Spinning Like A Dervish

I had my 4th lesson with Anna today at coffee club. When we started Anna had a somewhat devilish smile on her face and told me she wanted to start by working on pivots and spins. I had done these with Allison in group, so I showed her my FI pivot. She thought it was not bad for a start, we worked a bit on it. The keys seem to be to really get one's weight over the pivot foot, and also to feel the left shoulder pushing back and look over one's left shoulder. From there we went to the two-foot spin and worked on getting a good pump to start, keeping straight up, and quickly bringing the arms in. In the process of doing this I reeled off the best two-foot spin I've ever done, probably 4 or even more revolutions. Of course we couldn't leave it at that, but went on to work on picking up the right foot. Not too much success with that -- I suspect I am not getting my weight over my left skate correctly (probably dropping the right hip, too) so that when I pick up my foot I'm off balance. After working on this for 10 minutes or so I definitely started to get dizzy!

We looked at forward crossovers for a bit. The emphasis today was on getting the shoulders turned into the circle without really turning the hips. There's a little bit of improvement.

We went next to look at stroking again and edging. Emphasis on stroking is to really push with the heels -- produces more power and stays away from toe-scratching. Anna showed me a basic power pull ("power change of edge"). I worked on these for a bit but I can't really do them, even with a really big curve/edge.

We finished by looking at backward edges and backward crossovers. My backward 1/2 swizzle pumps on a circle look pretty decent but I'm still blocked on bringing my foot over, and Anna's not convinced I'm getting my feet separated enough.

For homework, Anna wants me to work on the spin, especially improving my balance so that I can pick up my right foot. Also, to help on my back crossovers, she wants me to try doing a sort of "moonwalk" either backward or forward, to get more bend in the knees/ankles and separate the feet forward-backward.

After my lesson I had about a half-hour to skate, so I mostly worked on stroking forward and backward and just kind of relaxing. My lesson today was pretty tiring (especially all the spinning) so I wasn't in the mood to do anything really complicated or strenuous.