Training Choreography for Competition Season

From the Choreographer’s Point of View

Figure Skating has seasons…

There is the spring season when you are learning new tricks, taking breaks, and creating new choreography.

Summer is the most intense and hardest work. As a skater, you are building your foundation for the upcoming competition season as you toil, stretch yourself, and train for long hours.

When the fall comes around, skaters need to shift into competition season. But what is the difference and how do you shift your training?

One of the shifts that I have found to be most effective for skaters is to train artistically.

What?

I know… sounds a little fluffy — but I’ll explain.

In the spring and summer, elements (jumps, spins, and step sequences) can be done for the sheer repetition, tweaking, and for attaining muscle memory. During competition season, elements have to be linked. The new layer of muscle memory must include performance.

When practicing your double Axel, for example, link it to the choreography both before and after the element. Build your ability to perform the element within the sequence that you have in your program.

If you do a beautiful bauer at full speed, cross under, step into a LFO rocker, cross and change of edge into the double Axel in the program, that’s how you want to train it when warming it up and skating it without the music as well.

Adding the next 4 or 5 steps out of the jump is also essential. After landing the Axel, stepping into the next push, extension, and set of steps is how you really train artistically.

Why is this important?

Skating a figure skating program/routine/solo is a demanding task. It requires:

From the outside, this feat seems rather simple. But the amount of focus and training it really takes to bring the magic of all these pieces of performance together is amazing…

It is also one of the reasons figure skating is such fun to watch: you never know quite what will happen during a routine!

Back to training:

If you only ever train elements in isolation and then expect to be able to put it all together in an artistic package under pressure, you may run into some real frustration.

Work the parts of your routine just as you develop your jumps and spins. Create space for the connections to become second nature and for the patterns of the routine to become natural to you. If you don’t have to think about what’s next because the body knows instinctively, you’ll have more space to lean into your routine, the music, and be more present to the difficult elements themselves.

It’s kind of like doing your homework; it’s usually a good idea!

Please feel free to pass this article on to anyone you feel it would benefit!!

This is the best place to get to work with me LIVE. Our Master Class Series incorporates all aspects of Figure Skating through our various offerings and always includes artistry and mindset as part of the Master Class Experience!

Connect with me other places…

Related posts:

For all the stories about AI eventually destroying humanity, we have very few examples of a confrontation between man and machine. One case might be the recents developments of deep learning…