Have you ever experienced anything similar to this? My daughter had absolutely gorgeous, huge, clean securely landed double jumps. Now that she has almost got her double axel landed, nothing else is working. All of her landings are shakey or worse, there is no landing, just splatter. She's popping, over rotating, under rotating or just sitting down on every jump.

Her coach saw her struggling (I think she's his pet project) and gave her an extra lesson. He told her that the jumps were there, just forget about it and concentrate on landing that doggone double axel. I'm sure that is good advice but she can't forget it. She's got the pouty faced-whiny voiced-droopy looking-folded arms-"I can't do anything" blues.

What's up? Any theories on what is going on?

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Babyskater's Mom

Could be she is tired - aren't your Easter holidays coming up around now, same as ours? Or perhaps she is sickening for, or suffering from, some minor infection and isn't quite up to par - it often shows up first of all in the skating. Perhaps a quiet afternoon curled up in front of her favourite videos will do the trick?

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Mrs Redboots
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I love my computer because my friends live in it!
Ice dancers have lovely big curves!

Been there, done that. As soon as I started working on my double sal and double toe loop, I lost every single I owned. My coach had to take me back to the beginning on some of them to fix what I was doing wrong! I think it has to do with trying so hard on the one jump that your body temporarily forgets it's muscle memory. Fortunately, it is a short term memory loss - I'm sure her jumps will come back soon enough if she just listens to her coach and doesn't try to stress out too much about it.

I agree with all of the above. Another possibility can be a growth spurt. Check the length of her pants...are they too short all of a sudden?

I don't watch my daugher very often anymore, but I get daily reports. Sometimes I hear she splatted all over the place all day...sigh...Coach will go back and work on each individual jump and fix the little technical problems if needed. She's fine in a day or so. I think it's pretty likely concentration on the 2/axel has messed up her timing on the other jumps temporarily.

Well, we can relate to this too. My daughter has had an axel, double sal and double toe since January and right before our first competition last week lost all of them - the axel being the worst. She too did 4 days of the whiney-pouty "I can't do it" syndrome, feeling sorry for herself and making the jumps worse. I know it was competition nerves but even on the practice ice up there, she was awful! Finally her coach yelled at her (even though she's only 8) that if she didn't want to even try to fix things then she must not really want to skate, since she's just giving up. Next practice she landed a few things by taking them back to the line to work on the fundamentals. That gave her some confidence and by the next morning she was landing a lot more. By Saturday she actually landed the axel in her compulsory and an axel, one double sal and one double toe in her freeskate - and had a completely clean warm-up at least. She missed an axel and one double sal in combination in the program but felt so much better about herself and so far this week has been fine. So tell your daughter just to pick herself up and know she can do it, and those jumps will come back.

This is a skaters theme song. I had a coach tell me once that this is what keeps them in work. Whenever a skill goes wonky I go back to the basics. My coach pounds the basics in. =-)Her skills will be back.

Chico

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"I truly believe, when God created skating, he patted himself on the back."

I took your advice, Mrs. Redboots, and had my daughter take another day off to rest. (I made her take a mandatory mental health weekend off last weekend when all of this started) We cuddled up on the couch, read books, played with the dog and went to bed early.

She wanted to skate this morning so we went. UGH! I have seen kids lose jumps and struggle to get them back but never this bad. It looks like she never had the jumps in the first place. To make matters worse, the double axel is at least a half turn off today.

I do think she is tired but probably not sick. This Friday is the last day before Spring Break. I will really make sure she rests, body and mind, during that blessed week. It can't come soon enough!

I appreciate all the advice I'm being given and welcome any others that have some words of wisdom. I especially appreciate that this is not uncommon. I'm telling my daughter that these things happen and not to give up but this has been going on for a week now and I can only hope that whatever is out of whack gets back into whack asap! My baby's in distress!

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Babyskater's Mom

Yesterday afternoon and this morning were much better. The jumps are still a bit...not quite right. They aren't as easy or automatically landed but they are seemingly there. What a relief.

What seemed to start things getting better was an adult skater watched her and told me that she was looking at the ice and her posture was "different." As I watched her, I could see her discouragement was showing in her posture. Her shoulders were slumped and her head was hanging.

I told her to stop looking at the ice! (That was her coach's pet peeve when she was younger - she used to say, "If you look at your toes, you'll fall on your nose!") Lo and behold, the very next jump landed. It was kind of odd looking but she was thrilled! One of my daughter's friends who is an older skater watched her (at my daughter's request) and told her she was dropping her shoulders. My daughter lifted her chin and pulled her shoulders back and started landing her jumps.

She's not jumping as big yet or going into her jumps fast enough so she is having some foreward landings and still over rotating a bit but it is so much better and clearly there is hope.

This morning in a lesson, she was soooo much better. Even though her double axel is WAY cheated, she was landing it on one foot - a huge step forward for her. She was smiling all the way to school!

Now I know what people are talking about when they say they lost their jumps. We have never experienced it before. There is still a lot of work to do to get the jumps back to competition level quality but I know now it happens - even to "naturals" like my daughter and then they have to learn how to work hard for something that once came easily!

Oh, yeah, she grew a 1/2 inch in about a week! Yikes! That and like Elsy said, the timing getting messed up by the double axel is what I think started the whole downhill spiral. I'm just glad things are looking up at last!

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Babyskater's Mom