Fixing Your Backward Crossover Issues! - Comment Response Video

Hey skaters, welcome back. I'm so glad you're here. And if you're watching this the day it came out, happy St. Patrick's Day. I'm wearing my green for you guys. All right, today I am gonna be responding to one of your questions. This one is from my backward crossover tutorial where I taught both the lifting backward crossover method and the sliding crossover method. I thought this was such a universal issue for so many people. Even some of my students in private lessons that I wanted to address it today. So this is from AnnaLori5736. She says, hi there, I'm working on these and have the lifting style sorted with pumping and lifting. However, I wanted to try the more advanced method, keeping the foot on the ice, but I just can't get it in front enough to not crash my toe picks. Have any of you had that problem, crashing toe picks on back crossovers? She says, do you have any advice on how I can fix this? I think it's due to my posture when I'm crossing over. I think also I might be thinking too much about the outside leg instead of pushing under maybe. Okay, so this is a great question. I'm gonna address this question as well as another posture issue with back crossovers in today's video. So let's get to it. We're gonna be using this circle here, this larger red hockey circle. I like using something like this as reference when skaters are learning their backward crossovers or forward crossovers because it gives you a little bit of a guide, a template. So what we're gonna start with is talking about why sometimes when you're doing crossovers, your feet will hit each other and how you can fix that problem. So the main problem is just that your feet are too close to each other as you're crossing and so your blades are going to hit each other. So as you can see, that is a big problem. I've done it myself. I'm sure so many of you have done it as you're learning to cross. So what I want you to do is as you're doing your pump, don't bring your feet together like you would with a crossing and lifting style. So when you pump and lift, you can bring your feet all the way together and then lift across. This doesn't work so well when you're sliding. So what we wanna do, get those edges on leaning towards our circle so we're on our outside, sorry, our inside on the outside foot and our outside on the inside foot. It's a little weird to say. And then what we wanna do is pump so that our foot comes to the front and you can practice that that way so your foot is coming in front of you every time instead of in back. So if you think about this outside foot pumping towards the big toe instead of pumping towards the heel, that is gonna be a good starting point on getting used to how a sliding crossover is gonna feel. So you wanna think about that foot coming towards the front and staying in front of you as you work on those swizzles. So that's the first element I want you to think about when trying to avoid hitting those feet together. The other thing we want to do is slide across at an angle. Okay, now, realistically, you should be trying to do this on your inside edge. Sometimes when I do it very slowly, it starts looking like it's on an outside edge because it's difficult to do slowly correctly, but we want our feet to stay leaning towards the circle. So it doesn't have to be super dramatic, but it needs a little bit of a lean. Our crossovers always should be leaning towards the center of our circle. So the other thing is, once you've got that pump coming to the front, we need to get a good angle with this foot so it's coming across more sideways instead of coming across straight. If it comes across straight, your heel and your toe are very likely to hit each other. So what I want you to think about is getting your foot to come across sideways so that your heel is directed inside the circle as you pump. So you're gonna pump, direct that heel inside so it can pull back across without those hitting. ♪♪♪ One more thing I want to address while we were working on this backward crossover subject is posture. So the other thing that can really make it difficult for you to successfully execute this move is leaning forward too much. So often we get comfortable with leaning in our hips just as daily life goes on, and then we are not so good at bending in the knees and keeping those hips very stationary. So we want our shoulders to lower over our hips nice and straight so that you can see it's almost like I'm sitting in a chair. All the bend is happening in my knees and my ankles, not so much in my hips. Now this is a little bit of an exaggeration. You will lean a little bit in your hips in these crossovers but you want the primary to be your knees and ankles. So if you lean and you are getting your heels off the ice, this is going to do two things. It's going to drag your toe picks, which sounds terrible, and it makes you unstable, but it's also going to be putting the brakes on. So you're working so hard to skate and get smooth and you're putting those brakes on the whole time. So you're unstable and you're slowing yourself down. So as you do these crossovers, do your best to get your bend primarily in the knees and the ankles, keeping those heels down on the ice. So when we execute this, we want that posture really strong. You can think about, so right now, my left foot is crossing, so I'm facing towards my right shoulder. So to help me stay upright, I'm going to engage the back of my right shoulder, back where my lat is. So I'm pulling my shoulder blade back and down. And this is helping me keep really nice posture as I do my crossovers. This keeps me off my toe picks, it keeps the crossovers smooth, it makes them not sound horrendous, and it's going to make it so that you're more balanced. You're not tipping forward on those crossovers onto the toe picks every time you try to execute a cross. So you've got really three factors that are going to help this crossover be more smooth. The first, pumping towards the front instead of towards the back of your heel. The second, really angling your heel towards the center of the circle as you try to cross. And the third is keeping that posture up nice so that you're off your toe picks as you execute that crossover. All right, skaters, I hope you found that answer to that backward crossover question helpful. If you have any questions that you would like me to answer, go ahead and leave those in that comment section down below. I love reading all your comments and questions, and I get to as many of them as I possibly can. If you enjoyed this video, please do give us that thumbs up. And as always, I'm looking forward to reading all your comments in that section down below. If you haven't done so yet, then hit that subscribe button and the little notification bell so you can see all my videos when they come out. Happy skating, and I'll see you next time.