Improve Your Backward Crossovers!

Hey skaters, welcome back. I'm so glad you're here. I am coach Julia and today I am going to be answering two of your questions. So I've got the questions pulled up. Let's see. Maria for USA says, I'm struggling at the step of lifting foot while going backwards. So this is on a backward crossover tutorial. She says, when I tried this, either I stop immediately or I lose the balance or going for a fraction of a second and then go into a random direction without the ability to control it. So when she's picking up her foot, she's losing control. The second question is from Pico 2337. They say, hi, thank you for the great videos as always, maybe unrelated to this video, but when I do backward crossovers, I can't control my speed. I want to stay on the circle, but I'll speed up and the circle gets bigger and bigger. Am I crossing too fast too many times? Okay. So I'm going to do my best to answer both of these questions. It's a little bit tough here because I can't actually see what these skaters are doing. And this is what I absolutely love about the coach Julia club. There's a forum on there where you can actually post your videos and I will check them out and give you some advice. Let me show you what the coach Julia club is. We just launched course number six today. So we have six of those 10 courses. Each one of these levels has structured learning. So you can go through and learn as if I was your personal coach and you were learning in the same order I'd be teaching you. So it has all different segments. Each segment has a bunch of lessons. Each course has 25 to 35 different lessons in it. So you can start with course number one, go all the way through course number 10, start with your very, very first steps on the ice and go all the way through double rotation jumps with me from the comfort of your computer or your phone. You'll also have access to a private community where you can chat with other club members. You'll have access to live sessions with me love member only supplemental resources like diagrams, workbooks, music, that kind of thing and some special members only swag. One of my favorite features of this club is the fact that I can actually interact with you guys and give you feedback on your skating. One of the things so many people ask me about is for feedback on their specific skating and over comments on YouTube, I can't actually help you because I don't know what your skating looks like, right? If I can't see what you're doing and where your mistakes are, I can't give you any legitimate pointers, but through the club, we have a feedback section where you guys can upload your videos of your skating. I can watch those videos and give you specific critiques and feedback on how you can improve your skating skills. Now I have 10 courses planned. And as of today, we have launched course number six, just today, course number six went live. I'm so excited. Now, while we are still putting up seven, eight, nine, and 10, you can take advantage of some introductory pricing. So we're going back to the price that we had at our launch as a special deal for you guys. While we build the final four courses of the club, I invite you to join me over at coach Julia dot club, where you can learn from me as if you were my own student, make sure you take advantage of that introductory pricing. While the final four courses are still being posted this summer. As soon as course 10 goes up, we're going back to our standard pricing. So don't wait, head over coach Julia dot club. I'll see you there. So let's work on that first question. It sounds like every time she's picking up her foot, she's either going onto her toe pick or changing direction. So let's go on to our circle here. I'm going to use the larger red hockey circle. So the beginner version of a backward crossover, the one I want you to do as you're just learning, you do a half swizzle and then you lift your foot over. Okay. And I have a tutorial on that. I also go into great detail on this in the coach Julia club. So if you want more thorough instruction on this, you can go to the club. But, uh, so when you have finished that swizzle, you come back together and your weight is generally on two feet. And since you have to pick the outside one up, if you haven't shifted your weight, you can lose control and move away from the circle. So one of the things I will suggest you do is after you swizzle, think about the weight staying over your circle. So if you have an axis through your body, we all have an axis when we're skating. When we're on two feet, it's right down the middle, right down your belly button. Okay. When you go on one foot, you need to move that axis over so that you're balanced. You're lined up over the foot you're intending to glide on. Okay. So after you do that swizzle, you can't go back to having your axis in the middle because you can see now I'm very balanced. I'm already moving away from my circle. And if I lift my leg up, I'm going to go farther away from my circle. Okay. So keep your weight over the inside. Even during your swizzle, think about like putting your shoulder, imagine there's a wall here and you're going to put your shoulder and your hip up against that wall. And the whole time you want to keep that shoulder and that hip on that wall. And you can practice just pushing and lifting and trying to keep your shoulder and that hip on that imaginary wall. Okay. And this way when you lift and you go to cross, you're not going