Breaking It Down

My figures lesson with Danette on the Chandler Ice Café.  Nice ice and just 4 skaters.

We started my lesson pretty much immediately, without really a warmup period.

Today's lesson:

• Edges -- generally pretty nice.  I'm really happy with the BI edges, the initial push is much better.
• step forward -- after this I asked for exercises to address the continuing issues I am having with the step forward.  Danette had me skate backward down the line, turn and push.  This is actually slightly easier than in the waltz-8 as I'm only turning 180 degrees, whereas on the w-8 since it's on a circle it's more than 180 degrees.  We worked through some issues with trying to get me to bend my knees more and to bring my hips under me.
• hips exercise -- which brought us to working to get my hips under me on any push, and stand straighter -- a nice vertical line from shoulders/hips/feet.  I tend to be a bit forward when I push.  We worked on this quite a bit with only some modest progress, but as Danette said, I didn't get where I am overnight so this will take a while.  This is something I don't have to be in patch blades to work on, so I can work on it whenever I skate.

After my lesson I had about 20 minutes to work on this stuff some more, as well as the exercise she gave me a while ago of gliding on my back edge and keeping turned into the circle.