Stick of doom

 Lesson today and it was more Moves. Can I just say how excited I am to potentially pass this test next week and move on to more exciting things? Because two years of working on the same stuff really gets boring. I dream in 3 Turns now. :(

So yeah, we worked a bit more on the 3 Turns using the end part of the pole harness which was a lot trickier than the theraband (and happened to aggravate an old hand injury). We also spent more time working on the 8 Step to try to make the movements more sharp. If I can remember all of the things Christopher told me to do on this move, I might be able to get a 0 on this. Fingers crossed. 

At the end of our lesson, we had a few minutes to work on anything that was giving me trouble and I told him I was struggling a little with consistency on my opening jump combo in my program (Salchow-loop-toe loop). He took some video and you can really see how I'm over-rotating everything. I need to flatten out the salchow, let the loop happen naturally with the leg crossed in front instead of out to the side, and relax a bit more on the toe loop. I feel like I'm a tornado and nothing feels quite secure. I'm landing the combo more often than not but I'm never confident that things will turn out well like I am with my other jumps. I usually just enter the jump combo and hope for the best but there are so many things that can go wrong. 

Christopher gave me a bit of a pep talk at the end. He told me he can see how steadily I've improved on everything and to relax more about this test. If I treat it like an opportunity to show the judges how hard I've worked instead of like a life or death situation, I'll do well. I need to trust myself. There's a passing test in me somewhere. I need to let it shine through :)