Forward Power Pulls aka One Foot Slalom Tutorial

Hey guys, it's Mary. Welcome back to my channel. Today we are going to be working on power pulls. Hope you guys are ready for this one. Let's start off with a warm up. We are going to practice our slaloms. Remember this from basic skills. On the slaloms, try to keep your feet together. We're going to focus on a very important concept of the power pulls. First, we're going to have a nice knee bend. Greater knee bend equals greater power. Second, I would like you to focus on really pressing into the ice on the back of our blade. Third, really focus on the ankle bend as well as knee bend. We're going to have a rising, a lilting sensation. So really focus on that knee bend for every curve in the slalom. What we have to focus on is keeping our chest up. Our arms are going to be right here. So we're not having crazy arms and forcing or jerking the turns. We're going to just work the shoulders against the hips. Let's go ahead and try our next exercise. We're going to do three slaloms, then three power pulls. For every curve, we're going to slightly twist our shoulders, twist our core, twist to the left, curve to left. Twist to the right here, curve to the right. So the movements are very slight. Let's try it out. On our power pull, my free leg is just right in front of me. I'm not really jerking up and down with my knee. I'm not trying to use my free leg to generate power. Instead, my skating leg, the nice knee bend, and the ankle bend is what is going to generate the power. Let's go ahead and try the power pulls on one foot. We're going to get those nice gripping sounds. The judges love that. Take your time with every push. The goal on the power pulls is to get more speed with every push. A common mistake is just to make the pushes too shallow, therefore not generating speed and instead losing speed. Another common mistake is to use too much of your upper body. If we're using our upper body too much, it's going to look sloppy and we're going to lose power and speed. We also don't want to use our free leg too much. It's going to be gently just resting, gently riding up and down. Try not to use the free leg to initiate the power. Lastly, learn to try to stay on the nice bent knee at all times. There's going to be subtle up and downs of the ankle and knees, but try not to lock the knee or pop the knee at any moment. Thanks so much for watching guys. Be sure to like, subscribe and save. Stay tuned for backward power pulls and see y'all next time. Happy skating!