Ice Skating Tips For Beginners: Salchow – Stomach Ache Drill (Michelle Leigh)

Olympic coach Michelle Leigh shares a great exercise for improving the salchow. She reinforces what she covered in her first salchow video while introducing a “stomach ache” drill to help her students keep their shoulders in line. This awareness exercise helps the students not only focus on their shoulder placement, but head and arm movement as well. This leads to greater control, alignment, and engagement of the core.

Michelle’s skater demonstrates 2 different salchow entrances using the “stomach ache” drill. At the end of the video, Michelle and her skater are working on a more advanced entrance, using the same principles of keeping the shoulders in line with the curve. Notice a couple extra things in this short clip. 1. Michelle often demonstrates the shoulder and head movement with the shoulders strongly leading the hips. But also notice in Michelle’s walk through at 0:35 that in practice the shoulders are not ahead of the hips. Also, in all of the demonstrations her skater’s shoulders never lead the hips. Michelle often demonstrates the shoulders leading as a way to show shoulder and head movement into the jump without moving her lower body. 2. Michelle always focuses on head position on landing. She wants the head to look to the right (toward landing side) to stop the head rotation. This results in better landing alignment, better rotational checking of the landing, and more skater awareness during the critical moments of landing.

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