Starting skating later in life, as I did, has its ups and downs. The ups are that I now have the means to do it, at least in terms of  access to rinks and excellent coaches and a very supportive skating community. And I have lots and lots and lots of motivation, and nobody to fuss at me about how I’m spending my money and time. And I can drive myself to the rink. Ah, the joys of being a grownup!

And my left three turn is now a thing of beauty (on a good day) and my knees still work okay. So I should just stop here before describing the downs, right?

Never shy away from the dark side, I always say. Especially when it provides an opportunity for a quotation or two from Eric Franklin’s Dynamic Alignment Through Imagery.

Towards the end of his book, Franklin takes on the idea of “pulling up” in dance or yoga, in which you try to maintain alignment by lifting the ribs, sucking in the abdomen, and tucking the buttocks under. The problem is that this desirable posture (“high chest” for dancers) is achieved through a constant activation of “voluntary control,” which leads to rigidity, poor breathing habits, and a lack of full spatial awareness.

When I read this, I realized that this has been me all over. I have been achieving a degree of alignment in skating through being a control freak: muscling through my edges and turns, rather than figuring out how to skate in a more efficient way.

According to Franklin, our emphasis should be on the proper conditioning (especially of the abdominals), placement, and technique to allow for “dynamic stability”: “the ability to maintain or to return to a position after a disturbance.” Skating is really “just” that: a series of dynamic positions. Our muscles work to absorb forces (up and down, forward and backwards, round and round), counter-balance (ankles press forward, free leg extends), and produce speed for the next position.

Certain muscles deep in the core really help with more efficient stabilization. (Other books I’ve read stress this as well; for instance, Annemarie Autere has described these inner muscles in The Feeling Balletbody.) But until this past year I haven’t really been thinking about how to use those. Instead, I have been trying to shore up instabilities and perturbations in my positions through tightening other large external muscles. I have been trying to lift parts of myself, rather than just figuring out how to lean in, bend in, and sink in. It has been like trying to defy gravity, rather than thinking about it as something that could be beneficial.

Franklin also thinks of gravity as his BFF: “If you join with gravity, you will be much more successful in the end.” He talks about achieving good posture through using our body’s response to gravity’s pull downwards, using “the ground reaction force as efficiently as possible”:

Guide this force up through your body (primarily through the bones). Liberated from their tasks of superfluous gripping, the muscles begin to create optimal alignment and lift. The nervous system becomes more alert, the reflexes more nimble. Freeing the muscles eliminates any controlled precipitation of weight down into the knees and feet. When you feel your weight, you gain control.

Franklin mentions that certain alignment problems happen when older dancers have adopted “cool” postural habits that they then don’t feel that they have the time to change. This feels so true of some of the things I have been doing inefficiently. They seem to work so well–up to a point! But I realize that I have been working way too hard. And honestly, I’m too old for that.

Plus I’m too old to waste any energy feeling sad about being too old to waste my energy. Ha! So the trick is not only to learn more efficient ways of doing things, but also to allow myself the mental time and space to let go of these former muscular habits.

Here’s where “skating like a kid” comes in. I love watching those skinny little kids fly around the rink, doing their footwork and their twizzles and their triple what-nots. You can tell when they’ve figured out the proper technique; they just seem to float over their skates. There is minimal extra force generated by large muscle groups. Those tiny little bodies have so little muscle to begin with!

So yesterday, I decided that I needed to do a skinny little Kilian pattern or two. Okay, this is just imagery; I missed the “skinny little kid” phase entirely. But it is possible to think about how skating would work if I were just a stick-like figure, rather than a supple and curved adult who can bend any which way (okay, that’s a fantasy too, but maybe closer to my twisted reality of late).

Three things that I noticed.

• One is that the Kilian has become a compulsory that I just mess around with for fun. Wow.
• Two is that efficiency and laziness are connected; it takes relatively little energy to do the Kilian in this way, so I can then go off and see what my skating friends are up to.
• Three is that my alignment is much better overall.

