Yesterday I talked about moving balance. You might have thought, what the heck is that?! Well, I don't like to make it too easy on you. I'm a coach after all. I'm hoping that you reach a little to see what you can find on your own before I start telling you how I see everything. After all, a lesson that you learn from your own exploration, experimentation and experience is far better than anything you can pull from a book. But now that you've had a bit of time to imagine moving balance on your own, I'd like to give you my take on this concept in ice skating and in everything else.
I once heard walking described as "highly coordinated falling". With every step you are falling forward, but you catch yourself before any disaster happens and then you allow yourself to fall forward onto the next foot. But, of course, we don't focus on the falling part. Walking is a great example of moving balance. Each step is an opportunity to fall, but we don't, because we are in balance even as we move.
It takes longer to learn how to walk than it does to just stand up on your own. That's because moving balance is more complex than balancing yourself when you are completely still. There are more muscles involved and more variables to deal with, too. But you aren't going to spend your whole life standing in one place to hold your balance. You learn to walk and then you move confidently through life.
Moving balance is that equilibrium which is always in flux. It's a controlled fall that doesn't feel scary because you are confident in your ability to hold it, to stand upright throughout the motion, and to continue to move in the direction you want.
Ice skating is all about moving balance, of course. It's about working with the forces that work on your body: gravity, acceleration, inertia or momentum. When you have learned a move it becomes comfortable as you become confident in your ability to control the fall, to manage the equilibrium throughout the entire process.
Life is all about moving balance, too. Life is always in motion, and you are always balancing yourself within it. Your mental, spiritual, and physical health are all affected by your equilibrium in life. Work-life balance is only a piece of this big puzzle. You balance your desires, your dreams, your family, your beliefs. You balance what you want to do with what you can do and what you must do. You shift your weight, sometimes subtly and sometimes drastically, in order to continue to move onward.
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Showing posts with label balance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label balance. Show all posts
The Layback
Labels: balance, physics, yoga
Layback spins are a particularly difficult challange in equilibrium for a lot of skaters. By the time you are working on a layback spin, you have a pretty good idea of what good balance in a spin feels like. But, face it, this spin is weird.
First off, this spin is strange because it completely messes with your sense of direction. In a moderately good layback you'll be looking at the ceiling, but in a really good layback you'll actually be looking at the world upside down. You can get used to that feeling of disorientation by practicing headless spins before you start doing laybacks.
A headless spin is just a regular one-foot spin, but you tilt your head back to look at the ceiling and hold your hands together in front of your throat, with your elbows pointing outward. This spin is a lot easier than a layback because, other than your head getting tilted back, your whole body is straight the same way it is for an ordinary scratch spin. You may find it takes a little practice, though, because the disorientation from looking up can make it hard to keep that perfect straight-spine position.
Once you are comfortable with the headless, you are ready to move on to the layback, but here's the catch: The layback is NOT just a headless that you lean back further. In a layback, your whole spine curves backwards. But we've already learned that you have to maintain equilibrium -- equal balance/equal forces -- in any move on ice. So, if your whole spine is curving backwards, how do you maintain balance?
The answer is in the hips! In a layback spin you push your hips in front of your skating foot to counterbalance the weight of your upper body leaning backwards.
The thing is, this is not a natural or a comfortable position for most skaters when first learning this spin. Most skaters who are just learning a lay back end up keeping their hips too much in line with their skating foot as their head leans back and they curve their back just below the shoulder blades. The thing is, your body is very smart. It's not going to let you spin like that, because your brain knows that it can't hold you up in that position. So, you push forward on the rocker of your blade, and next thing you know you're all the way up on your toepick and the spin is a mess.
Practice layback balance everywhere until you get it right. When you are standing in line, waiting for a bus, whatever -- whenever you have a couple of seconds to spare. Start by standing on your skating foot. Put your "free leg" behind you. Push your hips forward and lay back from the waist so that your whole back is as curved as you can get it.
When you first start practicing this, you'll need your "free leg" to stay on the ground, even if just your big toe is there for balance. As soon as you can, though, start lifting that free leg into the air until you can balance in the layback position anywhere and any time.
