Edged out#

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 13:03:58 +0000

What's so great about the outside edge anyway?, I asked yesterday. In the interests of forestalling replies pointing out the bleeding obvious, let me be a little more precise.

The outside edge is important. If you're skating on an outside edge with shinbones and frames aligned, then unless you have some quite extraordinary body geometry, your centre of gravity is either directly over your skate or completely outside the area covered by your skates. Until a skater is confident doing this he'll not be able to skate well on one foot - which means no effective push and no parallel or crossover turns. So the effort that instructors make to get people happy with their outside edges is well-founded, insofar as it's actually about getting them to be happy (a) skating on one leg, (b) balancing their gravitational and centrifugal[1] forces to go around corners quickly. So, that's what's so great about an outside edge.

But how did we get from there to "Even when you're just standing around talking to someone you should be working your outside edges instead of standing in a pronated position"[2]? Wish I knew. Everything I have previously said about setdown is [[here => mountain a la maison]], which saves me ranting about it again and allows me to get straight on with the incidental part of this blog entry: as follows.

"Pronating" is not just another word for "skating on inside edges". Pronation is the inward (medial) roll of the foot, and it's a normal part of walking which everyone does. See e.g http://www.footmaxx.com/clinicians/principles.htm. Overpronation of the foot is one possible reason that someone might be skating on inside edges, but it's by no means the only possibility - if we're talking about novice skaters ("A-frame gumbies") it's far more likely that there's nothing wrong with their biomechanics at all and they just haven't got the confidence yet to be balancing on one skate not two. So, from now on I will not be using the word "pronate" unless I actually mean it.

fn1. Yes, I know it's a fictitious force. But I'm assuming a rotating frame of reference, so nuts to you

fn2. http://www.nettracing.com/step1.htm, in which it has to be said that he doesn't exactly look on top of his setdown skate even in the "correct form" animation.