Vet88

My ankle isn't broken but I did have surgery on my heel that involved repair work on the achilles, 2 months after and the ankle is still swollen. Surgeon says this is really common with foot surgery, akin to broken ankles. So for those of you that did break your ankle and either did or didn't have surgery, how long till the swelling disappeared? Did you use ice and did it help and for long after the surgery did you use ice for? Or anything else for the swelling?

You will get around 1mm+ of extra length as the heel pocket settles in. 8.5 sounds just right for you.

True is engineered by a speed skater (Scott), so with your Graf comments in mind do you expect True to go the same way because they don't know what "works in hockey"??? There is a countering and growing argument to the high cut, ultra stiff, limited forward flexion, rigid ankle lock design that some of todays manufacturers are pushing in the desperate search for more speed and this is what some suspect is leading to more injuries. Lets take a common training technique in Europe and that a lot of professional players still use today, skate and train with no laces. Regardless of what skate you are in, now everything you said about graf (and I won't dive into the murky world of corporate and player sponsorship here as a reason for them going out of business) comes into play (low cut, soft boot, balanced forward on the balls of your feet) yet players are not getting injured from this? ParkseY - your boot was built to your foot shape (if you used the 3D scan) so adding superfeet is going to change that. Zac covers this in earlier posts. I don't know if this will work for you but you may want to try a reprofile on your blade with a +2 pitch (get the center moved forward). This will put you more onto your heel. Changing boots is activating different muscles in your skating technique, if you want to simulate a True fit in your Bauer skates then try dropping an eyelet or 2 and skate this way in your Bauer skates for a couple of months. The increased forward flexion and ankle roll you will get will help activate those muscles you are struggling with when you skate in True skates. Then try your True skates again.

What size are your current Alkalis, 9.5? If you can fit almost 2 fingers down the back then that's around 1.5 sizes to big. 8.5 might do or you may be able to drop to 8, it depends on how you like your foot, toes brushing the toe cap.

Don't keep your right hand up, get it level with the stick hand and let your arms move in motion with your body. If you keep your right hand up you are skating in a position that is totally different to when you want to hold the stick in 2 hands, this is why you skate with the hands relatively level to each other when you are skating with one hand on the stick. A transition to 2 hands on the stick means the top hand comes up a little and the bottom hand drops down a little but your shoulders, torso and balance are still consistent to your one hand on stick stance.

It's great seeing how much you have improved. My thought is that you are now beginning to repeat / reinforce bad skating technique. Looking at the way you are skating you are too much on your inside edge and are using the sides of the boot to accelerate with, turn etc. To correct it it doesn't matter how much I or anyone else talks to you about this, this can only be learned by muscle memory experience. The approach I use is to get players to start lacing 1 eyelet down, practice like this then just as you start to feel comfortable, drop another eyelet. Keep going until you get to 4 down (the top 4 eyelets not laced). At this stage your ankles have no support from the boot, they have to hold you upright and you have to be skating on top of the blade or your foot will collapse. Game time you lace back up to where you are comfortable with but every non game skate you drop eyelets. If you really want to see how much impact this has on your skating, next time you have access to a goal on the rink undo 2 or 3 eyelets and then try and push the goal across the rink. If you have good technique you will be fine, if you use the sides of your boot in any way at all as leverage during the push your foot will collapse inwards and you have no power in the push. ps - and on those turns really focus on getting the inside foot more forward. Try stepping into the turn / pushing forward with the inside foot, not just gliding into it.

When you take your skates off have a look at the sides of your feet, are there any intense red areas? This indicates a spot that is rubbing or constricted in some way and the general answer is to get a spot punch or stretch or use a protector such as a gel pad or change boots. However if you have foot alignment issues (eg pronation) these only alleviate the problem, it does not fix the underlying cause. Redness at the top of the foot indicates a shallow boot and / or you are tying them too tight. Looser laces, different lacing pattern, eyelet extenders, option B laces, different boots, skate with eyelets undone are all possible fixes. Pain under the foot generally indicates a foot sole issue, the shape is wrong for your foot shape. Hard to diagnose without looking at the foot but a general fix is to try an insert such as superfeet or a custom orthotic or change boots. There are a lot of other problems that can be the cause but this covers the majority of foot issues in boots.

