OH MY!

That was an eye opener!

I realized that when I skate, my arms don't seem to be as strongly held as when you see the elites skate. I figure I may not be able to do a triple, but I should at LEAST be holding my arms and hands the way they are. How do you do it? Do you just have to concentrate on your fingertips the whole time? No more weak looking arm positions for me!!!

If you think about keeping them up and strong, they will stay there. Maybe your problem is that you're not staying leveled, like you keep rising up in your knees when you do crossovers or you keep leaning forward and backward, because that's what I do and it looks like my arms aren't held when in fact the problem isnt the arms.

I can never get used to that it looks different then it feels. When I'm out there it "feels" like I'm way down in the knee, and when I see it on video, my knees are hardly bent at all. One of the crueler jokes of life! It is a shocker to see yourself the first time on video, but you will get used to that, too.

I sort of envy singers who can use equipment to hear their own voice while they are singing and make adjustments. Wouldn't it be nice if we could see ourselves while we are skating. Sometimes I catch a glimpse in the hockey window and it looks good, but then I see it on video and it doesn't look good, then the husband will say it looks good (but they are trying to be nice), then the coaches doen't say anything at all. So, I really don't know what the h*ll is going on...all I know is that it "feels" good...so, I hold on to that and keep moving forward.

Well, I think we are always more critical of our skating than our husbands and others are (except maybe our coach). Maybe that's good-we push ourselves harder that way (or bad, we tend to beat ourselves up even more over little things).

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Skate@Delaware
Ah, show skating!!! I do it for the glitter!

That's the good thing about video technology that we have today. It's affordable, so we can often look and see what we're doing. And then it's up to ourselves to make the necessary changes if what we see isn't quite right. Like, if our arms aren't in the right position.....then see what you're doing in the video and then put them in the right position.

if it makes you feel any better video taping every lesson has proven that I subconsciously:
signal by bending my skating wrist just before 3-turns
crack my knuckles before each jump
stick out the tip of my tongue before each sit spin
never ever ever really straighten my free leg unless I'm actually looking at it

Lyle

I point my forefingers whenever I do toe taps or half jumps. Habit from teaching, I guess.

Regular jumps mean "fighting fists!"

Yes, it is eye-opening to see what we "really" look like to the audience.
Take a look at your gestures, which always feel larger-than-life: you'll see that they're usually not "grand" enough.

Spoken like someone who hasn't yet had the courage to watch the videos of her own skating in last two years' skating shows. (I did watch my kids, though!)

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I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one who sticks out her tongue when doing something, me its for my spiral.

I curse like a sailor and my coach had to remind me not to do that in competition

Another coach who was in an ice show told me you can say sh** through your teeth as you're smiling and nobody will notice it