Back To Basics

My figures lesson with new coach Danette, on the Chandler Ice Café.  I just had a short time to warmup so I scribed some circles and did forward edges.  Nice to see Katy K. at this session!

Today's lesson:

• back push-off/hold  -- this is the exercise Danette gave me a couple of weeks ago.  Back push off as for a BO edge, hold the edge/flat along the boards and hold arms out along the boards.  The emphasis for this exercise is getting the twist in the upper body and holding the free foot in front; and getting the weight on the middle of the blade.  The RB edge is pretty easy, the LB is a lot harder as I don't normally push like that.
• back edges -- we briefly ran through the BO and BI edges.  The BO edges are pretty nice, BI not bad.
• BI push -- we spent some time working on the BI edge pushoff.  Danette drew an L on the ice and had me actually line my feet up along the L to get them closer together.  This was a bit unnerving at first but it improved after a while.

After our lesson I had about 20 minutes to work on other stuff, so I did FO8, FI8, and a waltz-8, then some more work on the exercises.

I had told Danette that I wanted to start off by working on fixing some of my basics, and in particular I mentioned 3s and the back mohawk/step forward.  I'm hopeful that if I can improve these basics that I will finally be able to make the progress I want.