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!

Just like Chad?

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result - Albert Einstein said that. Einstein was a German-born American Physicist, and that, one of his more quotable quotes, like his theories, was right on the button.

But you've arrived at what purports to be a skating website? A faster skating one at that (because let's face it, faster is almost always better) - so what am I doing opening with a quote from Albert Einstein himself?

Chad Hedrick (you know the guy, 50-time World Inline Champion and now Olympic ice Champion as well...) showed the World the effectiveness of what - during his Junior days - had been termed his ‘terrible technique’. Within a few short years (and a lot of over-slo-mo'd videos) of his 1994 World Championship debut, the speed skating world was ‘doing the Chad.’ It was a revolution where almost nothing happened – nobody but Chad (who was doing 'his thing' already) up-ended the World rankings, and nobody seemed to learn anything that saw them become devastatingly more efficient on their skates and dominate the competition… the World just looked like Chad.

'just' like Chad?

50 world titles and 8 years later (by Belgium 2002 and Chad's last stand), few skaters had learned enough about the key ingredient to the Double Push to make any real inroads on Chad’s success. We double-pushed because Chad did, the 'best' DP'ers were said to be those that were most 'like Chad' while few were getting Chad-like results.

Were we doing something wrong?

I think so.