Coach Amy Brolsma shares a sequence of warm-up drills that she uses as an on-ice warmup with her skaters. The primary goal is to get the skaters moving and fully warmed up, but coaches can also monitor the warm-up to better understand the focus and motivation level of a skater on a given day.
Amy starts the warm-up with 2 fast laps, where she asks the skaters to skate as fast as they can and include rhythmic arm movements. She doesn’t care if the skater goes forward or backward for these laps, as she just wants to get them moving. The idea of the fast laps is to set the tone of full effort for the coming training session. The fast laps also serve as a way for the skater to analyze the ice and the rink for the upcoming training session.
After the fast laps, Amy has her skaters switch to simple edge drills to warm up the edges, find their balance, and get the legs ready for spinning and jumping. She begins with repeated power three turns (basic power threes from USFS Preliminary Moves in the Field) where the skater more fully warms up their outside edges. Next Amy has her skaters run through all the cross strokes, starting with forward outside, backward outside, followed by forward inside and then backward inside. Amy adds a rise and fall to the cross strokes to simulate the knee action of turns and edge pulls.
Next, Amy has her skaters do a series of forward power pulls on one foot for half the rink followed by forward pulls on the other foot. This is then repeated with backward power pulls. Amy notes that more advanced skaters can do walley jumps or walley preparation jumps from the back inside edge pulls.
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