5 Easy Inline Skating Tips To Make Any Level Of Skater Better Instantly by Pro Joey Mantia

I'm two-time Olympian and world champion speed skater Joey Mantia here with episode 2 of Skate Tips, a series dedicated to teaching you how to skate faster, longer. Today we're gonna focus on five tips that will make anybody a better skater instantly. And it doesn't matter your skill level, whether you stepped on skates a few weeks ago or you're a world champion, being mindful of these five things will make you better and make skating more fun overall. Tip number one, keep your belly button over the center line of your skates. I'm talking from the front to the back, from the front wheel to the back wheel, right in the middle. If you line your belly button right up over the middle of your skates, you're gonna be much more effective. Now traditionally, people like to sit back on their heels. It's much more comfortable and it's just something that people naturally do. But if you can force yourself to use these core muscles to push a little bit farther forward, and if you're a fitness skater, it doesn't take much, it's only a couple inches. If you're a speed skater, you have to push a little bit more aggressively and get a good dorsiflexion, so bending at the angles to get this position correct. But if you can be mindful of this when you're skating, you're gonna be much more effective. Now for each one of these tips, I'm gonna show you what it looks like to do it incorrectly, as well as what it looks like to do it correctly, both in a fitness, more upright, relaxed position like this, as well as in a lower, more aggressive speed skating position like this. Now keep in mind, the differences between doing it wrong and doing it right are often subtle to the eye, but the important part is that you are mindful of what you're trying to do as you're skating, and that's gonna make all the difference. Starting off with a fitness or more upright recreational position, you can see here, if we pause it, that the belly button is just too far back on the heel. You want to move things forward. Use your core to activate, push forward like this to get the belly button lined up over the middle of your skate. In a speed skating position, when done incorrectly, it looks like this. It's a little more evident. All you have to do is just be a little more aggressive with that core activation, get that lean farther forward to get the belly button over the middle of the skate, like this, and this is what it looks like when done correctly. Tip number two has to do with positioning. You're gonna use your knees as a point of reference, meaning keeping your knees exactly where they are, and then push your ankles and your hips backwards away from that spot. So, first your knees stay here, ankles back, hips back. That's all you're gonna do is gonna put you in a much more powerful position to make speed, and again, doesn't matter if you're a recreational skater skating more upright, it just takes a much smaller movement to do those two things versus a speed skater from here to here and here, just to be more activated in the hips and a better power position. When it comes to fitness or recreational style skating, you don't have to bend your knees a lot to have a good time or to even get a good workout, but you have to do something. Right now, I'm pretty much moving my feet around with no muscle activation, but by employing tip number two, I activate the glutes and I make a better connection between my upper body weight and my feet. Now, I can just let everything fall into my skates and create easy speed. This is much more fun. When it comes to speed skating, you have to exaggerate the position a little bit more because every speed skater already knows to bend their knees, but oftentimes that means carrying the weight in the quads and it's very tiring. But by employing tip number two, using the knees as a point of reference and pushing the ankles and hips backwards, you really exaggerate getting into the glutes and you relieve the pressure from those quads, letting the body weight do the work in the skates and becoming much more efficient. Tip number three, keep your skating pushes directly to the side of you all the time. Except for when you're starting from a dead stop, skating is the most effective and most efficient when you're pushing to the side. And the reason for that is, as opposed to walking or running, when you're pushing your body weight forward from your foot and moving forward about your foot, skating, you want to travel with your skate all the time. Meaning, if you think of your belly button as your center of gravity and you're keeping that right over the middle of your skate, as you push they're both traveling together to create speed at the same exact time because you're working on a slalom angle. Now what you don't want to do is open your foot up wide and push forward every time you skate, leaving your foot way behind you. That's gonna end up being very ineffective and you're only gonna be able to reach a maximum speed that is much less than your actual potential. So by keeping your skating strokes to the side, keeping everything in this nice even lateral plane and finishing something like this on this white line, or trying to all the time, you're gonna be much more effective. This is probably the number one mistake people make when they are brand new to inline skating and it's because they treat their skates like tennis shoes and try to walk on them versus working in a lateral plane and pushing to the side, transferring their weight and carrying their momentum forward. Now you can see now as I push, I'm trying to keep my set down and my push on the same plane. It's never gonna be perfect but that's what you're trying to work towards. In your head, you're trying to keep a line from side to side of you and always working on that line from your push to your set down. Now in speed skating, it's much more detrimental because you're in a lower position so you're gonna get yourself way more tired by doing this incorrectly versus fitness or recreational style skating. But here, when done correctly, all the body weight falls into the skate and even though it's not perfect, I'm working diligently in my head to try to work in this lateral plane all the time. Tip number four has to do with your skate direction and it's related to tip number three in the sense that you don't want to open your skate up so wide and try to push yourself forward away from that. You want everything to travel together and always creating speed together as one system, keeping everything in a nice lateral plane. Now all you have to do is think about keeping your skates relatively straight because naturally you're gonna want to open them. That's what's gonna happen if you don't think about what you're doing. Your skates gonna open, it's gonna be traveling way too aggressively out away from you, and then you're gonna end up with your stroke way behind you and that's not what you want. So keep your feet straight in the line that you're traveling. You can see here this is pretty bad mindless skating in the sense that I'm not thinking about keeping my feet straight at all. They're just opening up every stroke pointed out away from me at the end of every push. Now when I think about keeping them straight, I get something like this. I'm able to ride my skates straight and even though my skates are never gonna be 100% straight, I'm using that as a cue in my head to get myself into this position. Now when it comes to speed skating, it's really dangerous to whip right now under the under push like this and like this. Going from a straight skate to a skate that's pointed out away from you may look or feel like you're creating speed, but you're really not because at the end of the day when you go to do a normal push out away from you, you're not gonna be able to ride that skate. It's not gonna be traveling with you anymore because it's pointed out away from you. Now if you think about just keeping your foot straight and taking your momentum back and forth across your edges, that's what you want to do. Now I'm trying to keep my feet straight and you see when I go to do a normal push, I'm able to sit on it and ride it much longer and more effectively. And last but not least, tip number five. Roll your recovery foot into the stroke, meaning as you set that foot down that's coming from being in a recovery position back down onto the ground, don't be abrupt and don't stop with it. Be smooth and gentle and try to maintain all that efficiency and carry momentum forward. Now what I mean by that is oftentimes I'll see people, they'll push, bring this over here and then stomp down to the ground really aggressively and they're just killing their momentum forward. You want to think about rolling your skate into the ground, starting with your front wheel and then finishing with your back wheel nice and smooth onto the ground. You're coming from here and smoothly transferring that momentum from your right foot into your left or left into the right, whatever stroke you're transferring from. As you can see, I'm bringing the foot underneath me and just stomping down to the ground and essentially that's throwing the timing of the entire stroke off, meaning all the speed I create by pushing, I'm not able to transfer that into the glide effectively. But when done correctly, you get this nice forward flow in the skating. Every bit of momentum you create is conserved and transferred from skate to skate. Now keep in mind, when you're first starting this, it's highly likely that you're gonna catch your toe on your foot that's on the ground, meaning you're gonna kick your skate from the back. Just be aware of that, be careful as you're trying to roll your skate down into the ground if it's something that's new for you, but this is a much more effective and efficient way to do things. That's gonna do it for episode 2 of Skate Tips. I'm Joey Manti. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please hit the like button, subscribe, and I will catch you next time.