Heel // Toe Press - The Next Level of Wizard Skating

Namaste Flow Skaters, Sean Unwin here. Today we're going to work on our heel press and our toe press, which is essentially rolling on the front two wheels or the back two wheels with our feet nice and close together. Really fun, really satisfying, not too difficult. Let's get started. Always good to start with some static exercises. Newer skaters start on a carpet, a mat, some grass, somewhere where your wheels aren't going to roll. Next we take it to a harder surface. Set it up with two fists width between your feet, compressing down. So bending our knees, flexing our ankles, feeling our shinbone in the tongue of our skate. We're ready now to push into the ground and extend through our toes or extend through our heels, lifting our toes off the floor. In this exercise, your wheels are going to roll and you want to feel them roll under your body to the position where you feel like you have some balance. Try and hold it there for just a moment and you're ready for the next exercise. So now using a forward lemon to set up a heel roll. I find that the adduction, bringing my legs together as we finish our lemon, is a great setup. What we want to do is when you're doing our lemon drop on the way forward, we want to remember that the weight is going to be in our heels, right? And of course the weight's going to be in our heels when we do this. So as I bring it in here, I'm going to lift my toes up. So I'm going to lemon, I'm squeezing it in and I start to lift my toes up and then I'm just going to try it a few times and see how far I can go. I'm going to keep a piece of chalk with me so I can mark my progress. Let's take a moment to study the foot position. When we're doing our heel press and toe press, we're trying to have our feet together and fairly in line. I do find it easier to start the heel or toe press with my feet slightly apart and then bring them together after a moment once I've had a chance to get the feel and a little bit of balance. With my right foot leading, the inside of the left toe box fits nicely inside the instep of that right foot. Hey, all right! So that's a great exercise and that lemon drop is going to be very useful for setting up those heel rolls. Most likely you're not going to be just standing still and then trying to do this move, as training of course we do, but more likely we're going to be skating around right? We're in the middle of our flowiness. We're doing our thing and then want to set up that heel roll with a little lemon drop. Woo! And I'm off, right? You see how that works. I'm in and I'm off. Missed it. I keep repeating here, I'm in and I'm off. What I'm trying to articulate is the flow, the feeling from going from the lemon drop into the heel or the toes. It's such a natural movement and the action of adducting, bringing our legs together, will generate some speed that combined with the lifting of our heels of our toes, allow us to catch ourselves in those positions and have a nice smooth roll. That's a great feeling. I'm in and I'm off. Now into that toe roll going backwards. I'm just trying to find my balancing point. Okay, I'm going to set up the exact same way. Weight in the toes. Oh, that was a good one. Again, this sort of setup, again, puts me in the proper position. The balance is in the right spot, just from the fundamentals that if I'm going backwards, you know, I'm in the toe. Weight is in the toe. So as I do this lemon backwards, oh golly, but here squeeze it in and onto the toes. I can balance it. The lemon drop entry was the first thing that I tried that actually gave me some results as I tried to learn these toes and heel presses. In fact, it works like magic. It's the best entry we have, but let's get a little bit more technical. Let's add a little rotation into that entry. Exercise. What I'm going to do is I'm going to lemon to an almost closed position, not quite closed. Here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to shift weight into my toes. I'm going to lift my heels and add a little rotation to flip me around to a backwards lemon. Something like this. I'm barely just trying to get my heels off the floor. It feels almost the same as that static exercise we started off with, just with a slight bit of rotation. Feel the weight shift into my heels like I'm leaning back a touch, popping those toes up with a little rotation. Now we're going to use that transition and try and balance it out a little bit. Ride that toe and heel press a little bit longer. Something that I think is key to this exercise is you want to make that transition with a little bit of counter rotation. What I mean by that is I'm going to get here. I'm going to start the rotation here, but then my arms are going to draw that little loop where they go this way and then back this way. That's going to stop the rotation. If my arms continue this way, I want to continue rotating and that's what's going to stop my rotation. Not a new concept if you've watched the 180 videos and so on. So much fun. So obviously the next step is to go from backwards to forwards into our heel press. I had very little success doing this from a standstill, so I'd always start by skating slowly backwards but still entering with a small lemon drop. I just want to mention quickly that these moves are fun and awesome and can be done in every different pair of skates. You don't need to have the same skates that I have in order to be able to do these moves. My frame is longer so the balance is a little bit different than what you would experience if your frames are shorter or something like this, but please just do the moves and enjoy them because they are a heck of a lot of fun and I really feel like over the next few years you're going to see a lot of really interesting toe presses and heel presses done by lots of amazing skaters. Thank you very much. Talk soon. Namaste.