Lift your knees toward your inside shoulder for good cross-overs

A short tip for today, that I'm sure to come back to and elaborate on later.

Good corner-skating technique is a very effective weapon in your Faster Skating arsenal if you can get the hang of it. There are some key points to cover when teaching good corner-skating technique... but I'm not going to cover them today.

Today, something you can take out the door with you right now if you are headed out for a skate

The corner-skating stroke action is of course called the Cross-Over. Its name, for new skaters, suggests the requirement to coordinate the lifting of one long and oddly-shaped skate over the other - whilst balancing momentarily on one skate. Perhaps Cross-Over is too black-and-white a name.

I'll cover this in more detail next post - but for now, what to remember, and what to visualize, to immediately improve your corners THIS SKATE:

The Cross-Over is best achieved while leaning - not before. So head into the turn with your bodyweight already shifting inward (loading more of your weight onto the inside skate - the one closest to the turn).

Then, when Crossing-Over, visualize lifting each knee in turn toward the inside shoulder. That's right, imagine two puppet-strings that run from your back, over your inside shoulder (the left shoulder, if you're turning left) and connect to the face of each knee. Each time you cross-over, the string is tightened and each knee is drawn in turn toward the inside shoulder.

If you keep your hips nicely forward over your skates when cornering, this action will bring one skate over the other neatly, simplify the action, and keep the skate level with the surface - ready for a quick setdown if necessary.

Go try this out!