Jumps Clinic with Christy Krall

 Ah, yet another reason why I love my club so much! I just got done participating in a jumps clinic at my rink and I am pooped! I learned a lot and came away with some cool new tricks. The best part? It was FREE! Our club provided everything! So, this was originally supposed to be a spin clinic with Janet Champion from Broadmoor but something came up unexpectedly and the club had to pivot. They changed it to a jumps clinic with Christy Krall (also from Broadmoor) but it was only for skaters who have an Axel or higher. So, basically this excluded the adults. When we brought this to their attention, they allowed the adult skaters from the club to participate anyway. Hells yeah!

Off -Ice: The day started with all of us doing an hour of off-ice jumps and spins. We were split into two groups. The Green Group were the adults and younger kids and the Red Group was made up of skaters working on double jumps and above. Josh Farris (from, you guessed it, Broadmoor) took the Green Group though off-ice jump exercises meant to get us into the air with some height. We were each given a Theraband and were told to wrap it around our waist twice. Then we either used our left arm or right arm to extend the theraband out as we jumped. Super hard. After 30 minutes we switched and did off-ice spinning with Christy to get some good positioning as we rotated on the spinner. Also pretty difficult. Basically, Josh's job was to get us up in the air and Christy's job was to get the in-air positioning better and to get us back down for a good landing. I now have some new ways to use my at-home spinner!

On-Ice: We had some lunch and then got on the ice for two 10 minute private lessons, one with Josh and one with Christy. I had Josh first and he asked me what specific jump I'm struggling with the most so, of course, I said the Flip jump! He had me do one and it was gross (as it usually is) and he asked me how long I've been working on it, probably expecting me to say a few months. When I told him it's been 4 years of working on it and not making progress, he seemed surprised but tried to hide it out of politeness, I suppose. He ran me through a lot of the exercises that Christopher usually has me do so, while it helped to get some perspective, I didn't have any "aha!" moments. I had some time to practice a bit before meeting Christy for my 10 minute lesson with her. When I got to her, she asked what I was working on and I said I was struggling with the flip. She had me do a loop jump, then she asked to see the loop with arms overhead (I've never done that before!), and then she asked to see the flip again but with arms overhead. Holy smokes! The flip was easier!!!! Getting the arms overhead stopped me from pre-rotating the jump so it had more flow. It's still not perfect but it feels 100x better (and it's prettier with the arms). 

I had some more time after my lessons to work on both the flip and the loop with my fancy new arms. I took a video of the loop with the arms overhead and look how it FLOATS! :)