To an onlooker I probably haven't progressed at all over the past week. To myself though I have come on leaps and bounds. Still nowhere near where I'd like to be, but I am making a number of gradual improvements. Upper body strength: mine is abysmal. Working on improving it is helping me keep my body under control during the rotation. Lower body strength: again abysmal. Not doing anything specific to work on it, but I can feel the workout in my abs when I cool down. Again should help with control. Finally lower body flexibility: This one is really holding me up. Need to be more comfortable rotating my hips to force the drop of my rear knee and to keep my backside closer to the board during rotation; am often finding myself with my weight too far forward causing me to push the board out behind me at the end of the 180. Intentionally taking it slowly, the more reps I do the more comfortable I am dropping weight onto the gloves which hopefully helps things to flow :)
Monday, 27 February 2006
Friday, 24 February 2006
Lather, Rinse, Repeat...
Heh, two days of rain/snow and I completely lost my technique... At least for the first half dozen or so runs. Spent most of the session just doing 180 colemans again to drill the technique into my subconscious. Being able to do these at a moments notice is much more important than moving on to pendulums and 360s. I did spend about 10 minutes trying to do toeside 360s at the end of the hour. Managed about 250-260 on most attempts before losing too much speed and the wheels regripped (still on the soft wheels). Going to keep on the soft wheels until they cone to uselessness then I'll move back to the Tsunamis. Doubt I'll actually manage any 360s on the softies, but won't stop me trying ;)
Tuesday, 21 February 2006
Cones
Spent another hour doing nothing but Colemans to a standstill on soft wheels. A lot of fun, and I'm getting more confident and fluid at laying them down. Playing havoc on the wheels though, noticable coning on the back already and I've only been sliding them for a couple of hours :)
Monday, 20 February 2006
Practise makes perfect
Decided to practise with soft wheels rather than moving on to getting the board to pendulum. It's kinda cool how when you have the technique the wheels don't seem to matter. I was running with some 70mm 78A wheels that came as part of a complete today (mainly because they are centre set. I have some 83A kryptos but they're side set so I can't rotate if they cone...). I was expecting to hit tarmac a few times in a hip slide while I got used to the grip; but actually managed to keep it pretty much under control for the whole session with only a couple of bails to my knee pads.
Working on technique now. I've noticed that as I have started to get the hang of the balance I've stopped dropping my rear knee all the way down. Am now trying to get my knee down while still keeping balance and spinning 180 heelside. Hopefully when I've got the technique down with the soft wheels I can move back to the hard wheels and work on getting extra rotation :)
Friday, 17 February 2006
Finally got the Coleman!
Woohoo! I finally got my heelside Coleman slide down today. I've been practising an hour a day during my lunch break for the past two weeks. It took me about half an hour to get my toeside shutdown under control; my heelside Coleman shutdown has taken me about 7 hours of solid practise to get under control.
Guess it's time to move onto trying pedulums :)
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