Good example and once you actually learn how to do it you will find that no extra strength is required above and beyond what you already have, it's all about body position and edge control.

Where to start. You are confusing muscle strength with muscle endurance. Muscle strength is how much power you can apply through your muscles for one action, endurance is how long or how many times you can perform that action. Lets look at the deep hockey stance, the person has the strength to perform the stance (or else they could not get in the position) but may not have the endurance to hold the stance for an extended period of time or repeat it over and over. In order to produce muscle growth, you have to apply a load of stress greater than what your body or muscles had previously adapted too. With weight lifting you are trying to over exert the muscle (break it down) so that it will repair larger, basic body building 101. Working a muscle over and over will not build strength if the load placed on it is insufficient to stress it, all you are doing is building endurance (aerobic capacity). In ice skating you are carrying your own body weight, as you do every day when walking, running etc. Do you get stronger when walking? Or running? No, you will get fitter but not stronger. But start carrying weights (a hockey stick and hockey gear are not heavy enough) or towing/pushing something (eg the goals) and now you start to overload the muscles to build strength. Note - if you have never skated before and start skating, there will be a small increase in strength in some individual muscle groups as you learn to skate. But once those muscle groups start performing within normal body strength thresholds then the strength building stops and the endurance begins. In stick handling, if you are really weak then there will be a SMALL increase in strength until you can carry the stick (all 450g of it, about the weight of a small paperback or tablet!) but once you are strong enough to carry it then you are building endurance, not strength. In particular with stick handling you are working fast twitch muscles as opposed to slow twitch muscles whereas general skating (unless you are accelerating hard) is mainly about slow twitch muscles. I've been stick handling for years and years and i can assure you I'm no stronger now than when I started, sad to say because my one handed back handers still suck..... So back to your original comment, the reason someone can't execute an advanced manoeuvre is because they don't have the strength to do it. If you are a normal human being who has skated for a while you do not need any more strength to do advanced skating drills. I train kids who are so small they can't even carry their own gear bag or lift it up onto the bench. Yet strap some skates on their feet and they skate as naturally as they walk or run. Show them a new drill and they are away. As I said before, if you are a normal human being with normal balance and all the appropriate muscles / tendons / ligaments / joints etc in all the right places and functioning as they are meant to then you can skate and you can LEARN to skate to a high level with enough time and practice. Do you have to do strength training to reach this level, no. I can point you to 100's of kids and adults I have trained and very few of them will have seen the inside of a gym or done any other strength training yet they all learned to skate by coming to practice on a regular basis. Not one has said to me they are stronger because of skating, fitter yes but stronger, no. Does it mean you can jump the highest, skate the fastest, generate the most power, last the longest - no. For this you need to add strength training to push yourself beyond your normal parameters. I'll give you one example, Drew Doughety. In draft year he could hardly do 1 pull up, his squat capacity was low and he had body fat in excess of 20%. Yet put him on skates and he was a beast. Strength training has only made him better but he still had all the skill base to begin with that had come from years and years of training. Does skating make you stronger? I don't have any emperical evidence I can quote but I can refer to a training regime one of our elite teams did a few years ago. At the start of the season, every player was measured for speed, skill and strength, on ice and at the gym (spider metrics). During the year half the team did gym work and skating, the other half just did skating (quadruple+ the amount of the first group). The 2nd group that just did skating were no stronger (gym measurements) at the end of the year than they were at the beginning yet the skating ability for most of the players in this group had markedly improved over the gym / skate group. As to your situation you said it yourself, you lost 20lbs of muscle mass. Along with everything else that would have been affected (tendons, ligaments, joints etc) are you in a normal state at this stage? No. Go for a skate and the brain asks muscle groups to do something but they can't because they are no longer STRONG enough. I sympathise, this amount of muscle mass loss would have made even basic daily tasks such as walking and running difficult. But once you rebuilt your strength back to normal levels your skating ability would have returned (assuming that whatever affected you had no long term or other lasting effects). Regardless of how you got there, I'm just happy that you are back on the ice enjoying the sport.

