I've always felt more comfortable skating CCW-my CCW moves are all much better than their CW counterparts. My friend, however, does everything CW. We're both righties. I'm trying to figure this whole thing out-is it personal preference, or is there an advantage to doing things in one direction as opposed to the other? I know that ideally I should be equally strong in both directions. Thoughts?

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deannathegeek
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While things like mohawks and 3-turns should be ideally equal, there will always be a "stronger" side - not necessarily the same for everything, either! Your jumps and spins will need to go only in one direction to be the most successful. There is no advantage to CW or CCW - one is not better than the other.

A rule of thumb, and I know of many exceptions, is that righties prefer to spin and turn CCW and lefties prefer CW. I am a righty, and a CCW skater, but have long been much more comfortable with CW FXO's because they were so much more difficult for me when learning, that I worked on them harder. I think that given the time and effort, you can become equally proficient in both directions with almost anything.

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And I'm one of those exceptions. I'm a rightie, but jump and spin CW, though my secondary coach has threatened tons of time that she's gonna make me skate CCW b/c certain skills seemed easier going the CCW direction... Go figure!!!

Don't worry about which direction is good... pick a direction that is comfortable to you and stick with it.

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Well, I jump CCW but when I started out spinning, CW went much better for me and I forced myself to learn spinning ccw. Also, moves I like to do on my right foot *regardless* of which direction they're turning. It is a "problem" my mother, also a dancer, has encountered as well. We're both right-handed.

I think it's part natural preference, part your experience in other sports like ballet, ballroom dancing, but also - skating public sessions having to go with the stream, etc. Muscle memory builds in a certain way on top of your personal preference. Which is why your least favorite side should be practiced a *lot*

I have a similar issue, but with my left foot. I am a much stronger spinner on my left foot, regardless of CW or CCW rotation. I utterly confounded my coach when I was learning Novice moves, because I preferred the CCW direction for the quick 3-turns, but the CW pattern for the quick rocker-choctaws. Good for the judging, though, because then they'd see that I was better at the typically weak side of the rocker-choctaws.

I always wondered if foot preference has anything to do with leg length. Everyone has one leg that is slightly longer (I think usually 1/2" or less) than the other. Maybe it's easier to keep the "short" leg off the ice in turns?

I've often wondered the same thing...and yes, the longer leg is the preferred weight-bearing foot for just about everything (don't ask it to get up into a spiral though!)

It's not just skating - if you try doing various conditioning exercises off-ice, one side is always stronger than the other. Even something as simple as that exercise where you stand against the wall and trim your waist by reaching round to touch the wall with the opposite hand, one side is more flexible than the other.

The answer, of course, is to work the less good side at least twice as hard as the good side! My coach always teases me as he says technically I am far better clockwise, but I am faster anti-clockwise!

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Mrs Redboots
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I'm a righty who skates CW. It was really an issue of spinning. I cannot spin CCW without wanting to be sick. I can do 2 revolutions of a 2 foot spin now, after a lot of hard work to combat dizzyness, because occasionally I need to teach those in classes. But even my CCW turns are lousy compared to my CW ones- and dizzy isn't a factor there.

Because of the spins I have to jump on my weak side. It's been a real challenge because my right leg is stronger than my left, but my left is my landing leg now. Our skate director jumped and spun in different directions and she really really counseled against it because it made a lot of things difficult if not impossible in programs (I doubt I would get to the level where that's an issue though...)

I blame poor dance training. I danced on a team where it was more important for everyone to do the exact same thing than for everyone to be well trained. For every 5-10 right piroutte, chaine, or pique we did, we did 1 on the left side. It became ingrained to turn to the right.

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-Jessi
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I'm also a righty who jumps CW. My right leg is the stronger one, so I was taught to spin CW. But I'm wondering if that was right because I think my backspin would be better on my right foot, and I think I would be more comfortable landing jumps on my right foot. So I wish I had not been encouraged to spin CW - alas that was many years ago and I don't think I can change now.

