A faster, more powerful skating stride is something every skater wants whether on inlines or quad skates, and whatever level.
To improve your skating stride with more power and efficiency, there’s a few drills you should do when off your skates to translate to good technique and body positioning back on the wheels.
Sometimes off skates, these kind of small adjustments are more easily seen and can make more sense to give that ‘lightbulb moment’.
Skating stride and body position
What is skating stride? Let’s break it down.
The stride is made up of four elements: the push, the lateral push, and the glide, and the regroup.
When you skate, your body (your centre of mass), should be directly over your support leg (the one on the ground), and not move laterally (sideways) with your other leg.
A common problem for many (or most) skaters trying to gain speed is to simply push further, without paying any attention to their support skate and body positioning.
Whilst it’s true that a longer push when skating does create more speed, it only does so if the push is made with the leg only and not accompanied by lateral body movement.
The problem with ‘over-pushing’
During a private video coaching session with an online student, Asha noticed her student was over-pushing to the side.
This created an inside edge pronation on the support leg and the student’s bodyweight was not correctly over the support leg, but somewhere between both skates.
This is a very common mistake with intermediate and advanced inline skaters and this lack of correct technique could lead to slow-onset injuries if over-pushing and a pronation become habits.
So in the end, more speed and efficiency will not be created by an overly long push, despite the illusion that “longer = faster”.
How to get a more powerful skating stride
Watch the YouTube tutorial linked below where Asha shows how to add more power to your skating stride for better speed and efficiency. In the video she demonstrates:
- The over-pushing problem and how it causes a pronation
- How the body then follows the pushing leg to move laterally off the support skate
- The series of problems that come from these incorrect movements that all reduce efficiency.
Try the Stride Training Sequence
If you’re an intermediate level inline skater wanting to improve your stride efficiency, speed, fitness and lower body strength, try the Stride Training Sequence training drill outlined in the video tutorial.
This essential speed and fitness training drill should be part of every intermediate skater’s training to systematically improve each part of your skating stride; the push, the glide and the re-group.
Follow Asha’s expert teaching of this complex series of movements with her 3 Free Stride Training Sequence Drills which will develop the strength and tone of your lower body skating muscles while giving you an effective aerobic workout.
The outcome will be a correct, efficient, stable and smooth looking fitness stride, with bad habits eradicated if practiced regularly.
View the full intermediate How to Skate for Fitness online course here.
Get access to 3 Free Fitness Stride training drills to receive lifetime access to this important training.
