Figure skating strength and conditioning expert Elizabeth Mullins continues her presentation on how she uses BlazePods with her athletes to challenge eye-hand coordination. BlazePod is a training tool designed to improve hand-eye coordination through interactive drills that combine physical and cognitive challenges. It uses reactive lights to create engaging exercises that enhance athletes’ reaction times and decision-making skills during sports. In Part 1 she introduced the Pods and a simple exercise/game, and also discussed the flow state and ease of letting go of mistakes.
In this video, the setup has 4 BlazePods on a box and uses distracting colors to challenge the athlete, while the athlete focuses on the color purple. The athlete is allowed to use 2 hands and can hit the Pods as fast as she can. Elizabeth goes over the data and scoring after the exercise, as most athletes will focus on how well they did and want to improve.
Here the skater asks for a different focus color (yellow) and they run the game again, and her scores and ranking improve. They run the game one final time to see if the skater can rank in the top 10 but the pressure results in some frantic hits and a lower overall score. Elizabeth suggests starting slower to build a rhythm and then increase speed. She has the skater repeat the phrase, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast” as a way to ingrain the mindset for the training principles that Elizabeth employs.