Also - if you still have a choice I would advise learning CCW. To skate on a crowded rink jumping and spinning the other way leads to a lot of near misses. When I'm doing crossovers to enter a spin everyone thinks I'm going to do a jump and they end up in the middle where I was going to step for my spin. And vice versa on the jumps. I almost took off a couple of little heads with my camel (attempt) one day.

I came from a dance background, too, although, unlike Jessi, we always practiced everything both directions. My best turn off-ice is a CW backspin.

My left leg is stronger as a supporting leg. When I first started skating, I practiced spinning in both directions and was fine either way, but the other skills (3-turns, mohawks, spirals) were vastly better on my left side, so I decided that, since those things set up spins and jumps, it was better to go CCW and set stuff up on my better side so that I might have a better chance.

Although, my RBO edge is my worst and I hate the stinkin' thing... So I dislike landing jumps on that edge. Maybe this is why I so much prefer 1/2 jumps and the 1/2 loop...

Mine too- but I can't for the life of me do it on ice!

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As a rightie and CCW skater I find I work harder on my CW skating, I have to be much more exact and focus more on my CW moves. Generally, I am stronger and more exact on those moves which show good bilateral strength and is something judges expect at the higher levels.

I have a ballet teacher who has children who skate and she really focuses on doing all our turns clockwise and equalizing the desperate between dominate side and spinning, I find that very helpful.

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Interesting. I prefer my left leg, but I jump CCW and land on my right leg. Despite being able to spin CW, I've never been much of a jumper CW.

I have found that while I am initially terrible at most CW moves, they tend to be the more correct and almost better moves after I work on them - probably because I can get away with less sloppiness and therefore have to really be spot-on technically. Also I'd practice them less when not forced to in a lesson, so lesser chance to develop poor technique.

Actually my preferred leg for moves is exactly the one that goes up in both the normal and the biellman spiral - although people claim my normal spiral has the leg at equal heights for both legs. Which might explain how come my falling leaf is my only jump which is better in the cw direction.

I'm beginning to think CW vs CCW preference is unrelated to handedness, just like eye dominance and Ina Bauer/spread eagle direction. I know there are lots of right-handed CW skaters, but I guess the inverse is true as well, since my coach is left-handed but jumps and spins CCW.

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I agree. My twins are opposite-handed, yet they both skate "the wrong direction" for their handedness. The lefty skates CCW and the righty skates CW. *shrug*

I like the "dominant leg" theory - that's how I test my students to see which way they should spin and later, jump.

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I also agree that handedness doesn't really have any impact on spinning direction. The most that can be said is that 'most people' prefer to spin CCW. 'Most people' are also right handed, hence the association, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the two statements aren't necessarily related.

Personally, when I was a teenager I was taught to spin and jump CCW. Although I managed to learn a few basic jumps, I could never spin. Coming back to skating as an adult, my coach suggested trying to spin CW. Whilst my spins are still pretty rubbish, I can now sometimes get a couple of revolutions out of them, which I never could before, and I have much more sense of what I'm doing. Now I'm starting to relearn the waltz jump, but it's very obvious that I'm much more comfortable jumping CCW. I don't know whether this is some latent muscle memory from my younger days, but the fact is that I seem destined to spin and jump in different directions. I'm left handed (or maybe I just like to be different! ).

I have a theory too.

I've become increasingly convinced that poor boot fit and mount controls a lot more things than people realize. I think to some extant the direction you prefer to spin and jump in was based on how the bootfitter and bootmaker fit the boots and mounted the blades when you were first learning to spin and jump. If one foot couldn't completely control the boot, because there were missing points of contact between the foot and the boot, or if balance was bad on one foot because the blade wasn't centered right, or didn't run along the axis it should, you got used to using the other foot as much as you could.

