new

A New Lease on Legs
Meet Sonya. She Reinvents Pro Skating Styles.

Despite my dreams of starring for the Boston Bruins, you couldn't mistake me for an NHLer. At 35 years old, in need of shedding a few lbs., I'm an average beer league player. Still, I've always figured I was a reasonably strong skater. Until I got on the ice with Sonya Shewchuk.

As skating coach for the Toronto Maple Leafs, she can take credit for sharply improving the skatings skills of Rob Pearson and John Cullen, who helped their team to their best start in history this year. Amazingly, many NHLers are just like me: they learned to skate at an early age, in the most casual way, and never really thought much more about technique. How could this be? "I don't know," says Shewchuk, shaking her head. "If you're scoring goals or stickhandling well you can hide it for a while. You may have a good year, but eventually it will become obvious." Certainly, it's clear to Shewchuk when she watches an NHL game. "I may pick out 20 percent who I could improve‹a stop to the left, a turn to the right, a backward crossover."

After lacing on my skates and slipping on my lucky Bruins sweater, I show Shewchuk my stuff by skating in circles. "Okay, when was the last time you played?" she asks. "Last night," I tell her. She winces.

The first thing she gets me to work on is keeping my knees bent. By being too stiff and upright in my posture, I'm losing power and breaking my acceleration. Another rule of thumb: the head of a good skater will never bob, but glide along at the same height.

It appears I'm also guilty of the most common skating flaw: strides that are too short and choppy, thus losing speed and power. As a corrective, she makes me skate forward, extending each stride and then bringing the back foot forward and tapping the heel of the front foot. This helps develop longer, more fluid strides. She looks graceful demonstrating this heel-tap exercise; I feel horribly awkward doing it. But it's got me thinking about how I skate‹for the first time ever.

Unlike figure skaters, who train highly in technique, few hockey players think about fundamental skating principles such as how their blade interacts with the ice. "It's the friction between the blade and the ice that gives you speed and power," says Shewchuk. Sounds completely obvious, but there are NHL players who ignore this. In their typical skating strides, instead of using the inside of the blade and pushing off to the side at a 45 degree angle with middle part of the blade, too many push straight back. "You have to keep your feet on an angle," says Shewchuk. "As soon as they face forward, you lose friction against the ice."

This is essential to an effective V-running start, the most common way to get going from a standstill. Demonstrating it, Shewchuk gets me to put my feet at 90 degrees, with my heels close together. Initially, my weight is incorrectly on the back of my blades; weight transfer to the front is crucial to this start. Then she tells me that, properly done, the first two or three steps are actually jumps, with the feet still at 90 degrees to each other. I try this a few times and am mostly just happy not to go splat.

If Shewchuk has an overall philosophy to good skating, it is this: "Think of yourself as skating not on ice but on water‹ and the thinner the water the better." This will improve agility. The key is making the lower body lighter through upper body lift. It comes as a surprise that the shoulders and hips‹which should always be square to each other for good balance‹are so vital to good skating. "Figure skaters are such good skaters because they learn to lift from their jumps," says Shewchuk, a former figure skater herself.

At the end of our session, I nervously ask her for a critique and skate around the rink two or three times. "Well, you've obviously played," she grants me. "But you need to bend your knees and lengthen your stride." My hopes of suddenly being called up to Boston have grown dim indeed.

From "How Hockey Works" (Equinox, January/February,1994).

Back