The advice and observations here are based on my experiences with professional ballet training, a professional ballet career, 40+ years of dancing in multiple dance styles, 15+ years of training in violin performance, 11 years ice dance experience as a child, and 7 months of training in figure skating, grounded in figures.
The basis for professional ballet training is a 90-minute ballet technique class, six days per week. This is a comprehensive workout that, over time, will prepare your mind and body to learn and perform ballet choreography. Of course pre-professional ballet students frequently spend more time than that training, but not in ballet technique class: additional time may be spent on variations, character dancing, floor barre, weight training (for men performing lifts), other forms of dance, and of course rehearsals. But stripping all that aside… 90 minutes per day, 6 days per week is the basis for how ballet dancers are trained.
Ballet class is externally motivated: it happens each day at a set time, and entering class even a few minutes is discouraged (or even prohibited). The aspiring ballet dancer need only set a schedule (two to six days per week), attend the given classes; and then follow along, listen, and try their best. From a motivation point of view, the hardest part is getting out of bed and into class at the right time, every time. That commitment is the difference between someone who makes consistent progress, and someone who just comes to class.
Thus dancer schedules are regimented. You wake at a certain time, get into the studio at a certain time, finish at a certain time, etc. This is not so different from the regimented life described by aspiring figure skaters on YouTube. During my ballet career, I came to understand my life to be similar to military life, and I loved reading military science fiction during my rehearsal downtime.
Contrast this to the life of a musician, who must practice daily but at no set time. It is too easy to say “oh not now I’ll do it in a half hour,” and then the day slips by. The set time and social environment of a ballet class always helped me with consistency.
Figure skating requires the same kind of consistency, with set times to appear in person (not via txt or email) at the rink, ready to skate. For the figure skater wishing to build a training program for consistent improvement, my suggestions are as follows:
- Make a schedule and stick with it. The realities of training our mind/body system require a minimum of 2-3 skating sessions per week in order to make consistent progress. Beyond that, the frequency with which you train all depends on your goals and opportunities: to a point, the more frequently you train, the faster progress you will make.
- Structure your training to start with more precise things, and gradually move upward in size and exertion though each session. In ballet, we spend 45 minutes holding onto a barre, then about 30 minutes in center exercises, and then maybe 15 minutes jumping at the end, once our bodies are fully warmed up and prepared for jumping. Trying to do the grand allegro in the first five minutes of class would be inviting chronic injury. Things are no different in this regard whether you are working on a dance floor or an ice rink.
- When you practice something in isolation, that will be the best version of it you will get all day. For example, your first Forward Outside 8’s will be the best, most perfect FO edges you do. Those same edges will decrease in quality when you use them in more complex moves. If you are unable to get the edge up to snuff in isolation today, then consider skipping the more complex things that use it. There’s always tomorrow.
- If you train more than once a day, make sure you are not over-exhausting certain muscles or muscle groups. One tactic is to commit different sessions to different types of training: for example one hour for Figures and one hour for Freestyle. If you do not do this, recognize that large amounts of Figures training is generally safe if sometimes exhausting, whereas over-training in strenuous jumps can lead to chronic injury. Another approach is to move between different kinds of figures as your muscles tire.
- If possible, train at the same time of day every day (or most days). Our bodies are creatures of habit.
- Build at least one day of rest into your schedule, where you do not skate, or do anything else physical. No need for chronic injury. I attend a Zoom class on skating technique on my “day off,” where I learn new ideas to apply in my training over the next week.
- Recognize when your body is getting tired and end a training session at that point, even if the skating session is not yet over. You can recognize your body is tired when things begin working less well than they did 10 minutes ago, and therefore continued training can put you at higher risk of injury. If you want to finish out the ice you paid for, do something else for that remaining time. For example, after my back is tired from practicing 45 minutes of backward inside edges, I might move on to practicing twin 3’s or loops for 10 minutes.
- Be patient and enjoy the process. It’s easy to look back and see how far you’ve come, it’s harder to know how far you have to go, and it’s impossible to predict how long it will take you to get there. So live in the moment. Enjoy the Figure you are working on right now, today, this moment. Listen to your body, what is it teaching you about what you are doing right now? How can you do it differently ten seconds from now? Because improvement in technique requires change. With this kind of concentration, an hour of practice can fly by like it was no time at all! Then you can take your skates off knowing exactly how you improved your technique today, even if in just one tiny increment. If you do that every day, six days per week, 40 weeks per year, then you will make enormous progress before you know it! To be successful in this, you ultimately have the enjoy the process and recognize the rewards it brings. This kind of work is too tedious to keep doing if you do not enjoy it.
I will write later about productive ways to use session time training. Until then, it is important to understand two things:
- Training and conditioning are different and should not be confused. Training is the process of teaching our mind/body connection to do something specific that is within our body’s capabilities. Whereas conditioning means putting our body through physical exercises that over time will expand its capabilities. Conditioning usually happens as an integrated part of the study of Figures, and no further conditioning should be needed (unless one is performing large lifts). Almost all of our time should be focused on training.
- Strive for a coherent training program. There are many teachers out there, and they will say different contradictory things about how you “should” train. It is easy to get caught up in who is “right” or “wrong” on (for example) the best way to prepare for an Axel. A certain amount of that kind of evaluation is reasonable. But at the end of the day, the skating being taught is the same — balancing on and controlling one of 8 different edges — and there is frequently more than one way to get there. The best way to train is to find one approach that makes sense to you and works for you, and stick with it through the end. Don’t go around to 17 different teachers with “a little bit of that, a little bit of that” from each one. Better to study with one teacher, one approach, one method, and make the pedagogy work for you. One you have mastered things, that is the time to look back and consider the nuances of alternate ways of doing things, other places to place your free foot on this or that figure, etc.