Hi! My name is Hazuki, I'm an inline figure skater and a figure skater,
and today, I want to remake one of my old videos.
Now, if you know how to spin in these already, it's probably gonna be easier to spin in these.
If you don't, that's okay, I can still help you (hopefully)
but if you do have a little bit of experience on ice, it's probably gonna be a little bit easier.
Now, as a quick disclaimer here, I am not an inline coach, I'm not a figure skate coach,
I don't really have any solid qualifications,
I am a self-taught skater of two or three years now.
I skate on Snow White inlines, which is a three wheel inline figure skate boot,
and I've never tried skating in four wheel inlines,
so while these concepts should in theory work, I can't say definitively that they will.
If this is your first time inline skating, please learn how to fall properly.
That sounds weird, I promise you will not regret it.
Learning how to fall properly has probably saved me from,
you know, broken joints and broken bones and crap...
which sounds kind of gruesome when you think about it.
Learning how to fall properly will help you in the long run and I promise that.
Please learn it properly, if you can, from a trusted professional.
This is not something I'm going to teach you because I don't know how
to teach how to fall, and I don't want people getting hurt on account of my
stupidity and hubris.
With that out of the way,
here are a couple things you probably want to know before you start spinning.
First of all, you're going to want to know your basics on how to place a toe stop.
The toe stop gets really important really quickly when you start spinning on inlines,
so you're going to want to have it in the right spot.
I have a video for that up here (or here).
Next, you're going to want really good edge control. Now, I don't mean this in the sense like,
"You need to make sure you have all of them like perfect,"
or whatever, but you should be able to have a fairly decent concept of how to
do outside and inside edges, and how to tell them apart.
I guess my only piece of advice here is bend your knees,
that almost always applies to making your edges better.
I have a video for that up here if you want some simple and easy exercises
to help you improve your edges.
Now, my edges suck in that video, so like,
you know, take everything I say with a grain of salt, right.
But, having clean edges is really important.
Next -- I know I'm throwing a lot at you, I'm sorry --
you also want to make sure you have your three turns, and probably your mohawk.
I don't have a video for mohawks here, but you can just find like any generic figure skating mohawk
tutorial and they tend to work, but make sure you know how to do basic turns on your inlines,
because otherwise, you will not be able to exit or enter your spin.
Also, the scratch spin entrance is kind of reliant on the fact that you know how to do
three turns on your spinning leg.
Now, I know that that sounds like a lot to learn especially if you're just beginning.
If you work on it consistently, you'll be able to get it eventually, but these are basic
fundamentals of just normal inline skating, inline figure skating, and figure skating.
These are just good things to know if you're going to be skating on wheels,
so I recommend you check those out if you haven't already.
Now, to the actual like fun part :)
When you want to learn how to spin on inlines you want to make sure that you
are learning to progress from easier things to harder things.
So first, we're going to start with a two foot spin.
Another disclaimer here, my forward scratch
spin is on my left leg, I think that's counterclockwise spinning? Um... yeah,
that's counterclockwise spinning.
If you are a clockwise spinner, if you do your forward scratch spin on your right leg,
you're gonna want to flip everything I say.
I'm so sorry, to be fair, people who spin counterclockwise and on their left,
I believe is like, the dominant?
It's kind of like the being the righty of spinning in figure skates? So everything
I'm saying is applying to a forward scratch spin on your left foot.
So first, you want to do your two-foot spin.
The way to progress into your two-foot spin
is by first learning how to lift the heel of your left foot and the toe of your right foot.
It sounds kind of complicated sometimes, it's not, I promise, and just learn how to pop that.
Go onto it for a second, and then come back down.
Once you get comfortable just popping the heel and the toe,
you are going to want to try to do a quarter turn.
Now, this is when you're gonna start turning, and it's a little bit scary, if you have a railing or
like a chair or a wall or like a person that you can hang onto, it'll make it infinitely easier.
Of course, I practiced this in my bedroom, I had my bed to fall onto and that was a huge help.
Not really recommending that, but it is nice to have something to like brace yourself up against.
So again, lifting your left heel and your right toe try to do a quarter spin to your left,
keep doing quarter turns until you get comfy doing quarter turns and then move on to half turns.
From half turns, you can move on to either full turns or,
if you're not really feeling up to it, then three quarter turns.
Take your time learning these,
it's entirely dependent on how comfortable you feel in your skates at this moment.
Take a deep breath, it's not a competition, just take your
time to learn these fundamentals because it'll help you in the long run, I promise.
Now, once you can do a single revolution on both your feet,
you can start progressing into doing multiple turns.
This is where you kind of, like, start feeling like that rush and like the hair whipping around
and like it's it's the feeling of actually like kind of being able to learn how to do spins again.
This is when it starts getting a little bit more fun.
So, now you've got your two foot spin.
