Some of us argue that skating consists of repeated cycles of falls and recoveries. Specifically, a skater deliberately moves his upper body such that shifted center of gravity causes him to “fall”. During this fall, he continues to glide on one skate. But at the same time he moves his other skate, the free skate, towards the projection on the ground of his shifting center of gravity, with the aim to recover from the fall by planting the free skate onto the new projected center of gravity. The process now repeats, with the previously free skate now becoming the new gliding skate.
If this fall and recovery sound like walking… well, it is walking, but with a special skating gait. And we need a specific vocabulary in order to talk about this special walking. See the illustration below.
Let’s look at the same sequence from earlier, with annotations. The skater starts out leaning to the left while gliding on his left skate. He is about to fall to the left, but during the fall he moves his right skate, the free skate, over to his left side. He catches his balance at the last second, by planting his right skate on the projection of his shifted center of gravity. I call this moment a balance moment, indicated by a red bracket.
This may sound contrarian to the usual teachings of pushing off with alternating skates. In the fall and recovery narrative, there is no explicit pushing. There is only the body shifting balance and inducing falls. But this is just a complimentary perspective that describes the same coordinated movements of body parts.
I’ve written about rhythmic falls and recoveries in ice skating before. The same principles mentioned for ice skating apply to inline skating. This is an offshoot of the beginner guide I recently wrote: How to Inline Skate.
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