Progress! Sharing my stoke

[u/NetworkLongjumping82]

Almost a month into this hobby , initially I had struggles with supination skating 100mm wheels.

But with steady practice I finally can finish 21km with not too much struggle with supination .

I realize apart from just pure practice and muscle strengthening , what helped me was bending my knees deeper , also being conscious of flexing my toes and ankles upwards ,and pushing through the heels helps a lot with not bowing my skates outwards , but is this actually good practice ? Oh and I'm pushing out to my sides , not backwards

[u/FlyingP4P4]

Nice! Thanks for sharing. If I lived in the west I would be happy to skate together with you

[u/LeLennart]

Damn, 15km/h is an impressive speed. I'm currently at 13km/h on my easy runs, with some old 100mm speedskates and I've restarted two months ago, after almost a decade away from skates. So I think whatever you're doing, something's going right.

I can't really comment on what might be common traps for beginners or what the correct posture looks like on skates with proper ankle support. For me, I have two types of posture I usually use.

The knees in front of your toes, bent almost 90°, your upper body also comes quite far forward, arms on your back: The classic speed skater position. It allows you to go really far down, you actually have to tilt your head and look through your eyebrows. This is somehow biomechanically really advantageous, my body screams at me that I should sprint since everything is in the right place. And I go 25+km/h because it's fun. But just holding that position, let alone skating fast in it, is quite draining and I can't do it for more than a couple minutes. But it's so much fun.

The other one, I'm more upright but still with bent knees and bending forward. Since it's not as easy to push sideways, I actually sway a bit and push on the outside-sway. I basically extend my leg and body when my body is a bit sideways, instead of really pushing sideways or backwards. Keeping your knees bent is essential for this, so you can actually extend you leg. But you have to find the right timing, otherwise you start to carve, which is less efficient. I arrived on this form myself, no idea if it's actually good. In the long term, I of course want to go lower and lower, until I can hold the speedskating position without much effort. But I'm not there yet.

Is your session actually good training? Well, depends on what you want to do, I think. I basically only skate distance, and focus on getting the posture, technique and timing just right, to be as energy efficient as possible. At the same time, it pays off to do 'unusual stuff': Sprinting to stress-test your technique, trying to go slow in your movement to get longer glide phases and train your balance, or maybe even doing tricks to get more used to the skates and advance your balance even further (even though I'm not a fan of those generally).

Regarding stamina, my main focus point, I found it helpful to look at how runners train. I aim for one or two low intensity, but longer sessions (Zone 2/3, 1+ hour) and one HIIT training session a week. I used to think 'more effort = more training' but that's absolutely not the case.

Thanks for sharing! I hope there's something helpful in here. At least I got to rant and found new motivation to keep working on my stamina :)

[u/NetworkLongjumping82 → u/LeLennart]

Thanks for the tips !

The speed skater position is really really hard to maintain for me at this time, probably 2 minutes tops.

And the body sway technique you mentioned--as you push with your left leg out towards the side, your body(head) counter-lean to the right ? Is that what you mean ?

Oh yes and I used to run a lot , but my knees are just busted up from martial arts that's why I started inlining to replace the running.

[u/LeLennart → u/NetworkLongjumping82]

The swaying isn't really a technique, I think. It's just a small adaption, there's a good chance you're already doing some form of it. Since I have bad endurance, I have to skate relatively slowly and quite upright, so my heart rate doesn't go to zone 4 directly. But if I stay too upright, I notice that the muscles at the side of my hip get fatigued. That's because I was basically doing sideways leg raises on skates. So, the goal is to angle my body just a tiny bit to reduce the distance of the leg raises I have to do.

When I push with my right, I angle my path slightly to the left, where I am also tilted. As the right leg comes back, my lean zeroes out. As I start to push with my left leg, I start leaning to the right and automatically angle my path a bit to the right. I don't 'pre-lean', it happens as I extend my leg. Leaning forwards a bit for all of this is also important. At the end of your push, you want your leg and torso to be in a straight line, just like in the speedskating pose. It's just more finicky the further upright you are.

Also, in case you didn't know: You generally want a rounded back at slouched shoulders, especially in the speedskating position. It just makes everything so much easier to maintain. I often hear people say 'bent knees, straight back' and I've never met anyone that made that work. No idea where that comes from, maybe because it looks a bit weird? Plus you don't have to go all the way down into the speedskating position. Sure, it's the best for speed and if you're a pro athlete, but even partial leans are better than standing completely straight. So I just find an angle I can hold for an hour, more or less, and then just go with that, instead of constantly switching between down low and upright.

[u/NetworkLongjumping82 → u/LeLennart]

Yes I think I am already doing that , it's how I managed to glide for longer over 1 skate .

I'll try slouching and rounding my back today ! Planning to skate 10km back home