Kori Ade explains how she warms up her skaters for jumping practice.  In this case, she’s going through a series of exercises with Jason Brown to get him ready to work on his triple axel.  Many of these exercises can be simplified for lower level skaters to improve their singles and doubles.

Kori likes to work on a skater’s jump timing through exercises that encourage natural rhythmical movement.  She feels that the rhythm developed early in a jumping session will carry over throughout the day.  By investing the time early in the lesson in these exercises, she feels she is able to be more productive later when working on specific jumps.

She also likes exercises that are “bilaterally symmetrical” meaning they rotate both ways and are even.  In the alternating half-loop exercise, Kori has the skater rotate in both directions and work on checking in both directions.  Kori focuses first on correctness and then on quickness.

Kori uses a spin exercise to help the skater open his hips.  The is dynamic flexibility exercise.  Kori also uses a lot of inside axels to work on shoulder control.  Using the inside axel before a toe loop is a good way to develop the check needed when doing combination jumps.

Here’s the drills in this video:

1. Loose leg, loose leg, loose leg, double toe, double toe
2. Double flip, half loop, double flip
3. Double flip, loose leg, loose leg, double toe
4. Alternating half-loop exercise
5. Pull up forward scratch spin, pull up back scratch spin
6. Repeating inside axels (cross over, cross under, inside axel)
7. Inside axel, double/triple toe
8. Recovery pattern, (double) axel – recover speed and original curve between the jumps

Kori offers some powerful advice near the end of the video.  She says, “Sometimes I feel if you just tell the athlete ‘be aware’ that you don’t have to tell them to make a correction.  Just that little bit of awareness is better than saying ‘make this correction’ because then they’ll overcorrect and that’s all they’ll focus on.  Just be aware.  Put your antenna up for that moment.”

As the lesson proceeds you can see the emphasis on double axel.  That’s because Kori and Jason were preparing for work on his triple axel.

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