Not so, strength has very little to do with been able to skate. If you can walk and run then you should be able to skate. Skating is about muscle coordination and muscle training, which muscle groups have to fire correctly to keep you upright, balanced, holding the edge, making a cross over etc. And after your brain has started to work this out then it has to optimise these firings so that the least amount of energy is used whilst doing it. This isn't strength. I can happily point you in the direction of some of the smallest and weakest players I know and they skate just fine. To skate faster, to stay on your skates battling on the boards etc then yes, strength does play a part but to skate, no. And the reason you can't do an advanced drill is because you don't know how to, not because you are not strong enough (unless the drill is beyond your physical strength like asking someone to push 200kg down the rink). eg there is a classic youtube vid of Laura Stamm showing a relatively simple edge control drill that these NHL prospects struggle to do. Are you saying these guys can't do it because they aren't strong enough???

My comment about giving up games etc to train is from a time point. Most people find that time to do things is a big issue and training / games can take a lot of time each week. If you can do both then that is great but if you had to choose one or the other and you want to get better then practice is the choice you have to make. For positioning one of the best things you can do is watch as many nhl games as you can, focus on a player and where he skates, how did he get into that position to score that goal or receive that pass, where did he come from 2 seconds ago, what made him skate there, what pattern does he skate in front of goal, understand what a "soft zone" is and see how when it opens up the player skates into it for the pass etc etc.

Yep, you got it in a nutshell. I'd also add that once you get some inline skates and the biscuit underway, you will find it hard to stop training this way because the benefits are huge. I used to go out and just get lost in time, 3 hours later I'm having to drag myself out of the park....

Getting better as an adult is one of the hardest things to do. As a kid you pick it up quickly, as an adult you have to work much harder at it. How you work at it is the critical part. You can go to all the scrimmages and team practices in the world but this little fact will keep biting you in the ass - for every 90 minutes you are out on the ice you will touch the puck for no more than 90 seconds. How are you meant to get better at puck handling at 90 seconds a time? Simple answer is you don't, you reach a certain level and then plateau off. If you want to get better you have to specifically practice that skill, either your own ice time with stick and puck or the best off ice setup you can get - green biscuit, abs blade on a shaft, inline skates with hard wheels and somewhere to skate. If you really want to take the next big jump in skills, give up your games and scrimmages and skate on your own for the next 6 months, every day, an hour a day, you and the biscuit.

That is right, a soft side with a frame around the ankle. I've found the K2 and Salomon boots to be good, do some research as there are a lot of cheap chinese plastic rubbish around that do not last long, a decent pair will set you back around the $60 - $90 mark. And don't think this is just for beginners, this is often used in off ice camps over summer.

Not in this thread but in others I have discussed how to get better quickly as a beginner. Ice time is generally limited and often on the ice trainings consist of skating drills and then waiting your turn for the next drill only to have someone screw it up. And then you have a scrimmage and how many times during that scrimmage did you actually get to touch the puck? Scary fact, during the average 90 minutes of group trainings you will get to touch the puck for no more than 2 - 3 minutes. How are you meant to get better at just 2 minutes a day / week??? You need to skate and puck handle and without your own rink or a job at one etc this can be hard. So here is how you can get better, fast. Buy yourself a pair of soft sided recreational inline skates (you can remove the brake), I suggest these because of the time you are going to spend in them and you want it to be comfortable from day one. You can use proper inline hockey skates if you want but often that comes with its own issues, fit, break in period, wear etc. Then buy the hardest outdoor wheels you can, you are looking for 82A or 84A hardness. Then purchase a green biscuit or 2 and a shaft (straight, not tapered) and an abs blade (inline warehouse, hockey monkey and others have green biscuits and abs blades). Get down to your local park, driveway, mall carpark wherever there is a flattish skateable surface and start skating and puck handling to your hearts content. This is the best way to improve, period. Nothing comes close other than your own ice time. And everything you do here will transfer across to ice. If you want to really replicate an ice skating style look at a marsblade chassis on an inline boot. Good luck and enjoy.

Whereas I tried really hard to like these (and AX1's and QR1's and a bunch of other Warrior top end lines) my knee just would not feel right when sitting in the pocket. Nothing against the padding, just wouldn't work for me. Sold all of them to team mates though who are happy campers with them.

