Another day in the ice-box...

At next practices we will do a relay kicking balls... (no pun intended)

Wednesday practices is our ''everyone practice'' day and yesterday it was mine and Twisteds turn to run this practice. We started off with a shortened down version of ''Black Widdow'' (starting at 14 laps) it seems to be our current warm-up of choice. Yesterday was only around 4 degrees Celsius in our practice space - so it's all about keeping warm and getting the muscles going. We could see our breath...  I also like that we do some core and general strenght exercises, since we don't have much dedicated off-skate practices.

Then we continued with an excercise that we picked up when we skated with TORD in Toronto - 10 exercises in 10 minutes. It is simple - we all do an exersice for 1minute and then directly change into another, for a total of 10 minutes. Good things to throw in are; skating on one foot, big slaloms, transitions, skating backwards, jumping from foot to foot... ect ...ect... just exercises where you can challange yourself on your own level.
The challange with everyone practices are to find drills that everyone will find challanging without disencourage the less skilled girls and not to make it too basic for the advanced girls.

Later on we did some matching steps, both side by side, and following each other, yesterday we only did it two and two, but one day I hope we can skate a whole row of people on step, it's fun, makes me remember when Deadly Aim used to run practice. It sounds really cool to have a whole row of girls skating on step. We also did ''shopping carts'' and ''truck'n'trailer'', also an old classical drill that seem to be a standard in every leauges practice protocol, it is a good endurance drill, and I like the competative moment to it, if you want it to have.

I really like running practice - adn I think everyone felt accomplished afterwards - of course there is always room for improvement both from the coaching and from the sakters, but I guess that is what we live for.