World and Olympic coach Tom Zakrajsek continues his presentation of some on-ice exercises he uses with his skaters as a warm-up for jumping. In Part 1 he introduced the concept and shared exercises such as “heel clicks,” “edge ups,” and “air brackets.” In Part 2 he shared the “one rotation jump on the diagonal” and some additional insights. In this video Tom explains the Zhou Jump warm up exercise, named in honor of Tom’s student Vincent Zhou who is an Olympic and World medalist (landed first quad lutz in Olympic competition in 2018).
The purpose of the Zhou jump is to learn to fire the entire posterior chain and produce maximum effort on jump take-offs. Tom explains that when done properly this is not a salchow but instead lifts off of both feet on inside edges from a backward swizzle. It starts with the shoulders fully twisted to the axis side and the arms extended. As the skater jumps the skater’s axis side comes around to the non-axis side and as soon as that happens the non-axis leg activates to an h-position and then into a standard jump landing. Tom explains that this exercise “takes a while to develop” as it is not natural for younger skaters. The three demonstrators in the video are at “different levels of coordination and understanding” of the drill. Tom says, “I feel these exercises are really important for them to do with intention and purpose at the start of every session so that when they come to me for a lesson I know they’re activated and ready.”
To help his younger skaters learn the concept, he slows the speed down to focus on the jumping movement, especially on the concept of getting full extension through the jump take-off. Tom wants a fairly wide swizzle on nearly straight legs, noting that a deeper knee bend usually turns the exercise into a salchow. He also explains that this jump comes off the ball of the foot without dragging the toe picks, and “this exercise should not be noisy.”
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