Jumps & Spins!

Today's lesson was at 7 a.m. The rink's morning freestyle schedule changed this week back to "normal" -- 5:30 - 8 a.m., ice cut, 8:15 - 9:15. There's been some talk about changes for Tuesday morning and also starting at 5 instead but that's the way it stands right now.

Today's lesson:

• waltz jump -- we mostly worked on bringing the hands back more on the step forward and bringing them up and together on the jump. Good progress on the first but I'm tending to just spread them straight out on the jump. Needs some work.
• half flip -- main correction was to have a better posture on the rideout... again the "buns of steel" posture (:-)) as I think of it.
• toe loop -- I'm still toe-waltzing these pretty badly. Sonya observed that part of the reason I'm not drawing together completely is that I get up on my toepick on the R foot so I can't really finish drawing it in -- so we worked on getting my weight more in the middle of the blade. Not much progress though. We also worked on bringing the left hand/arm straight in instead of helicoptering it around, and made some progress on this.
• two-foot spin -- just a couple. Not too bad, but the first one I had my R shoulder down which didn't help, so we fixed that.
• one-foot spin -- as usual I love my windup for this... but not much else. I did manage a pretty good 2-rev spin (for once this happened when Sonya is present!) but the rest not so great. We worked on being a little more relaxed on the step in. Sonya also mentioned that sometimes I don't really wait to hook the spin, I just step forward and try to force the spin... again, patience and not rushing is the fix. Still having a lot of trouble really getting over the L side on these.