National level coach Jackie Brenner continues sharing insights and drills for double axel development. In Part 1 she offered many general axel insights and focused on single axel attempts, and in Part 2 she finished adding thoughts about the single before focusing on the double. In this video, she offers a few more exercises to help develop axel specific skills.
The first exercise in this video is done at a very slow speed and consists of a forward swizzle on bent knees to a toe pick stop and balance and then rise out of the knee. The purpose of the drill is to begin to master pressing the take-off skate out in front of the skater and hitting the toe pick before straightening the take-off leg. This is done on two feet to simplify it for skaters with little experience with these concepts. Jackie describes it as, “That feeling of hitting your toe pick while you’re still loaded” (i.e. down in the knee) before exploding upward. Jackie then demonstrates a much more accurate and difficult version on one foot that all skaters learning a double should be able to master.
The next exercise is the two foot spin backspin. Jackie says, “You don’t get any additional push (when transitioning from 2 feet to one foot), you just work in the rate of rotation.” She demonstrates how to set up the two foot spin with the arms and shoulders and head slightly to the axis side before “snapping” to the backspin position. Jackie says, “I think that really simulates conversion on double axel, triple sal, and triple toe.”
The final exercise in this video is three forward outside edge pulses (see Part 1) followed by a toe twirl. This exercise requires solid forward outside edge control and the ability to convert the pulses into rotation on the toe pick without swinging anything around (like on a typical spin). Jackie reminds us that rotational energy is created from the edge, and by extension she is implying that a good double axel does not swing around (free arm or leg). This is what coaches mean when they say, “Trust your edge.” Jackie says, “The production of (rotational energy) comes from the ice surface. I feel like the hips turning over that pressure is what creates all of our jumps.”
