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In the squelching heat and humidity of the Minnesota summers, I chose to spend most of my days in the giant refrigerator we call an ice rink. Summer was the most important time for training because school didn’t interfere with our practice regimens, and it was also like very expensive daycare. A big component of summer training was the off-ice classes. These included ballet, stretch, and strength classes. Ballet was used to teach us to point our feet, proper form, good posture, blah blah blah… (clearly, I have found memories of the instruction I was given). It was miserable because most competitive figure skaters, me included, are very short, muscular individuals and we were being taught to elongate our bodies by a lengthy thin woman who was at least 6-feet tall. Stretch class was used to teach us how to do particular tricks such as leg extensions, the splits, etc. before we were expected to try them on ice while moving. Strength class was used to practice jump techniques off ice, strengthen our core for balance, and increase our endurance so that we could actually execute our 3 minute routines. In the case of this off-ice practice, I actually improved. Identical Elements Theory explains why I was able to positively transfer the skills I learned in these classes to the ice. Off ice, I was being taught observable movement patterns that were elements of the whole- skills I would be performing on the ice. For example, as I gained strength for a jump off ice and worked to correct my posture and form, the jump was much more easily learned on ice. In addition, the added speed on ice made the jump even easier. I was ultimately doing the bulk of my learning for a harder skill off-ice which made transfer onto ice easier. Moves like spirals, pictured to the right, were practiced off ice and also more easily transferred to the ice. If you could hold good form in a spiral off ice, doing it on ice was a heck of a lot easier.

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Because Why Not Embarrass Yourself In Front of the Entire Men's Varsity Hockey Team?

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Because Why Not Embarrass Yourself In Front of the Entire Men's Varsity Hockey Team?

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As you progress in figure skating with jumps and spins, you have to also progress with your basic ability to skate; this is done through Moves In the Field tests. Moves In the Field was not my favorite part about figure skating, and this moment in my life did not help. I was working to pass my fourth moves in the field test, and was performing a component called snails. Although the overall pattern of the motion was like a snail, the speed involved was not. This kind of deception will haunt me forever. The motion starts out at the very center of the ice rink with very slow, large cross overs. As the circle expands, the cross-overs have to get smaller and faster, yet you had to cover more ice. I’m still confused about how this is supposed to work till this day, but I regress. I was performing these snails with backwards crossovers and my coach was watching to give me feedback. By the end of the skill, you are moving very fast, backwards, in a circle, performing small quick crossing movements… on skates. On my last circle, I realized that because I was going so fast, I had made an error and my circle was too large for the ice. This related to Fitt's Law speed accuracy trade-off because at a faster speed, I was more likely to error in the sizing of my circle and less able to correct this error. I tried turning around to brace for impact with the boards and instead ended up face planting into them. When I finally had to ability to stand back up and had thought my embarrassment was over, the entire men’s varsity hockey team was stretching in the bleachers ready to greet me with judgement. After this incident, I learned to control my footwork to a speed that allowed me to achieve the goal of the task and make my circles fit perfectly on the ice. I even eventually passed this level for moves in the field; my ego, however, never recovered.

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Once my competitive figure skating career took off and I was consistently amazing myself with last place at every competition *cue sad violin music*, my coach Beth started using the harness with me during practice to expand my jump repertoire. Now don't get me wrong, at first the harness seemed appealing. It was a literal harness connected to a line on a pulley system and spanned the width of the ice. This contraption was used to increase the skater’s confidence in trying new jumps because their coach could pull them into the air and decrease some of the effects of gravity. This allowed the skater to focus 100% of their energy on the necessary motions of the jump and not so much on their entire body weight hitting the ice on the way back down. In theory it sounds like such a great idea, but for me and my coach it was not the best use of our time. Let’s just say augmented feedback was not my coach’s strong suit. When performing a jump, feedback from an instructor can be very pivotal to improvement because the skater can only rely on the knowledge of the results of the jump: whether or not they landed the jump in full rotation or fell on their butt. The coach needs to provide knowledge of the performance such as: placement of the legs crossed over each other, whether the arms were all the way in, the height of the jump, the take off, etc. My coach really liked to tell me all the things I did correctly, but rarely gave me error feedback because I think she was afraid of being mean, bless her soul. Error feedback is ultimately needed to improve the performance of a jump and to learn the correct motions. Without this feedback, I didn't know what kinds of changes I needed to make in the big picture to achieve the jump successfully and I ended up spending a lot of time in that harness. The only time her feedback was productive was when the jump happened to go well and her positive feedback was also useful feedback. Unproductive augmented feedback would explain why I improved at the rate of a snail compared to my 8-year old counterparts.

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Kid hits ceiling of gym with rope! | ORIGINAL

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When looking at all the components of figure skating, the skill I practiced the most was spinning. I loved to spin, and I was ACTUALLY DECENT AT IT. I could progress through spins relatively fast and eventually ran out of ones to learn that were within the realm of my competitive level and the limits of my flexibility. This love for spinning ultimately ended up being my downfall because I practiced the layback spin so much I injured my lower back. But regardless of this tragic ending, I never stopped wanting to spin. Jumping however, did not have a special place in my heart. I found little appeal in throwing my body in the air, especially as I got older and gravity’s effects were a little more obvious. I progressed through jumps very slowly and that made it hard to be motivated to practice them because I did not see the results I wanted to. The factor that had the largest influence on this was likely my innate ability. Spinning requires several component abilities: gross body equilibrium to maintain balance while rotating and not knowing your relative position on the ice, dynamic strength to stay upright while on one leg, extent flexibility to be able to achieve certain spin positions, and multi-limb coordination to be able to coordinate the actions of the spinning leg with the position of the rest of the body, especially when changing spins. Practicing each individual spin as a skill was then highly prolific because the underlying ability to spin was present. Some of these same abilities, such as multi-limb coordination, underlie the components of jumping too; this explains why I was able to do jumps over time and eventually master them, just much slower.

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The Costumes May Have Been the Best Part

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The Costumes May Have Been the Best Part

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No matter how many times you watch a skating tutorial, the Olympics, or any variety of skating show, nothing truly exemplifies its difficulty like actually doing it.  Figure skating utilizes every proprioceptor to tell you exactly where your body is and what it is doing; this is pivatol because it is likely your visual cues are a bit blurred as you spin through the air. As my years of competitive figure skating progressed, my sense of proprioception developed. My sense of stretch and tension of my muscles plus the angle, velocity, and direction of my joint movement allowed me to better understand and correct my movements in the air. As an additional benefit to my proprioceptor development, other areas in my life improved as well such as running into less objects, tripping less, etc. To this day, I definitely still see the positive effects of developing these mechanoreceptors at a young age.