Leaderboard

How do you know that hyper is lighter than ultra, fly, crazy, or super? There’s no globally accepted measurement scale for these types of things.

Of course it did. It gave you mega power, (and style)! 🤣

cmon man, they're Social Media Influencers...why wouldn't you trust their opinion?

Not a coincidence, I borrowed it almost verbatim 😁

I've been skating most of my life. For a long time, I'd plateaued in my skating. But then I started dropping eyelets during practice just to see. Skip ahead in time and now I'm practising with my laces undone, and what a huge difference it has made. Yes, at first, I felt a bit slower, but then as I got used to it and my edges got stronger, it felt like I was getting into a better posture and getting better extension. Generally, I'm feeling the ice better, and that's allowing me to get better. When the world isn't ending, I'm playing games with looser laces. The laces on the top three eyelets are, for the most part, only there to keep the boot from spreading open. Otherwise, they don't provide much/any support for me. For me, it was short time pain by sacrificing that ankle support, but it's been long time gain, because once I got used to it, I'm a better skater for it.

Don't you badmouth my beloved Micron Mega 10-90's! They were the shiznit! 🤣

Thousands of coaches have spent their entire lives teaching skating without understanding what really differentiates good skating form from poor skating form. You can see a lot of folks are very passionate about the subject, but the amount of alignment in their beliefs is all over the map. Be wary of the anyone that thinks they have it all figured out. Anyone that claims that most certainly knows far less than they realize. Hell, NHL teams even in recent years have had power skating coaches like Laura Stamm teaching players to swing their arms front to back instead of side to side. Mike Bracko has disproved this and taught the side to side arm swing. Anyone talking about knee bend really means hip hinge. If you try to bend your knees without developing the ability to comfortably hinge your hip, you're going to have a bad time. But look at McDavid, the undisputed skating king of the NHL. No one puts fear into opposing D like McDavid. Does it look like he has a deep hip hinge / knee bend and long stride like Taylor Hall? No, not at all. Does he blow past players like they are standing still? Yes. So what's his magic? It's certainly in his linear crossovers and the power he's generating below the knee. His strength to mass ratio and the power he generates on his cross overs puts him in another league altogether. It'll be decades before most traditional power skating coaches catch up to teaching the technique McDavid is using vs. the old school Laura Stamm train of thought. I don't mean to pick on Laura, but her videos are on youtube and show what most traditional 'power skating' coaches have believed for years. I can't comment on ankle strength but ankle mobility is 100% important. People make fun of 'ankle benders', but elite skaters can (in a controllable way) pronate their ankles to achieve more power in their stride. Look up Jason Yee's videos on McDavid's and MacKinnon's stride analysis and watch what their feet and ankles are doing as they accelerate. Also look up Cal Dietz's work on ankle mobility and strength training, he's got videos on youtube. This is a very deep topic. Anyone who claims to know it all is surely wrong. If they were right, they'd have produced piles of players that skate like McDavid. But that hasn't happened. Players can become better skaters. But I'd argue most of what they need to do to get there starts off ice with mobility and speed work.