Learn Half Swizzle Pumps In Ice Skates!

Hi skaters, welcome back. I'm so glad you're here. I am Coach Julia, and today I am gonna be making a tutorial based on one of your comments. This is from SP1704. They say, hi Coach Julia, we love your channel. Thank you. Do you have a video that shows forward half swizzle pumps? Thanks. Well, you know what? I was thinking about this and I realized I do have half swizzle tutorials, but they're buried inside of crossover videos where I teach you how to do crossovers. And if you're not ready for crossovers yet, maybe that's not the most helpful thing. So today I'm gonna be teaching you how to do forward and backward half swizzle pumps. Let me show you what these look like. So we're gonna do these half swizzle pumps on this large red circle. We're gonna start with the forward ones, stick around long enough, and we'll do backwards as well. So you need to have the ability to do a full swizzle, both forward and backward. And so I will post tutorials down below to where you can find my instruction on forward swizzles and backward swizzles. So you want that foundation. Once you have that, we can move to half swizzles and you'll wanna learn these going both directions. So I will teach it one way, but you need to be able to do it both directions. Okay, I'm gonna start with my left leg on this circle. Now, the primary thing you need to learn how to do is take your weight and move it to one side of your body. Okay, that's the first thing I want you to think about. With a full swizzle, your weight is right between, so your legs move evenly, okay? So it doesn't matter if it's forward or backward, your weight stays isolated to the center and your legs go away from you. When we do a half swizzle, we need to take the alignment of our body and move it over to one foot. And you can see, when I did that, I bent one of my knees. So here my legs can stay straight, my nose, my belly button are lined up between my feet. I'm gonna take my nose and my belly button and I'm gonna move them over so that they're lined up with my knee and my left foot. Okay, so I'm creating a line through my body that goes all the way down through my knee and my left foot. If you look at it from the side, I haven't changed the alignment in the forward and backward stance of my body. I'm just going to the side. So my body is still lined up straight, it's just shifting over to the side. So here on this circle, I'm taking my hips, my shoulders, moving them over and I'm bending my left knee. This is allowing that alignment that we just talked about. Okay, it's almost like you're making a lowercase K, all right, where you have that line and then the two extensions. We're just gonna put our right hand in front, okay? So we are leaning over right hand in front, left hand in back since we're on that circle. Imagining you're holding onto that circle like it's a giant hula hoop, okay? From here, what we're going to do is do a couple of motions. We're gonna break this down into numbered motions for you. So we're gonna start with our knees together, but most of our weight over on the left, okay? So my feet are together, but my weight is still on the left. So I can pick up my right without having to move anything around, okay? So we're bending. From here, I am gonna keep everything lined up over that left leg and push out with my right, and then I'm gonna stand up. The trick is as you stand up, you cannot let your weight shift back to the right, okay? So everything has to stay on that circle. So here's motion one, weight's on the left, hands facing the left, so everything is facing that circle. We're gonna bend, that's motion one. Two, we're gonna push out on our right forward inside edge, okay? So my foot is going away. My right foot is, I'm staying over my left, and my right foot goes away. One, two, okay? Now my left knee is still bent and my right knee is straight. That should be the position we have in number two. So we have one, we bend. Two, we push the right away, but we keep our alignment over the left. Three, we're gonna stand up. And as we do that, we stay on the left and we just collect that right leg back into a parallel position. As you do this forward motion, the forward pumps, we want to push our foot slightly parallel. So you can see that my feet are lined up perfectly with each other. So our foot is not going to the back where it begins to drag and we are fighting with that blade and our foot is not going to the front where then it can cross over, okay? So you want at the very widest point at position two, you want your feet to be parallel with each other, okay? So you can see that the toe picks are pretty even and that's gonna help you stand back up and collect those feet together still in a nice parallel position. So we're starting with our feet next to each other. We pump their next to each other and we stand up and they're still right next to each other. Now you are gonna be told by some instructors that your inside foot, right now that's the right one, needs to be on an outside edge. And while that is technically correct, you're not gonna feel it until you actually start doing crossovers, okay? When you're doing swizzles, it's such a shallow motion, the circle is very large and we're focusing so much on keeping our weight over that side. You're not gonna feel much of an outside edge and that's okay. In fact, my foot to maintain this circle correctly is practically on a flat. So while it's correct that yes, down the road when you've gotten some more experience there, you might be able to do an outside edge, for now, do not worry about that. Just know in the future, you'll wanna think about it. Bookmark it for the future, okay? For now, you can let this left leg or the inside leg stay somewhat flat as long as your outside leg is staying on its inside edge. What you