Hooray for that skinny little kid in all of us!

So this entry has two parts. The first is the part I started writing a couple of days ago; it features an article that I found in the N.Y. Times that says that skating can help improve your balance (well, duh!) just after I had one of those days (you know what I mean, we’ve all had them) when I thought I was back to square one. The second part then muses over the fact that you can have a really, really bad day on the ice, go to sleep sore and grumbling, and then (voila!) have a really, really good day.

Part 1: What happens when autopilot is not an option

Yet another op-ed in the N.Y. Times that confirms the value of skating, especially for older adults. This one was about balance, and it cited a recent study that showed value in doing athletic activities, like skating, that demanded learning new motor skills. Scientists found that “novelty and unpredictability, rather than repetition” is linked to “motor cortex plasticity,” a measure of the brain’s ability to change its wiring in response to new stimuli.

Both types of athletes have highly trained calf muscles, but endurance athletes use them repetitiously, in a way that the brain consigns to autopilot. Sure enough, plasticity in the area of the brain that controls calf muscles was no different between endurance athletes and nonathletes. In contrast, the dancers, gymnasts and skaters, for whom autopilot is not an option, showed dramatically higher plasticity: Their neurons were primed to keep learning new motor tasks.

It is good to know this, because after not skating for much of last week, I spent my first day back thinking that I’d forgotten everything. Panic ensued. I hadn’t felt that much “off” in a long while. Whoa, what was that? Was that an edge?

I tell myself that it’s nice to know that my motor cortex plasticity is being developed (go, you neurons, go!), and that even if I might fall on the ice occasionally (ouch!) it is all in the service of decreasing the chances I’ll fall outside of the rink at some later date.

I’m not quite sure if this justification makes sense, but hey, whoever said that skating makes sense?  My favorite line from the article was the following:

Simply staying upright is, in some ways, a full-body exercise.

So true, so true. . . .

Part 2: Onward to the compulsories!

So I got back on the ice today a little wary of what might happen next. It’s summertime, so I had to drive a little further to skate and missed seeing the familiar faces of my skating co-conspirators. It was literally just me and three pairs of pre-teen hockey boys on the ice for most of the time. One hockey skater that I sometimes see showed up but he was having trouble with his skates and left after just a few minutes; another woman I didn’t know was also there going round in hockey skates for a while.

The ice was fast, the pop music was loud, and the boys were fairly mellow. It was a really good session. Let me count the ways!

To begin with, I am getting more and more mobility and strength–and proprioception–on my left side. I’ve been trying to think about how my hip and leg bones and joints are moving while I’m skating, which actually helped a lot today (more on that later).  Some of my swing rolls felt pretty awesome (totally spherical!) and my edge pulls easily went from one end of the rink to the other, no sweat.

I was also able to make some progress on two basic pushes that have been eluding me. One is the back inside edge to back outside edge; the other is the back outside to forward outside. I tend to rush both and simply step (or even, fall) from one edge to another, rather than letting the initial edge rise, letting that ankle bend, and getting a good push onto the new edge.

Kseniya does both very well in her European.

The best thing, though, was that in the final half hour I actually worked on some compulsory dances for the first time in months. (That is not entirely true, since I have been doing a little bit of Kilian each session–I figure it’s like taking vitamins–but I’ve been largely holding off on other dances in favor of rebuilding my basics.)

I’d been thinking that I ought to get back into doing some of these dances before too much time goes by. And since things were going so well, I thought, why not start today?

I approached them in the same way that I have been doing my different exercises: breaking down different sequences, thinking about circles, that spherical lean, and knee action (rise and fall), and making sure all my edges are true and my pushes solid.

No music yet, and just remembering the patterns. But I did just enough to realize that this is the way to go. Kilian, Starlight Waltz, and Viennese Waltz today! Most excellent!

Hooray for motor cortex plasticity and all other good things!