World and Olympic coach Tom Zakrajsek shares some on-ice exercises he uses with his skaters as a warm-up for jumping. This entire warm-up takes roughly 10 minutes, and a major goal is to activate the skaters’ posterior chain which is critical for good jumping.
Tom begins with an ankle and calf activation exercise that has the skater gliding forward down the ice on one foot while bending quickly up and down, alternating feet after a few bends. This is also done while gliding backward. Having the hands on the hips helps awareness. Toms says this is a “very simple exercise but it allows them to connect their mind to their bodies, and their midline to their center.”
The next exercise is called “heel clicks” which are basically backward swizzle hops with tapping the feet together in the air. Tom wants the boots to connect but does not want to hear the blades touch. The goal is to activate the posterior chain, and the skater should jump as high as possible. Tom has the skaters do single taps down one side of the rink and double taps down the other side. When done correctly the skater takes off from a clean edge and not the toe pick, and the skater does not point the toes in the air but rather flexes the toe to ensure the legs fully straighten. The skater should also not land on the toe picks. Tom describes it as, “Edge pressure, up.” He continues, “When a skater is preparing for a jump I like them to think from the top down, and when they actually take off I like them to think from the ice up.” He explains in detail what he means by this.
The next exercise Tom calls “edge ups” but most people know it as “power pull hops.” The drill consists of alternating back power pulls down the ice, where the skater hops directly from the point on each lobe with the greatest edge pressure and lands back on the same skate for the next lobe. This exercise can be done either with deep lobes or relatively shallow lobes. Shallow knee bend warms up and improves quickness and deeper knee bend improves power and strength (and simulates the increased knee bend at critical moments on edge jumps).
The final exercise in this video is “air brackets” which is helpful to warm up “the pepper grinder moment” that is so important in good jumping. To do this exercise the skater glides backward on an inside edge with the free foot behind (in Coupé), jumps up from the edge pressure and does a twist and twist back or a “bracket” in the air, landing backward on the same skate. The skater can then step or hop to the other skate on the inside edge and repeat the exercise on the other foot. Tom has lower level skaters do this on the hockey lines, while more advanced skaters can do it down the full length of the ice. The key is to get the shoulders to work in opposition to the foot in the “pepper grinder moment.”
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