In skating, experience accounts for the permanent preference, cuz most skaters only practice in one direction (I work on trying to be equally bad in both). I admit this doesn't explain the dance preference, cuz modern dancers go barefoot, and ballet shoes are too thin to influence anything. So it probably doesn't explain the skating thing completely for everyone either. And I can't prove anything.

OK, so how do you explain why most skateboarders and surfers are more comfortable with the left foot in front but some are more comfortable with the right foot in front? They don't have blades, but there is clearly a preference.

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"You don't have to put an age limit on your dreams." - Dara Torres, 41, after her 2nd medal at the 2008 Olympics

Hmm, we have a spinner and when my daughter's friends come over they usually end up playing on it for a few minutes. I've noticed that the kids who are lefties spin CW without any prompting. That's a very small sample (like 2 lefties out of 5 kids, 2 CW spinners), but these would be kids who don't skate. I assume it would be a natural inclination for them.

Query, I respectfully disagree with the mounting theory, although I agree that a wrong mount can cause problems (I've had them myself in my spins after discovering my blades were bending, because of that I had learned to spin on the toepicks). I've tried skating in 3 different pairs of skates by different manifacturers within weeks of just starting to skate (my own ProStars, my mom's Risport RF3s and my own new Risport Etoiles) and at the preferences were identical. Also you'd expect that learning new things, like rockers and counters, I'd not have a preference yet in my new Graf Edmontons - after all, for the 3 turns and mohawks, I only prefer to turn CCW regardless of foot. In fact you'd expect the preference for the right foot to have waned away significantly as I spent a month in a cast with that ankle broken last summer, and then had serious strength, pain and mobility issues with it afterwards.
Not so. It frustrates me to no end because I'd rather practice it all on left, exactly because of risidual effects of the fracture, but I keep that strong preference for the right leg. What makes it *even* stranger, is that I was born with that leg partially paralysed. You'd think that's a good reason not to prefer doing everything on it, but apparently, even that isn't enough to convince the body to switch preference... It must be either very strongly engrained, or the result of training and muscle memory. I'm gonna guess in my case the latter cuz when I was a kid, the doctors made me do all sorts of thing with that leg, including only picking up things I dropped with the toes of the right foot (which I think also explains my preference to stand on the left leg for spirals and stuff, I had better balance to "just stand" on it originally because I'd learned to keep my balance while picking things up with the right foot).

I still think it's a muscle memory / genetics combination.

You must be right, at least for you.

Beginners usually have trouble balancing fully over one foot. Going onto an outside edge is even harder. It is dificult to spin on a foot without balancing over it or going onto an outside edge, unless you are good enough to backspin. If the blade mount on a foot forces you onto an inside edge, you can't really spin on that foot well. If the mount forces you onto an extreme outside edge, it would be hard to spin in place. So it still makes sense to me it might be one factor.

Could the majority preference for CCW have anything to do with the fact most rinks have people skate CCW around the rink?

Or could it be a habbit learned from instructors? Maybe most people have learned from other people who spin to the left, who in turn did the same thing, and so on onto the beginning.

I don't even know why most people are right handed.

For what it is worth, I try to spin and jump on both, because I'm afraid of making the muscles stronger on one side than the other, which is supposed to cause various chronic problems. And yet, I definitely spin a jump easier to the left.

I was born ambidextrous, but was taught to be a rightie, because it works better in our culture. My left leg is slightly longer, if that helps your database. Has anyone created statistics? Maybe someone could start a poll.

Then again, does it matter?

That's actually quite likely. . . unless the reason for the CCW skating around the rink is due to most people's preference for going CCW!

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"You don't have to put an age limit on your dreams." - Dara Torres, 41, after her 2nd medal at the 2008 Olympics

We turn to the left when we shake hands, we waltz turn CCW (any other dances too?). Right handed swordsman turned CCW to go en guard.

Guys turn to the left to go into closed dance positions - but gals go the other way.

We could come up with lots of plausible explanations.