This is when it starts getting a little bit easier because now you're used to spinning.
Here's the scary part, you're going to want to start lifting your right leg into a one foot spin.
I wouldn't really recommend doing a two foot spin and then lifting your leg, just because
you're going to have your weight centered and then moving that to the side is gonna make you fall.
So after getting your two foot spin, the first step in getting your one foot spin
is to start from a pivot entrance.
Now, different regions and different countries
and different people call it different things, you might call it like a pump,
you might call it a push, you might call it a pivot, there's a lot of different names.
Basically, you're going to want to anchor your spinning foot and
push or pivot or pull or whatever you call it into doing a one foot spin.
The first little bit that you're trying this, it's not gonna look pretty, I'm gonna- I'm gonna
say this upright, it's not gonna look pretty, but trust yourself, it's- it'll look good eventually.
This is kind of more about getting you used to spinning on one foot.
Now, the biggest problem people make here is putting too much weight onto your toe stop.
Now, your toe stop is this little rubber thing we got here, you can tell that mine
is really worn down and it's because I do a lot of spins, and while you are only leaning
on your toe stop and your first wheel when you are spinning, you're going to want to
try to shift as much of your weight over the wheel as opposed to the toe stop as possible.
Now, you're going to have to use your toe stop anyways because, like, balance?
Because you're going to topple over otherwise, you can't just spin on one wheel,
you want to touch the toe stop as little as possible.
Again it's like- it wears down for a reason,
you're still going to have a fair bit of weight on your toe stop but you're not,
like, you're not spinning on your toe, right, you're spinning on the wheel.
In theory.
Now, if you're a figure skater that already learned how to do a single foot spin,
you might want to take your free leg and cross it over your skating leg.
Don't do that yet.
The thing about inline spins is that they're very-
I wouldn't call it fragile, but their balance is hard to pinpoint.
Once you fall out of the sweet spot, it- it's- it just gets worse, so wrapping your leg around while
you're still kind of pivoting and learning how to spin on your one foot is not gonna bode well.
It's gonna make it a lot harder to learn the spin for you, so just hold off on that,
just hold your leg off to the side like a flamingo does (?)
and don't cross over your leg yet.
There will be tips and stuff at the end of this video,
but right now, we're just doing progressions.
After you learn the pivot entrance to a spin and you feel comfortable doing that and you feel like
you're actually getting a little bit of speed and a little bit of, like, actual spin happening,
you're going to want to switch over into doing an actual entrance to your spins.
Now, if you're a figure skater you might have the instinct (again, this depends on
like the club and your coach and how you've learned it), you might have the instinct
to do crossovers into your right inside edge, and then step into your left spin.
Don't do that on inlines. I mean you can, and it's possible, but just that shift of momentum is
not as ideal on inlines as it is on ice.
A better way of entering these spins is if you actually hold an outside back edge with your
right foot or your free foot, which will draw kind of a three pattern with your two feet.
That way, when you do swing your leg and wrap your leg around your skating foot,
it tends to shift the momentum and your center of gravity a little bit smoother?
And it gives you a little bit more control over the power that you're pushing into the spin.
Unlike ice spins, you're going to need to push into the spin, if that makes any sense.
A lot of the times when you're spinning on ice,
the amount of effort it takes to do a fast clean spin is a lot less than on inlines.
As an asterisk here, when you go back on ice if you're a figure skater, be careful of that.
I made a habit of pushing into my spins, and then when I got back onto ice,
I kept falling because I'd like bend my knees too much and I push way too far into the spin,
and then I just have these crazy uncontrollable spins everywhere.
It was really bad.
It fixes itself eventually, it's not something to be worried about, just keep that in your mind.
The amount of force that your free leg puts into the spin is different across ice and inline.
So again, with a right back outside edge, push it into your spin.
For those who haven't figure skated before, the way you want to think about it is you're on your
right foot you do a curb here, you switch off to your left foot doing a semi-circle,
you do a three turn, and then you start spinning.
That's essentially the basics of how to do an inline figure skate spin.
Now if you are a figure skater, you'll realize, hey this is actually kind of similar.
Yes, but no?
When you are spinning on ice, you're going to be putting your weight kind of here-ish.
You don't do that with inlines.
You actually shift your weight closer to the toe on inlines.
If you were to spin on like the ballish of your foot,
you'd kind of be like hovering between the toe stop and the second wheel and just kind
of teetering on your front wheel and that's not how you spin on inlines.
If you use that same technique on ice, it'd feel like you were digging your toe pick into the ice.
Trust me, you're just going to want to shift your weight closer to your toe.
Another thing that really helped is to
imagine leaning kind of closer onto the inside of your foot.
Again, for figure skaters, this kind of sounds like a no-no,
you want to have like your weight fairly evenly on the ball of your foot,
but if you're spinning on inlines, you want to shift it closer to the inside of your foot.