Now you're ready to take it to the ice.
First you need to center yourself in the comforts of your normal life: family, home, friends, faith, routine, and whatever else brings you to your point of moving balance.
Next you step out of this safe space, and create a new balance that is out of the ordinary. If you travel far from home, you might find comfort in the presence of new and old friends. A travel buddy may become your lifeline of normalcy as you explore new foods, new languages, and new cultures. Or you may find that you rely more heavily on calls home to mom than you normally would in your workaday life.
Finally, knowing that you've found a balance that you can hold comfortably for a while, you relax into whatever adventure you are on. You reach for those stars, throw yourself into an ambitious task, and rest assured that this odd equilibrium that you have will keep you steady until it's time to return to your center and get back to ordinary life. 0 comments
First off, this spin is strange because it completely messes with your sense of direction. In a moderately good layback you'll be looking at the ceiling, but in a really good layback you'll actually be looking at the world upside down. You can get used to that feeling of disorientation by practicing headless spins before you start doing laybacks.
A headless spin is just a regular one-foot spin, but you tilt your head back to look at the ceiling and hold your hands together in front of your throat, with your elbows pointing outward. This spin is a lot easier than a layback because, other than your head getting tilted back, your whole body is straight the same way it is for an ordinary scratch spin. You may find it takes a little practice, though, because the disorientation from looking up can make it hard to keep that perfect straight-spine position.
Once you are comfortable with the headless, you are ready to move on to the layback, but here's the catch: The layback is NOT just a headless that you lean back further. In a layback, your whole spine curves backwards. But we've already learned that you have to maintain equilibrium -- equal balance/equal forces -- in any move on ice. So, if your whole spine is curving backwards, how do you maintain balance?
The answer is in the hips! In a layback spin you push your hips in front of your skating foot to counterbalance the weight of your upper body leaning backwards.
The thing is, this is not a natural or a comfortable position for most skaters when first learning this spin. Most skaters who are just learning a lay back end up keeping their hips too much in line with their skating foot as their head leans back and they curve their back just below the shoulder blades. The thing is, your body is very smart. It's not going to let you spin like that, because your brain knows that it can't hold you up in that position. So, you push forward on the rocker of your blade, and next thing you know you're all the way up on your toepick and the spin is a mess.
Center, Leg, Hips, Back
These are the steps for a perfect layback:- Center yourself
- Get your free leg back
- Push your hips forward
- Lean back from the waist
Practice layback balance everywhere until you get it right. When you are standing in line, waiting for a bus, whatever -- whenever you have a couple of seconds to spare. Start by standing on your skating foot. Put your "free leg" behind you. Push your hips forward and lay back from the waist so that your whole back is as curved as you can get it.
When you first start practicing this, you'll need your "free leg" to stay on the ground, even if just your big toe is there for balance. As soon as you can, though, start lifting that free leg into the air until you can balance in the layback position anywhere and any time.
Now you're ready to take it to the ice.
Om...
I'm always saying that ice skating is like yoga, and it's not just because of the positions that you have to hold when you do moves, either. The layback spin is like a mini-meditation on accomplishing anything really difficult.First you need to center yourself in the comforts of your normal life: family, home, friends, faith, routine, and whatever else brings you to your point of moving balance.
Next you step out of this safe space, and create a new balance that is out of the ordinary. If you travel far from home, you might find comfort in the presence of new and old friends. A travel buddy may become your lifeline of normalcy as you explore new foods, new languages, and new cultures. Or you may find that you rely more heavily on calls home to mom than you normally would in your workaday life.
