National level coach Debbie Warne-Jacobsen offers insights and drills for improving double loop in combination. She begins by having the students do single loop double loop combinations, which is one of the most common ways of training a double loop in combination. Debbie focuses on pressing up with the non-axis knee at take-off, partly as a way to prevent dropping the free side and partly to ensure a powerful jump with good timing. She also explains what she means by “pushing the [skating hip] up the diagonal” as a way to increase edge pressure, create power with hip drive, and avoid alignment issues.
Next, Debbie has the skaters do single lutz double loop before doing a drill on the hockey circle to work on overall alignment “in-between those two jumps.” Initially this exercise is the classic backward outside h-position gliding drill on a circle, with the free hip up and forward and some internal rotation in the free hip as well (“toe turned in”).
Debbie then adds difficulty to this exercise by asking the skater to go from this “still” position on the circle to creating rotation using only the foot on the ice. Creating edge pressure this way typically requires some knee and ankle bend, blade control (shifting balance point on the blade and blade angle to ice), and some internal hip pressure as well. The skaters struggle with this difficult drill. Debbie mentions using “scallops” as a way to feel this edge pressure, meaning repeated undercuts or one-foot cuts on the back outside edge. After single-double combos, Debbie switches to double-double combos and she encourages working on those combinations the skaters are not comfortable with (which skaters avoid).
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