"As a man thinketh, so is he"
As a learning skater I have so often found myself "fighting" and struggling for control, for balance. It seems to me that a comparison can be made to learning a second language. If walking, running, jumping is our native tongue physically speaking, then figure skating might be thought of a trying to learn a second language, with different rules of grammar, and different alphabets. Anyone who has tried learning a second language as an adult knows how difficult it can be to become "natural" and effortless in reading, writing, and speaking.
I feel that this "unnaturalness" I feel on the ice is like that. If I were to spend 12 hours a day on the ice in skates for the better part of 40 years I have no doubt it would be as natural to me as normal movement on land. As a child my whole control system for movement developed in shoes on dry land, the somewhat flexible apparatus of the nervous system was sort of synchronised to operate in that environment. That is why I slip and fall when I hit a patch of ice...
Jumping forward to the present, there seems to be a mental obstacle moreso than a physical one in terms of learning this new language. I feel as if it is not my physical body that is the limiting factor so much as it is a mental refusal to shift paradigms and fully embrace the body grammar of skating on ice. To give an example: In running around a corner we meet resistance at each step as our feet strike the earth, yet our momentum carries us forward over our anchored foot and we naturally swing the other leg ahead to catch ourselves and repeat the movement on the opposite foot. This is combined with a lean of the body in the direction of the turn. In skating there is virtually no resistance, it is very slight, to our forward movement. The greater the lean the greater the resistance of the edge as the blade cuts deeper into the ice. So to accomplish a crossover, the swinging of the leg and the transfer of weight effectively we must have this resistance, and the only way we can do this is to lean into the turn. It is this leaning away from one's vertical axis, the reorienting of the body in relation to the visible horizon, that causes me to become overly tense and stiff. In actual fact to execute the movement well we must un-tense and in a word "soften" all through the body to be able to adapt to this new orientation of axis. To me this is the challenge, to remain in a state of body-equilibrium or balance and allow the physical forces, so natural to us on land, to re-program our nervous system along multilingual lines. How is this to be done?
When I'm out skating, let's say doing back crossovers around a circle, the natural tendency is to emphasise the muscular effort required to execute the element. Arm and shoulder position is fixed, hands palms down, neck and head turned into the direction of travel, knees bent, etc etc. It is a whole lot of "effort" being wasted on an artificial rigidity of posture that looks and feels rather wooden and unnatural. The answer to this, some would suggest, is just ample repetition, do crossovers for 8 hours a day until you get it
Yet I wonder if there is a better way? If we take my theory that the single greatest obstacle for a beginning skater is mental, then would there be a technique we could apply, a mental process, we could use to re-program the control center from the core, rather than working from the outside in? It is like trying to translate land body mechanics into ice body mechanics and coming out with gibberish. We must somehow find a way to operate entirely in ice language. If we try to converse with each other in 2 languages we get chaos. Only when we speak the same language is the unity and understanding and real communication. And in the end all of the arts are about communication, and skating or dance is really an art when you boil it down. So where does this leave me? Well, if we have the mind control center giving the body a bunch of land-language commands on the ice, it is going to be an impossible situation: like an English tourist trying to order lunch in swahili.... you might get a tuna sandwich on whole wheat or you might get pickled goat kidneys. The language gap is insurmountable.
I think the first step for any skater has to be acquiring an understading of the body grammar of ice language. It is so different than land language, you almost have to toss everything you think you know and start from zero. The essence of movement in skating is glide, fluidity, and an almost complete lack of the stop-start friction-momentum tick-tock resistance that comes to us so naturally on land. The key to operating in this new paradigm with ease and grace seems to be abandoning the expectations we have, the dynamics to which we are accustomed on land, and use this potentially endless lack of resistance in the same way we use high resistance on land. The interruption of momentum on the ice is like stuttering is to speech, it is jerky, unattractive and hard to understand. Flow is allowing the body to un-tense, and to become naturalised in this new dynamic.
Of course to just relax the muscles would be to collapse on the ice
The challenge seems to be to maintain muscle control and strength necessary to movement while removing debilitating tension which is just wasted energy. The energy wasted on being overly tense in our body seems to indicate a need to isolate, to identify, and map out which areas of our body are useless feeders. Then to mentally relax them. It takes a lot of effort to isolate, for me anyhow, to allow my shoulders to be loose and free yet to support my whole weight multiplied numerous times over on one foot while gliding around a corner. I really have to think about it, like trying to compose a sentence in Latin even when I know what I want to say or at least the idea I wish to convey...it takes thought to arrange the verb, noun, object etc. graceful skating, like graceful elegant speech is largely a mental process in preparation and execution. Good pronunciation and inflection, vocal shading etc, is like execution of elements, choreography, flow, etc in that it is what other people see, the final picture for public consumption. It is what goes on within us beforehand that shapes these external components.
I think that visualisation, imagining ourselves executing a smooth crossover, or turn, or spin, or jump, is a useful tool, but in the end it nothing more than our imagination. if we lack the language to express our thoughts it will be cryptic and unintelligible to others. The mental aspect of learning to skate is I think a far more important aspect than has hitherto been appreciated. Of course the on-ice practice, lessons, repetition, drills, are essential, but I think a really great method of coaching would involve some totally off ice, in a chair looking at the blackboard, class time. The "Philosophy of Flow 101"