When you spin on figure skates, you kind of center your spin and you
have like a single point at which you're spinning.
When you're spinning on inlines, um, it's not that.
When you're spinning on inlines, you're going to travel.
Just the mechanics of how you spin is different, so you tend to travel a lot more,
and you tend to spin around a point rather than spinning on the point.
Take that as you will, I guess?
Another thing that really helps, which sounds a little bit weird, is to bend your spinning foot.
I'm not sure about other people, but I have a really bad tendency to lock my left leg
into being like super straight after the entry of my spin.
So I would- I would enter it with my legs slightly bent, and then I kind of like,
turn into like a freaking vegetable stock and like just straighten up right.
You don't want to do that.
Bending your spinning foot throughout the spin, and then slowly extending it, rather
than snapping into it after your entry, actually really helps keep the stability of your spin.
When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.
If you're like if you have your bent knee, then you're gonna have a lot
more control over like where your weight is on your foot and across the blade.
It almost helps to exaggerate how bent you are, which sounds weird,
but if you bend it slightly more than you would normally, it does seem to help and then you don't
even have to like fully extend it at the end of your spin, just like, keep it slightly bent.
You do have a lot more control over where your weight is,
and that seems to help a lot with spins.
Now this is a little bit more maintenance related,
when you're spinning, it wears down your wheels really quickly.
If you don't notice, you can get really tiny front wheels.
Uh, yeah, you can't see it but my front wheel right now is actually super duper worn and I
do need to rotate these after I finish filming.
The front wheel of your spinning leg is going to
wear down really quickly, and the inside is going to wear down a lot faster than the
outside, so you want to make sure that you're flipping those wheels as well.
Keep an eye out for how quickly they're wearing down
because I promise you, they will wear down faster than you think.
I haven't talked about it too much here, but make sure that you're not like hunching forwards.
I know that personally I have a tendency to do that, just like sitting down,
or talking to a camera, or skating, but make sure that you you have your shoulders back,
your head nice and level, your arms out, and make sure that you are maintaining really good posture,
because again, if you hunch over your spins are gonna be crap :)
Don't underestimate how effective and helpful your arms are when you're spinning.
Just keep your the back of your mind on it, just to make sure that you're not like slouching over.
Now, sit spins and camel spins...
These are tough.
Especially if you're used to doing them on figure skates, like it's
it's weird putting your weight over your toe.
It's really weird.
I personally had a lot of issues with like balancing my camel and my sit spin
over my toe, it just feels wrong and it feels like it's really unstable.
Like I said earlier [lol that's a lie, I completely forgot to mention it] make
sure you're wearing protective gear
like helmet, elbow guards, wrist guards, knee guards, the works.
When you're starting out your camel spin especially, you're gonna fall.
I'm sorry to say this, but you're gonna fall.
Make sure that you are protected and you're prepared.
A little tip for sit spins, I guess?
If you swing your leg into your sit spin, you're kind of taught
a lot of the time especially when you're starting out in a sit spin,
to do an upright spin, and then slowly go into a sit-spin position, don't do that.
Because you're going to lose your speed and you're going to lose your center.
If you just kind of swing your leg into the sit spin position through the spin,
that tends to really help both stabilize it and give it a lot of momentum and speed,
which helps with, you know, keeping it spinning for longer and a lot better.
I hate to say it but this isn't something you can learn in an afternoon.
Especially without figure skating experience, uh this took me six months?
Six months to learn properly? I don't know how accurate that is.
It should be mentioned that I was flipping between inline and ice a fair bit as well,
back when like, ice was a thing that was available, often...
remember those days?
The whole, "Rome wasn't built in a day," it's not something you can just get in an afternoon,
especially if you don't have experience, but it is something that is possible.
You can do it, it'll just take time and effort. Have a good playlist on standby, I guess?
Be patient, figure skating and especially inline skating,
if anything, have taught me how to be a patient person,
and how to be resilient because, oh boy, the number of times i have failed or fallen...
It's a lot, it's been a lot.
I feel like that's a really discouraging note to leave this on.
It's possible, you know, I'm self-taught.
I did technically take learn to skate lessons, didn't technically finish them because the season
ended before I could and I missed about a third of my lessons, but that's the story for another time.
It is possible to learn without having a coach.
Again, I don't recommend it if you can help it.
Whether it be a financial situation, a social situation like, just like a geographical – not
having any coaches or rinks near you – type of situation, like I know a lot of people,
it's really hard to get a coach, but yes, if you can help it, get a coach.
If you can't, it's still possible to learn stuff, just be extra careful.
As I often say, please be careful about parasocial relationships,
take everything I say with a grain of salt, all that fun stuff.
It's possible, you can do it, you've got this! :)
Let me know of anything I've missed, any questions or comments you have down below,
thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you guys next time!