Figure Skating Balance: Improve Your Jumps (Sheila Thelen)

Sheila Thelen offers one of the best and simplest tricks ever for preventing pre-rotation of the head on jumps.  Head pre-rotation is one of the most common major errors in jumping.  It’s a problem for many reasons.

1. It causes loss of alignment on the jump entry.
2. It causes pre-rotation of the shoulders which makes alignment problems even worse.
3. It causes loss of skater body awareness.
4. It takes the skater much longer to get back to the rotational side in the air.

Ultimately these issues can create jumps that lack height, have poor air positions and rotational axes, and bad landings.  Proper alignment allows the skater to lift up properly into the jump, increasing the odds of the skater hitting a proper air position and getting full jump rotation.  Proper alignment also allows the skater to hit an efficient air position faster, which also increases the odds of full rotation and a controlled landing.

If you carefully watch a televised figure skating event (i.e. record and watch in slow motion), you’ll notice that elite skaters only have one of two head variations.  The first is the head remaining fixed with respect to the shoulders, usually in a central or neutral position, so that as the skater’s shoulders rotate, the head rotates with it.  The second variation is the head remaining fixed with respect to the rink, meaning the head actually turns against the rotation of the shoulders on the jump entry.  Both of these methods are acceptable and provide good results.

Virtually no elite skaters pre-rotate their head on jump entrances. However, a huge majority of lower level skaters pre-rotate their heads prior to their jumps.  This habit must be trained out of our skaters as early as possible.  As Olympic coach Audrey Weisiger says, “When you’re teaching skaters their very first single salchows, you’re also teaching them their triples!”  All coaches need to take head position seriously at the very earliest stages of skating.

Note Michelle Leigh’s jump videos elsewhere on this website to see how another Olympic coach addresses proper head usage right from the beginning. If you look around iCoachSkating.com, you’ll notice that head movement and position on jump entrances is an important theme.  The simple fact that elite skaters essentially never have head issues should be enough evidence that this topic is incredibly important.  Fixing head-related issues is incredibly difficult once a skater already has an ingrained bad habit.  Sheila offers a simple and free method to break this habit that she calls the “bite the coat” or “bite the jacket” method.  And that makes this video from Sheila, one of the very best on this website. Thank you Sheila!!!  Please leave Sheila a comment.

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