You get what you pay for, Any top of the line pad has great knee protection, it then comes down to fit. My personal preference is Rbk 10k, 11k or 20k as they are built like tanks, great knee protection and fit me really well and I don't need to tape them. apx2's are also ok. Tried everything else top of the line, protection is great but the fit is meh on me.

The sad part here is that you had someone at the LHS say it was fine......

Alan - previously we have spoken at length on this and discussed how graf was better suited for the movement of the holders. I had some success with this but it is not the panacea one expects it to be. I have done some ongoing work with a couple of students who are doing masters / doctorates in this field and have learnt that pronation has many causes and effects, resolving it in a ice skating boot requires a multi phased approach - orthotics, boot fit, blade alignment, body alignment, exercises, strengthening programs and stretching. For example: putting a wedge in to get cog may help you whilst you are standing upright in a neutral position on the blade but as soon as you go into a turn and if the boot fit is not right the foot can collapse and roll in the boot. This leads to a loss of power in the turn, loss of edge or the catching of an edge as you transition from one edge to another coming out of the turn because your foot has now moved in the boot. My suggestion would be to go see a sports podiatrist who has experience in working with ice skaters. NOTE - "experienced" is the key word here and you will need to ask some hard questions before you consider seeing someone and paying them for their time and expertise. The aapsm organisation would be a good start and their web site (www.aapsm.org) has a list of members located in Canada. You may know of other organisations who offer similar expertise. The downside is the cost, it is not cheap to see these people and get orthotics built and if you live remotely it is even harder. But I think that seeing someone skilled in sports podiatory, explaining to them the problems you are having, working with them on your current skates and a long term plan (or short term if your current skates are found to be a poor fit) to get into a pair of VH skates (for example have them build lasts for you that VH build the boot from) would be the best value money you can spend if you want to continue skating. This is a good article on pronation in skates and how some of the issues were addressed: http://www.aapsm.org/pdf/humble-skatinga.pdf

You can use them but you need to cut the lugs off and epoxy them in place to stop them turning. I also ground a slot in the top of the nut so I could use a screwdriver to help with installation / removal.

"Because the base layer is protected the abrasive" - I'm kind of struggling to understand this sentence. Lets assume it was meant to be "Because the base layer is protected by the abrasive" then it isn't really talking about the abrasive at all. It's talking about the base layer. I'd expect the base layer to retain its shape, it's the profile of the abrasive after 200 passes that I would be interested in. But on the other hand lets assume somehow the sentence is about the abrasive and it's profile is always "PERFECT". As an engineer who has spent a lot of years working with abrasives I find this particularly hard to swallow. You have a product that by the very nature of its work wears away every time it is used. Let alone the fact that the entire surface of the profile of the grinding wheel is not in contact with the skate blade (the outer edges do not contact, do these just mysteriously evaporate away?) you have minute variations in the shape of the hollow of the blade that causes + / - grind resistance as the wheel does it work. And if you ever changed your hollow then this would only magnify the issue. Otherwise what they are saying is they have invented an abrasive that never changes shape during it's life span, its wear is even and consistent REGARDLESS of the shape of the surface it is in contact with. If this is the case then they are wasting their time making skate sharpeners, I can think of a dozen better applications they could put this technology to use with...

How do you check the grinding ring for accuracy of hollow after x sharpenings? Using other sharpening systems one would dress the wheel before sharpening the blades (either to change hollow or to ensure the wheel was still true at it's setting) so how does sparx retain the accuracy of the hollow on the grinding ring?

This might cause a volume issue but as a test it could help to prove your arch issue. If you have any old footbeds lying around, cut the arch out of them and slip them into your boot. this will give your foot a lift or around 1mm - 2mm (depending on the thickness of the footbed) and relieve any pressure on your arch due to the boot pushing up into it. If you can skate pain free in the arch this way then keep working away at getting that arch lower, if you still have pain then you may need to rethink what the cause is.

Some machines have a clamp that runs the length of the blade (eg Incredible Edger machine) and I haven't seen a blade yet that these can't straighten for the sharpen. When you take them out of the clamp then that's another matter, they are still bent and as hard as I have tried, I haven't found a way to reliably straighten them. I was told if you retemper them whilst clamped in a shaping jig then you can have some success but that seems a lot of work for a $50 blade. Better of spending your time and money on a quality blade like Step etc.