to swing away from the circle. Also, since I'm not, I don't get to see her skating. It could also be that she's going onto her toe pick. So that is a problem where when you swizzle your weights going forward and you're bending in your hips. So if you swizzle, if you do your swizzle and then you're going to lift, but you bend in the hips, maybe that feels safe. Maybe this doesn't feel safe to you. Right? So right now my shoulder's upright and if I lift that foot, maybe you feel like you're going to fall backwards. And so to compensate, you could be leaning forward. I'm not sure. Again, I can't see you, but if you're leaning forward, then yes, that's going to cause you to go onto your topic as soon as you lift your foot. So that fix, if that was a problem would be, think about your shoulder going over your hip and through your heel. Okay. So we don't want to stand up so much that we're leaning backwards. Some people imagine standing up means their back is like on a backboard and that yes, I can feel my weight is so far on my heels. It's almost scary. Instead, I want you to think about engaging your core. So tight, strong abs, and then keeping your shoulder and your hip and your heel aligned this way. When you lift, you're still going to be straight. Okay. You're not tipping backward, but you're also not bending in that hip and going onto your topic. Now let's try to address that second question. So again, without seeing a video of the skating, I can't exactly address the issue. If you want to send me your videos, join the coach Julia club and you can put them in the feedback form and I will answer and give you all this kind of feedback that's actually correct for your skating, for your actual issues. But based on the comment, it sounds like as he does his crossovers, he speeds up. And so we want these to be a nice, strong, steady pace where our legs stay a similar speed, but our momentum increases, right? So we don't want to actually get faster and faster with our feet. Um, so let me, let me think about if imagine what I think that comment meant. So there's a few things that could be happening to increase speed. You might be going faster and faster and faster. This is actually not using your muscles more effectively. It's just making your skating more frenzied. And this is also going to be harder to control. It's going to be hard to control your direction. It's going to be hard to control your toe picks and it's going to be so much harder to not click your feet together. So to increase speed and still stay in control. It's similar to the last one where we want to keep our weight to the inside. We always want to have our weight, our axis over our circle. And the faster you get, the more over that circle you can lean. If you're going really fast, if you watch some of the skaters who are competing on national television and they're doing crossovers, it looks like they're defying gravity because they're inside their shoulders so far inside their circle. The faster you go, the more lean you can have and physics will still keep you up. Okay. So keep in mind, you always want to step and keep your weight to the inside. So every cross you want to think about your upper body staying still inside. I just taught a little six year old yesterday. And I had her imagine she had teacups on her shoulders. Okay. So she's like, Oh, I don't want to spill the tea. Right? So she kept those teacups up on her shoulders. You can see my upper body is staying very still while my lower body moves. So that is my first tip for you. Keep your upper body still and stay leaning in towards the circle. The other thing that could be happening, we talked about it a little bit earlier is you're speeding your feet up. So I don't want you speeding your feet up so much as I want you pushing harder. So to increase speed, we don't want to speed up how fast our feet are moving. We want to push harder into each crossover. So think about a strong push out and then keeping that weight over a strong push under push out, push under and you can almost, if any of you have learned music, you might know what a metronome is. It goes tick, tick, tick, tick. And it helps you keep the same timing in your music. You can do the same thing with skating. You can imagine that metronome in your head. I think there's even metronome apps you can put on your watch so you could listen to it, but you want each step to have the same steady pace. So one, two, one, two, one, two. Now I'm going to keep the same timing. One, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, but speed up. What I did there was kept the same timing in my pushes and just pushed a whole lot harder. Okay. So push hard. Don't push fast. All right, skaters. I hope you found those tips helpful. Again, if you want feedback on your skating and if you want me to see your actual skating issues and be able to give you correct answers to your issues, you can go to coach Julia dot club. And remember right now we are, have gone back to our introductory pricing until I put a course level 10 up. Once course level 10 goes up, we will go back to our normal pricing and we will not go back to our inter-pricing. So you want to go on there now so you can lock that inter-pricing in as long as you remember. All right. So hopefully I see you there. I would love to connect with you and give you some actual feedback, some correct feedback on your skating. All right, skaters, happy skating. I hope you enjoyed this video and I'll see you next time.