complex maneuver seem much simpler.
Of course, knowing what you need to do and getting your body to do them is something different.
At the end of the evening, one of my students was a no show. That worked out just fine with me, though. I spent an extra half hour with one student, and then I worked on my own jumps.
My jumps have been horrible ever since I came back from the US. I actually fell down when showing a student what I wanted in a combo jump the other day. Oy vey! Some of it is the weight gain. It's a lot harder to launch my lard butt up in the air. Some of it is just lack of practice. Like I said, knowing what I need to do with my body isn't the same as making my body DO it. So, it was kind of fun when one of my students watched my jumps for a bit and told me what I was doing wrong. She took my coaching advice and turned it right back on me. EXCELLENT! :)
It's good to remember how sometimes you feel like you are doing one thing, but someone from the outside can see that you are doing something different. In this case I was doing toe loops and I was reaching my tapping foot back behind the skating foot, crossing them. You need to reach straight back, not cross the tapping foot. It felt like I was reaching straight back, really it did. After she pointed out that I was crossing, I had a couple of near falls as I tried to correct the mistake, and then my jumps got better.
I need to commit to doing at least 15 minutes straight of jumping per skating day. That doesn't sound like much, but I saw the difference in my jumps at the end of the 15 minutes of non-stop jumping I did yesterday, and that really wears you out. And, yeah, I can feel it in my muscles this morning. Plus, that 15 minutes isn't in a vacuum. It's part of 4 hours on the ice with students, chasing them around the rink and doing jumps and spins for demonstration purposes. So, I think it will fix my jumping problems quickly, and maybe I won't feel like such a flub when I'm demoing jumps in a lesson in a week or two.