A Little Airport Stretch While I answer Your Questions!

Not long ago while traveling, I had a really long layover and while I spent a good portion of that working on enhancing the Coach Julia Club, I also spent a little bit of that time doing a stretch because I had an entire wing of the airport to myself for about five hours and I thought it'd be fun to do a little Q&A video. So here you have my stretch and the answers to those questions that you guys sent in. Hey guys, I'm sitting here at an airplane terminal and I have a nine hour layover I am trying to kill time with and I'm working on getting the Coach Julia Club up so I've got course number seven I'm working on but in the meantime, you guys should send me questions. If you guys have questions for me, I'm going to answer it so post below any questions you have for me and between now and gosh, five hours from now, I'll answer. So your coach thinks that you should skate barefoot without insoles. I mean, I know quite a few people who do this. One of the coaches at Skatetown skates barefoot, in fact one of my students just switched to skating barefoot. I personally cannot do it. I can't stand the way my foot feels when it's like sticking to the boot. But there are skaters who find that if you skate barefoot, you will feel your boot a lot more like you feel the contact with your boot. You might find you get blisters a little bit at the beginning just because your foot might be sticking and rubbing to your skates. But if you can get past that, you might feel what your boot is doing a lot more so you can give it a try. There's definitely people who do that. Your coach is not crazy. Oh my gosh, thanks so much for asking. So if you guys don't know, I had major surgery on my ankle in 2020. Anyway, yeah, I had two screws put in, some synthetic ligament. I had some work done on my, some of the, what is it, cartilage in my ankle a lot. My ankle's doing great. It gets really stiff sometimes. And if I do, if I've tried axles, the times I've tried axles, it's caused me pain for like a week or two. So I just limit myself to lutzes and below, single lutzes and below. I can't handle the torque that happens higher rotations anymore. But beyond that, my foot is amazing. I can use it. I had a doctor tell me I would never skate again, so I'm grateful that I can skate as well as I can. Okay, I'm one step below freestyle level and I'm 42. Am I too old to keep learning new moves? No, you are not too old, absolutely not too old. In fact, I have a student who's 46 who is working on their loop jump, their flip jump, getting sit spins down. They started as an adult also. So 42, you have so much still that you can learn if you really go for it. It isn't, it's harder as we get older, I'm not going to lie about that. And we have more fear that we have to overcome. But if you can overcome that fear and you can work on your fitness and your flexibility off the ice and all that kind of stuff, you have so much that you can still do even in your 40s. Okay, so your ankles keep bending inwards. You're wearing overture skates. You may have a pronation. Pronating means that your ankles naturally are going to drop to the inside of it. So you might want to look at your posture when you're not wearing your skates and see if you tend to fall in. In fact, you can look at the bottom of a pair of tennis shoes and see if you wear in the inside of your shoes faster than the outside. If that's the case, if you wear the inside in more than the outside, you probably have a pronation. Pronation can be fixed two ways. It can be fixed with a pair of insoles or you can get your blade adjusted. You can get it moved around to help you stay up. Otherwise, you need to work on building muscle in your arches so that your muscles can hold your arches more into place. So you have two solves. One, build muscle in your foot so that your arch holds up. And the other one is check for a pronation because your blade can be moved for pronated feet. Should I look ahead or look at my feet? Well, the second half of that question is easy. Should I look ahead or look at my feet? Well, the second half of that question is easy. You should always be looking ahead. You should be looking up. You should be making sure you're being safe on the ice. If you're looking down at your feet, you're not looking where you're going, you could run into somebody. So that is an easy answer. Look forward. In fact, out in front of you, you should be able to feel where your feet are without looking at them. The other question, how can I get over my fear of doing a crossover? That is something you are going to run into over and over and over in skating, getting over fear. Part of it is repetition. Part of it is you can play mind tricks on yourself. You can try doing it closer to the wall. You can practice the motion, doing it off ice over and over and over again. And part of it literally is just mind over matter. You have to make yourself try it and then your brain will be like, oh, this isn't so bad and stop giving that fear response. Okay, honestly, this one is hard to answer without actually seeing you do your backspin. And through my Coach Julia Club, I have a whole feedback forum where members of the club will send me videos and I will watch those videos and give direct feedback to what their skating is. So if you want that, you can join my club, coachjulia.club. But ending up on your heel could be a number of things. It could be that you are not lifted onto the ball of your foot while you're spinning. You should be sort of lifting your heel and lifting your toes and pushing down with that ball. So maybe the foot isn't doing enough. It could also be somewhere in your posture. You could have your knee bent, you could have your tush sticking out, you could have your shoulders tipped. So there's a number of different areas, like every single different joint in your body, you have the opportunity to set it. You could align it wrong. So you have to make sure you're really lifted, knees straight, hips under, good posture, good core control, and that kind of thing. Okay, this one is really easy. I have been wearing Harleks since my early teens. I think my second pair of skates was a hand-me-down pair of Harleks. And then, they just worked out so, so well for me. And I can't imagine ever switching to another brand. Yeah, so I wore them during training, testing, competitions, through all of my professional show skating career, and all of my coaching. So I am a passionate advocate for Harleks skating boots, and now I wear gorgeous custom ones. Mine that I'm wearing now have lasted me since 2018, so they last a long, long time. And I wear them with a MK Gold Star Revolution blade. That's an amazing combo. So, they are expensive, but they are worth the price. So if you want to invest in a really, really nice pair of boots, I would highly recommend you check out Harleks skating boots. This is an interesting question, and I think it varies. I, for my students, like to find out what their favorite skill is. Like, some of my students absolutely love doing cantilevers, or hydroblades, or their flip jump. And once I know what their favorite kind of thing to do is, I just love watching them do it well in a program. So, it makes a difference who the skater is. Like, if I'm watching, you know, a high-level skater, I know kind of what their signature is, and I get so excited watching them do their signature. I used to love watching Brian Boitano do his big, spready rolls, because he was so good at that move, right? So, yeah, it varies. My least favorite figure skating brand is definitely Edea. I have had so many students have problems with it. They spent millions and millions on marketing, getting into the figure skating world. But they, I have known so many people who have had a lot of trouble with the boot not fitting correctly, with it breaking down quickly. When I have a student who decides suddenly to buy one, I'm like, okay, well that's a very disposable boot. You're gonna get, you know, break it down in six months and then have to replace it. Yeah, I just, I know there's people out there who love them, and if you love them, good for you, but I can't stand Edea. And anytime a student of mine talks to me about potentially switching, I do my absolute best to steer them away from that choice and in another direction. Yes, it is difficult to lead with the heel on the salchow. And to be fair, when you see skaters doing this with multiple rotation jumps, you don't see so much of the heel lead. It's on the single that makes a difference. And to get to a double or triple or quad, you don't see that heel lead quite as much. But what you do see is still the skater getting their leg across. So if I'm gliding backwards onto my left back inside edge, even if I'm not leading with my heel, I'm gonna get my right leg to the outside of my left one before I rise up to my toe. If you get, if you keep your legs parallel side by side, it's gonna turn into a wall jump. But if you can get your swinging leg across to the other side of the jumping leg, even if it's not a heel lead, it will still be a heel jump.