don't want is both legs going to an inside edge because then you're going to do a full swizzle, okay? If both of your legs go to an inside edge, you will not be able to help it. This foot will get away from that circle. And even if your weight is all over on that side, if my leg, if my left leg is on an inside edge, I will do full pumps. The only way to do this correctly is to have it lined up so that your hip, your knee, your ankle, your blade are all in a straighter line or slightly, slightly to the outside, okay? So if you don't get anything else from this video, but you can keep your foot lined up flat so that your foot is not leaning to the inside, that will be a golden nugget for you to learn from this video. Now let's address this going backwards, okay? So it's the same three steps, bend, push, collect, okay? We're just going backwards. So now we have a twist in the waist to also add. When you're going forward, your shoulders rotate, but you don't feel that twist in your waist as much. It's a more natural forward-facing motion. But when you're going backwards, you need to be able to look where you're going without running into anybody. If you're out on a session practicing, you don't want it to be your fault that two skaters collided. So we do need a little bit of a twist in the waist, but your hips need to remain facing forward or your feet will turn and you will find yourself spinning around to forward while you're doing these half swizzles. Now I have found it's easier for skaters to not look all the way over that hand at first, but to look inside and use your peripheral vision to be able to see who's behind you. I'm on a hockey circle that has a red dot in the middle. And when my students are learning this skill, I tell them to focus on the red dot so that they can see both hands at the same time. That way they're not trying to turn into an owl and look all the way behind them and rotating their hips. So we're gonna do that. We're gonna have our eyes focused towards the center so you can use peripheral vision to see both of your hands. Then the motion is the same. We're gonna bend, pump out, collect that left foot in. So now my weight is on my right foot. It should be ever so slightly to the outside edge, but again, kind of flat, but definitely not to the inside edge, right? So we're still trying to get that same line up as we pump where our shoulders, our hips, our knees, our toe are all lined up together. We don't wanna go to the inside. You can slightly go to the outside if you have the skill for that. So motion one, our feet are together. We're gonna bend. Motion two, we're gonna pump that left foot out. Motion three, we're going to stand up, keeping our weight over our circle. So at this moment, it's over my right leg. Bend, push out, stand up, keep your weight over that circle, all right? So that's the motion going backwards. It's the same thing as going forward. You have an added twist in the waist. Now let's talk about where on your foot you want your weight when you're doing a swizzle. You really want it in the middle, and this is gonna apply to both forward and backward swizzles. So that means right through the middle of our skate here. When you're going forward, if you wanted, you could have your weight slightly to the front, and that's gonna be fine, but if you go very far to the front, you're gonna trip on your toe picks, and nobody wants to do that. If you're going backward and your weight goes to the front, you're gonna end up dragging those toe picks into the ice, and then it's like having the gas and the brake on in your car at the same time. You're working so hard to get motion, and then you're stopping yourself, which is very counterproductive. So try to get your weight through the absolute center of your blade as much as possible. So if we're thinking our blade is straight up, not tilted, and right in the middle, it's like you're skating on the very, very center of your blade, all right? Let's try this again. We have position one, head to the inside. We're gonna bend those knees, push the left foot out onto its inside edge, stand up, keeping our weight inside the circle, and just collecting that right foot in. Pump, collect, pump, collect, always keeping our weight leaned towards the center, and our focus just enough back so we can see our behind hand out of the corner of our eye. So let's talk about our foot position with that pump going backwards. So when we're going forward, we talked about them staying parallel. It's a little different going backwards. When we're backwards, we want our pumping foot to go slightly in front of us, okay? It's not way out in front of us, but it's certainly not behind us, okay? And so as you pump, think about it going at a diagonal. So my left leg is going at a diagonal slightly in front of my right leg. It's going slightly in front. Diagonal, diagonal. And if you can work on this, then at some point when you start doing it as a crossover, it's easier to get that foot to slide across, okay? So pump out with your half swizzle, get your foot slightly to the front. You can see it's like halfway in front. If I line them up, the middle of one skate is kind of lined up with the toe pick of the other skate. So pump and pump slightly to the front on those backward half swizzles. Okay, skaters, I hope that that half swizzle pump tutorial is helpful for you. It's so important to get those basics really, really good so as you level up your game, you don't have pockets where you're weak. So focus on making those basics as strong as possible as you move up each level in skating. 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. And if you leave me one that I can answer with a skate video, maybe you'll see your comment pop up here with a tutorial in the future. 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.