Spin specialist Kim Ryan continues a spin class (see Part 1 here) with more advanced spinners, with the emphasis on the sit to up camel difficult transition (worth a level!). She begins with the basic camel spin, and she shares a wide range of tips in her verbal description. When giving feedback to one of the skaters she focuses on opening the hands (opens the shoulders).
Next Kim describes the sit to up camel while she manipulates the skaters position to show what she wants (although the initial demo is a back sit to up back camel). The first step is to have a very fast forward sit spin, followed by keeping the hands forward and up while rising out of the skating knee. When moving the free foot back from the sit position to the camel, Kim describes the position as a “little pizza wedge” where the free leg bends with the knees apart, and the free foot passes close to the skating leg while remaining bent so that the free foot ends up higher than the skater’s head in the camel. Kim describes this as being like a catch camel where you don’t catch. Once the free leg/foot is above head level the skater can open the arms. The free leg remains bent in the camel as a way to keep the rotational speed up, which looks better after the sit than the slow rotation of a fully stretched camel.
As skaters in the class try this, we can see it is more challenging for skaters who cannot really do a basic camel position with the shoulders relatively flat to the ice. Kim describes the problem with this as pulling the free side “away from the revolutions” and instead she says to “keep that camel going in the direction of the spin.” She wants the skaters to “open level” to help maintain the spin energy. Another error Kim notes is allowing the knees to collapse together or “losing the pizza wedge” which causes a loss of balance.
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