Aug. 31, 2023

The Ride To The Rink - Enhancing Skating Skills at Home

Show Notes
Transcript

What if there was a tool that could help you enhance your ice skating skills right in the comfort of your home? Imagine being able to mirror almost everything you do on the ice at any hour of the day. This episode offers just that - a deep dive into the benefits of using a slide board, featuring insights from power skating coaches like Kurt Nichols. Learn how a slide board can help you master balance, strength, cadacity, agility, and much more. This isn't just about repetition - it's about refining your stride formation, body positioning, and points of contact.

Along with the physical benefits of the slide board, we also discuss how it can be used to improve your stick handling, shooting, and body positioning. These insights come straight from our summer conversations with premier power skating coaches who highlighted how off-ice practice translates to on-ice success. This isn't just a training tool, it's an opportunity to get creative, experiment and have fun with your routine. It's time to take control of your training, invest in a slide board and elevate your game to the next level. Listen in, and get ready to transform your ice skating journey.

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So I'd like to really focus more on today's ride to the rink, basically on what you can do to enhance your skating at home.

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And one of the things that I found working with a couple of power skating coaches and it's quite specifically this this summer with guys like Kurt Nichols and watching you know what they do on the ice is just trying to find a way to get more of those reps in.

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And the best way I found to get those reps in is to go out by yourself a slide board and then try to follow a program, whether it's a formal program by one of the premier power skating coaches around or just find your own programming on YouTube or anything like that and what you can do is you can take those reps that you're trying to build on strength, balance, cadence, agility, all those kind of things and then you can start building on all that you can do Mohawks you can do forward to backward pivots, you can do, anything you can do on the ice you can do on a slide board to enhance your stride, your strength and your balance.

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So one of the things I would focus on, if you're a player and you're looking for that extra edge and you're looking for an opportunity to go home and train off the ice, specifically thinking about what your skating coaches are doing for you on the ice.

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It's all about building reps and when you can build those extra reps, it's just like getting shooting practice at home.

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If you could add in cadence and you can add in your stride formation and you can add in where your body is and your body weight is on a slide board, it is going to directly translate to your on ice success.

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One of the really cool things is you can start to be really creative on holding your edge and holding your body weight and focusing on all those points of contact right your toes, your knees, your hips.

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You know where your ankle flexion is and really fine tune it, which is really hard to do on the ice.

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Sometimes, when we go to these power skating classes or skating classes, we don't have the time to pinpoint exactly where your feet are and where your body weight is.

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This way, we get to do this in a way at home, in almost slow motion and at your own controlled pace and, more importantly, it allows you to do it and have fun at all hours of the day.

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So you could come home from school.

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You could do 20 minutes of power slide workouts.

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You could get home from practice, have a little bit of extra time.

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Instead of maybe jump on the bike, you can get on the slide board and work on that for a little while.

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So it's really so many different aspects of what you can do Additionally, if you don't have skating tiles, you can do stick handling and shooting and body positioning off of the slide board too.

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Throw the booties on it allows you to have that mimicking rotation of where your feet are going to be and the cadence of moving back and forth and the weight distribution, and ultimately you get a stick handling ball, tennis ball, hockey puck with another board you know, a green biscuit, anything like that.

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It's going to allow you to have as much touches on the puck at your own time, at your own pace.

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Nobody's watching you.

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So if you want to try different things and try doing stuff that might be a little creative, which you wouldn't have time in practice or maybe you'd get yelled at in practice, this is the time you can do that, but for sure, one of the great opportunities for you as a player.

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Invest in a slide board, invest in the opportunity to do some workouts at home.

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Invest in giving yourself that 20 or 30 minutes a day, it doesn't matter what type of brand you go with.

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Anything that allows you to have full extension and anything that allows you to have that slide.

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And that glide is really going to give you the opportunity to up your game and you will see direct results on the ice once you get into a regular routine with the slide board.

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I hope that helps and I hope you get to try it.