Figure Skating Exercises and Warm Up Drills for Freestyle & Ice Dance

Hi everyone, thank you so much for joining Paul and I today. My name is Mary. I am a skating coach and I am so excited to share with you my five favorite freestyle exercises. Thank you Paul for collabing with me on this video. I'm excited to teach you guys. Hi guys, I'm Paul from Ice Skate Coach. Thank you Mary for joining this collaboration. We've got five edge drills each for you. Five from the UK and from my point of view as a dancer and from Mary's point of view as a swizzle pump hops. We're going to bend, press our edges into the ice and a launch off of our toe picks. We're going to bend, extend the knees, activate the glute muscles to get maximal height in the air. First we're just going to a regular jump, quickly click, second we're going to click and cross our feet, crossing our arms with the elbows down at the same time and lastly we are going to do one rotation in the air activating our shoulders and our hips for a full rotation. So the first one I'm going to show you is what I call a foot stop and this comes and appears in a lot of dances. It's where you come from an outside edge and bring your feet together. I'll give you an example. There's a lot of the lower level dancers as it starts doing like this. We'll do a run and bring our feet together and here we have to stop our feet. So trying to get the feet to stop and not overtake and lose control. So it's a simple exercise, we just do the outside edge with the foot stop. So rising up on my knee as I bring my feet together, try not to pull the foot in and bend the knee and try and come up on this skating leg to bring the feet together like that. Then just to challenge it a bit we can have a double knee bend, like a double press of the knee. Rise up, press down, then do the foot stop. What you should feel here is you're adding speed to the exercise. Press, press, lift. Press, press, lift. It's also possible backwards so you should try both. Foot stop, foot stop. Facing in slightly backwards for the push, next we are going to warm up our jump landings. For a jump landing our free leg is going to be at seven o'clock or five o'clock depending on which direction you jump. Our goal is to have our skating arm to our side, free arm slightly in front and we will be looking inside the circle. First we are going to do three hops in our free leg landing extended position, extended from the hips to the toes. Then we are going to do three leg raises up and down and lastly we are going to do three pulses up and down with our knee. The goal is to be completely frozen in our extended free leg position, chest up, arms out and trying not to waver back and forth. This is going to improve our core strength and our balance. All right, this next step involves a European waltz dropped three turn. So taking these three turns from the European waltz, nice soft three turn. Three turn feet together then you drop onto the back edge rather than holding it like a normal three turn. That has a lovely rise and fall on the knee. Rise up to the turn and down for the drop. Rise up, rise up and down. That's the basis of the European waltz three turn. We're trying to come up with an exercise where you can try that both ways. A nice flowing linking. So here's what we came up with. We're going to do the European waltz three turn. Sit down, take your leg behind, cross in front twice, chasse to get you around the corner and then do the same three turn. Behind in front, in front, chasse. Then the three turn, behind in front, in front, chasse. Three turn and behind in front, change of edge, crosses, chasse. Let me break down those linking steps. So after your three turn, you have your backward edge, cross roll, two crosses in front, change of edge, cross inside to outside, then push to the chasse to turn the three turn the other way around. We talked about jumping, we talked about our landing leg position, so let's talk about the middle, our rotation position. So my head will be slightly turned into the circle and my chest will also be rotated slightly into the circle too. Let's try that on the circle. Holding our position, we're going to try to get our legs nice and crossed, ankles very tight and squeezed. Trying to get as tight as we can so we can get those doubles, those triples, etc. If you want something a little bit more advanced, we can add some twizzles to this exercise as well. So the back progressive, back run, leg goes forward, bend through for the swing and change and you keep the curve for the next run and change, swing through and the change of edge, bending through and leaning out. Let's get our feet jumping again to keep warming up. We have power pulls this time, outside to inside edge with hops in between. We're going to try to stabilize our upper body position, we're going to try to explode off of our toe picks and extend our knees as we jump. Okay, Austrian waltz three turn sequence. Do the three turn step forward and swing and both forward and swing. Three turn the back edge, try not to hit your toe, through. Let's do that again in slow motion. Three turn, we get the back edge to run and pre-bend to push into the swing, has a slight double knee. Three turn bend, push, double knee on the swing. Three turn glide, push, through. Turn the Austrian, it's just a short step. Three turn and step through. Three turn and step through. Last but not least, my favorite exercise, backspin jump outs. We're going to quickly rotate in a tight position, arms crossed, elbows down. If you're working on doubles, try to spin for two and jump out. I am exploding my knees, rocking up to my toe picks and I am activating my glute muscles, quickly stopping my posterior change and escaping, bringing my free leg out quickly. This will help with jump landings and also checking jump landings and making sure that we do not have any delayed landings, that we are sharp and coming out of all of our jumps. All right, we're mixing a waltz inside swing. When I say waltz, it's waltz because it has a double knee bend through the swing with a samba chassis. Your samba chassis has outside, inside, step wide, inside, outside, inside, step wide, inside. So we're just adding the double knee to the end of the samba chassis with the waltz swing. So we have chassis, inside, double knee swing. Chassis, inside, double knee swing. Chassis, inside, double knee swing. Chassis, inside, double knee swing. Thanks for watching this video guys. If you liked it, make sure you leave a like and if you're new here, consider subscribing and also you can follow me on Instagram at Ice Skate Coach and also check out the website iceskatecoach.co.uk for more tutorials like this. Thank you very much to Mary from all the way in America for your collaboration in this video and we will catch you later. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you loved all these exercises. Thank you Paul. It was a pleasure to meet you and teach with you too and see you guys on the ice.