Peter only started skating at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown and unlike most “new skaters” he’s already got an amazing Fitness Stride. Amazingly, he’s also managed to learn the Double Push which is an advanced speed skating technique used by professional speed skaters and certain high level amateur skaters.
Peter’s Intermediate Fitness Stride (I’ve seen videos) has a perfect straight ahead set down, nice push to the side and an outside edge glide and regrouping either side of the central axis, as well as a smooth, slow cadence that he can keep up for many kilometres. These are all the fundamentals of a pre-Double Push stride.
By managing to learn the double push, Peter can also skate much faster, an incredible achievement for a skater with just over a year’s experience. Most skaters don’t reach this level of stability, control and efficiency even after skating 10 years.
Peter does have some advantages (he’s a martial artist and ski instructor), and we all know skiers make good skaters, but still, his progress is impressive and a source of huge satisfaction and inspiration for me.
I always knew that in the hands of the right students, my online trainings could indeed help them to master the basics and progress through a varied list of skills to become competent, advanced level skaters that turn heads and make onlookers want to take up skating.
Here’s Peter’s assessment of learning physical activities and subsequently, how he was able to learn the Double Push from the Skatefresh “How to Skate for Speed/Fitness” Advanced course. Check the links at the end of this post to get your Free Trials of any of the 9 online courses available for inline skaters.
Peter (51) from Cambridge UK, on how he managed to learn the Double Push:
“I cannot thank Asha enough for putting together her on-line courses. They are absolutely unique amongst the deluge of various self promoting, unhelpful at best and more often than not actually misleading posts on YouTube, claiming to be tutorials.
Skating is incredibly technical and only through careful study of fundamental principles can one truly, fully and safely enjoy this amazingly satisfying sport.
Taking shortcuts in learning the skills will highly likely result in frustration with lack of progress, rapid loss of satisfaction and eventually complete loss of interest, not to mention high probability of bad accidents. And this applies to all aspects of skating, whether you want to be a better recreational skater, an urban free-rider or a speed skater.
I am a fairly athletic person, and have been all my life, which by now spans more than half a century. I know how to train your body for balance, strength and agility and the importance of a systematic approach to learning new skills.
When I picked up skating during the first COVID lockdown, over a year ago, I thought I could just get by using freely available tutorials on YouTube and create my own set of exercises. I only got frustrated and hungry for some proper, thorough, instructions that would explain in details the principles of skating all the way to the advanced level.
Eventually I came across Asha and her inline skating on-line courses and upon viewing a few free trial samples I decided that they looked promising. And that turned out to be probably my best investment in my physical education that I have ever done!
The courses contain extremely well structured set of exercises with gradually increasing level of complexity, with detailed explanations of the body movement behind each exercise. This is truly a game changer for anyone that wants to enjoy skating in all its forms.
Do the exercises in sequence, one by one, spending time to master each one before moving to the next one and within a year you will go from absolute zero to hero! Guaranteed, as long as you take your time to practice systematically.
I have purchased and went through all 3 course series; How to skate, How to stop and How to skate for speed/fitness (i.e. speed skating). I must admit that all of them are invaluable, but one that opened my eyes the most perhaps, was the speed/fitness series.
YouTube is full of advice how to improve your speed, quoting and demonstrating (often badly) the principles of the ultimate speed skating technique – the Double Push. While watching the skating Olympians talk about the Double Push and
showing how they do it is enjoyable and inspiring, you simply cannot start from there.
For those guys the fundamentals of movement involved is so intuitive by now that they do not dwell in their videos on decomposing them into their basic principles. And that is a big problem for someone that is trying to learn speed skating from on-line videos. You cannot do that. It will not work.
All you will achieve is something that you think is the Double Push but really isn’t at all. In order to unleash your full potential as a speed skater you must instead first fully understand what your body is supposed to be doing and then
practice each element separately before putting it all together.
And that is exactly what Asha’s speed skating on-line course series does. It was an eye opening experience for me.
“So that’s the second push, ahhhh amazing!” – understanding dawned on me towards the end of the course.
Now, having spent weeks and weeks on drilling those exercises I can finally fully enjoy and get the benefits of those fantastic speed skating Olympians’ YouTube videos and take inspiration from the exercises they show.
Because now I know what they mean!
In short, don’t cut corners – start with a solid course like Asha is offering and you will see the difference.
Highly, highly recommended.”
Peter (51) Cambridge, UK
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Learn the Double Push and/or try Asha’s course for FREE
See this page;
https://skatefresh.com/product/how-to-skate-for-fitness-advanced-level-full-course/
Need a good intermediate level Fitness Stride first? (BTW, you will need this before you learn the Double Push)
Click Free Trial on this page;
https://skatefresh.com/product/how-to-skate-for-fitness-intermediate-level-full-course/
Want to see all 9 courses and decide which are the best options for you right now?
https://skatefresh.com/learn-to-skate-online/