LondonSkaters Speed Team - Speed Skating & Rollerblading Club in London

Adam B(GMF) · Joined: 30 Apr 2004 Posts: 237

OK - skater wisdom from Eddy Matzger - you pressure the skate through the heel - so all your pressure in mainly on the back wheel throughout the stride
snowboarding wisdom - when you carve the board the pressure starts and front of the board at the start of the carve and then moves towards the back at the end of the carve

applied the same principle to stride the other day and noticed that if i started the push with the weight more of less even through all the wheels and the as the stride progressed moved the pressure towards the back wheel - i seemed to go faster.

Rick · Joined: 25 Feb 2004 Posts: 5914

You are right that you push through the centre and heel carve at the end though. You are not trying to push only through the back wheel. You are wanting to use as much of the contact areas as possible.The heel carve allows you to finish the push more to the side (driving forwards more) rather than behind which would finish on the toe, though not necessarily with a flick.

However, there is no correlation between one and the other in the instance you seem to be describing. If you are referring to pumping a board to try to gain speed then there is some correlation.

The carving of a board or ski is more akin to making a parallel turn on skates than a heel carve for the purposes of acceleration. With a board, gravity is doing the acceleration and you have your weight forward to control direction and to stop the thing from shooting out underneath you. Not recommended to try that on skates you won't be able to steer through the toes.

It's good that you are trying different weight postions and their effect as it helps to find the precise pressure point for each part of the stride and therefore develop the overall most effective push. However, remember that sometimes we feel like we are going faster when we do one thing over another but we are actually faster the other way. You will need to objectively measure the difference to see if you were indeed going faster or you just felt like it. Alastair and I experienced this in Hamburg one year. When we both got too tired to keep laying the power down to keep up, we concentrated on technique and actually went faster than when we were trying to go fast. He recorded all the info on his GPS and the difference was phenomenal. I used my heartrate monitor and the frequent time splits they gave us in the race which was not quite so accurate but my times were nearly a minute lower for the last two 10km and my heart rate was dropping over the period from 15 to 25 bpm lower than earlier in the race.