The 4 Steps to Learning Figure Skating Jumps Off the Ice

Hey skaters, it's Dace here from Next Edge Tutorials. In today's lesson, I'm going to be showing you the different stages for jumping off the ice. When it comes to figure skating, I feel that there are four stages to learning how to safely jump off the ice and this is what we're going to do. We're going to learn them in order. So the very first thing that you need to be able to do is just safely jump up and down. So you just want to be able to push through your feet here and learning how our knees and our ankles work and our core works here. So it's safely going up and down and you can go from one foot to the other and holding. This is step one. We have to learn how to transfer from that one foot to the other, to pushing off a two. You can also do exercises where we're stationary jumping, but you can do some small jumps and then you can do some big jumps and then go back to small and big. So we're just learning how to safely land. We're not landing with locked legs. We're landing and our knees and our ankles are giving in and then we're pushing through. So we want to think about our ankles working through our feet. Our knees, they have a soft give. Our hips and our shoulders, we're all in a line. We're not trying to jump this way. We want to learn how to maneuver our body and land over our feet. So that's step one. Now the second step is learning how to move forwards and backwards into the side. So you can easily hold here, pull up through your back and we can learn how to move backwards. Then we can learn how to move forwards. See, there's nothing complicated about this. We're just learning how to move our body as one and then we can move to the side here, pushing through our ankles and then moving back the other way. We can also do that with one foot jumps. So you can balance on one leg. You can move backwards and learning how to push off and then move forwards, pushing forwards. Then you can also learn how to move to the side and then the other side. You don't want to move on to the next step until you can do this because I have worked with a lot of skaters that struggled to move the whole entire body as one, pushing through both feet. So we have to learn how to do that first before we can move on to the next step. So I want you to start off with the first stage of just stationary jumps, learning how to bend, use your ankles, safely land, bending our knees, not locking our legs. So we want to learn how to bend because that's what's going to happen on the ice. When we land jumps we have to be able to give and hold. So step one that, step two moving, now step three. This is where we start introducing the concept of rotating. Is going around our body one way or the other direction and this is where I like to tell my skaters you want to be able to rotate in both directions because you might not have found out on the ice which direction you want to rotate. So it just is going to help you out being able to rotate both ways. So we've learned in step one that we need to be able to do stationary jumps. Step two is moving on two feet or one foot. Now we're going to add rotation. So what I want you to do is using both feet is just learning how to rotate in a circle and then you can go the other way. Hold. So it's learning how to use our ankles and how we turn as one unit. We're not throwing our body trying to turn. It's little bend turn, bend turn, bend turn, bend turn and then the other way. Now if you feel really good with that I want you to start rotating your turns while moving because we already learned how to move from side to side forward back. Now we're going to start adding that rotation. This is where it really starts to look like finger skating. So you might take, I'm going to step onto my left foot and you can start rotating your body and then you can go the other way and then the other direction. So it's just learning how to hop, stay over that right side or your left side and start rotating. Now if you're feeling really good with that I would start recommending now you can introduce more of the quarter turn half and whole and it's going to look like this. So I'm going to go counterclockwise. You can, like I said, you want to try both but I'm going to go that direction. So I'm just going to do quarter turns where I'm focusing on that bending and springing up and out, up, out, lifting, holding and trying to land on the ball of my foot and then come down with the heel so we're not locking our legs. And then you can go like, okay that felt great. I want to see if we can add a little bit more rotation. This is where you can do a half turn and then another half turn and then we start introducing that single rotation landing on one foot. So we want to make sure that we push through both feet when we do this rotation and then hitting that landing position. So if you are struggling with that one foot, sorry rotation, single rotation on one foot, go back to those quarter turn and half turns because you might only be pushing through one foot when you rotate. So go back and get that really settled where you can land on two feet before moving on. So if that feels really good and you're like, okay I got this single rotation and hold, you can start, you know, adding a little bit more rotation. So we have our first step, our second step and this is our third step. Now step four is where you start really introducing all your single jumps that you have. You have a waltz jump, you have a sal, you have a toe, you have a loop, you have a flip and a lutz. So this is where we're transferring our weight a bit more from one leg to the other. So the next step would be learning a waltz jump off the ice where we step, jump and hold. Where we're pushing through and landing on the one foot. This is where I feel like all those steps that we did, you start combining it together because we did the side jumps, well this kind of looks like it in a waltz jump moving to the side. We add the rotation and then we have the landing jump. So this is the next step is making sure that you can put everything together and holding and like let's say that feels really good and you're like, okay now I might try a toe loop off the ice and you can do, you know, inside three turn and then toe loop and hold. So you start just checking all those jumps and learning how they work off the ice because it's so much easier if you understand the concept of jumping off the ice. It's going to make it so much easier on the ice. You're going to have a level of confidence that you go, okay I know that and inside the return from the tapping, I need to pivot around and lift and jump and you can really hit those positions off the ice to help you on the ice. So let's say you have single jumps, well guess what? The next step is going to be adding that extra rotation for doubles, for triples or quads. So you want to make sure that you have every stage of your jumps down before moving on to the next because if you go from like step one to step three and you miss learning how to maneuver your weight from side to side or front back, you're going to struggle when you start introducing your jumps because you haven't learned how to transfer your weight completely. So doing these stages is so helpful. It's going to help you progress even faster on the ice. So I want you to go back and you know even all my skaters, before they get on the ice, they check all of this because it's just reinforcing really good habits. Thanks for watching Next Edge Tutorials and like always, happy skating!