Finally, knowing that you've found a balance that you can hold comfortably for a while, you relax into whatever adventure you are on. You reach for those stars, throw yourself into an ambitious task, and rest assured that this odd equilibrium that you have will keep you steady until it's time to return to your center and get back to ordinary life. 0 comments
A Balancing Act
Labels: balance, physics
A lot of people think that ice skating takes some special feat of balance. In reality, just basic skating around the rink isn't all that difficult as long as you have a decent pair of ice skates on your feet. You should have strong boots and the blades should be balanced properly under your feet. Notice, I said that the blades should be balanced under your feet, not that you need to balance on the blades. If your boots are supporting your ankles and the blades are positioned correctly on your boots, you shouldn't have any difficulty keeping your feet upright. Standing upright on skates doesn't take any particular balancing skill, but controlling where you go and what you do on your skates, that's another issue entirely.
It seems a bit unlikely that you should be able to stand up on a small blade under your foot. It's not that hard to understand, though, if you take a pencil and balance it on your finger. You know that there is a point on the pencil where the weight balances perfectly. You can even balance it on something smaller -- a pin or the point of another pencil.
In Hebrew, the word for balance, shivui mishkal, literally means something like "equivalence of weight", much like the English word "equilibrium" which comes from the Latin words for "equal" and "weight". That mental image helps me lot when trying to understand how any given move actually works.
But what is weight, anyway? It's not how big something is. That's size. It's not how much matter is in something, that's mass. Certainly you learned in school that the mass of a thing isn't the same as its weight. Weight is the force that is exerted on a thing by gravity. In physics that's the mass of the object times the local gravitational acceleration. That's why your weight is different on Earth than it is on the moon. The moon doesn't have as much gravity to pull you down.
So, what we can say, then, is that equilibrium, is really about evening out the forces on the two sides of some specified point. In ice skating, that point is somewhere on your skate blade, but where?
If you take a look at the bottom of your blade you'll see that you don't really skate on 5mm or so of steel. You're really skating on two, much thinner edges. When you go straight you are fully on both edges. When you turn to the right you are putting most, if not all, of your weight on the right-side edges of your blades. It doesn't take a lot to push you onto an edge. Moving your arms, shifting your shoulders or hips, leaning a little, or even changing where your eyes are looking can all change your balance and push you over onto one edge or the other.
But still, whether you are on one edge or two, you are balanced because the forces that are pulling you in one direction are equal to the forces that are pulling you in the other direction, whether that force comes from gravity or muscle power in any given position.
Tomorrow I'll talk about balance in the layback spin. But first, tell me, what are the challenges to balance in your life? How do you equalize the forces that pull at you? 2 comments
It seems a bit unlikely that you should be able to stand up on a small blade under your foot. It's not that hard to understand, though, if you take a pencil and balance it on your finger. You know that there is a point on the pencil where the weight balances perfectly. You can even balance it on something smaller -- a pin or the point of another pencil.
In Hebrew, the word for balance, shivui mishkal, literally means something like "equivalence of weight", much like the English word "equilibrium" which comes from the Latin words for "equal" and "weight". That mental image helps me lot when trying to understand how any given move actually works.
But what is weight, anyway? It's not how big something is. That's size. It's not how much matter is in something, that's mass. Certainly you learned in school that the mass of a thing isn't the same as its weight. Weight is the force that is exerted on a thing by gravity. In physics that's the mass of the object times the local gravitational acceleration. That's why your weight is different on Earth than it is on the moon. The moon doesn't have as much gravity to pull you down.
So, what we can say, then, is that equilibrium, is really about evening out the forces on the two sides of some specified point. In ice skating, that point is somewhere on your skate blade, but where?
If you take a look at the bottom of your blade you'll see that you don't really skate on 5mm or so of steel. You're really skating on two, much thinner edges. When you go straight you are fully on both edges. When you turn to the right you are putting most, if not all, of your weight on the right-side edges of your blades. It doesn't take a lot to push you onto an edge. Moving your arms, shifting your shoulders or hips, leaning a little, or even changing where your eyes are looking can all change your balance and push you over onto one edge or the other.
But still, whether you are on one edge or two, you are balanced because the forces that are pulling you in one direction are equal to the forces that are pulling you in the other direction, whether that force comes from gravity or muscle power in any given position.
Tomorrow I'll talk about balance in the layback spin. But first, tell me, what are the challenges to balance in your life? How do you equalize the forces that pull at you? 2 comments
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