Jump Development Exercises Pt 3 – Flow and Landing Drill (Chris Conte)

Chris Conte continues with Part 3 of a multi-part series on jump development exercises. The series focuses on a set of warm-up exercises with important drills embedded in them. The purpose of each drill is to improve the skills needed for double and triple jumps. Most of these drills are general and apply to all multi-rotation jumps and are not focused on specific-jump take-off methods or technique. In Part 1, Chris introduced the “snizzle” which is a combination of “snap drill” and “twizzle.” In Part 2, he shows some basic warm-up drills including the backward jump snizzle.

In this video Chris shares two exercises. This first is a a stroking exercise intended to warm up the skater and build flow while incorporating arms and head movements. Chris calls this exercise “one arm two arm” because he wants the skater to focus not only on flow across the ice but on artistic arm movements as well. He breaks the exercise down in detail, including the backward inside edge to forward outside edge step/push.

Chris calls the second drill the “6 count drill” and it’s intended to improve landings (and also axel take-offs). He explains what happens on each count. Notice the body positions and alignment in these drills. It they are not done precisely, the drill is essentially worthless. The drill consists of doing a forward push onto an outside edge followed by a crossover and a mohawk with a push back into the landing position. Again, that description is completely inadequate as the value in the drill is based on body positions and isolation of body movement. At the end of the video, Chris also covers head position and movement for this drill in detail.

As he describes, Chris likes to have his better skaters demonstrate his drills to his younger/newer skaters (he mistakenly says he uses “younger” skaters to demonstrate but he means those skaters that have more experience doing the drills proficiently). The demonstrator gets more practice this way and the younger skater sees what the drill looks like when performed by a peer.