Can someone explain this?!?

[Zac911 317]

He was able to skate that well despite restricting range of motion... I know... Amazing eh?  Even with all that tape how much would you say it improved lateral stability?  

Why do people associate wrapping their laces or tape around their ankles as better?

Players don't learn how to weight their edges properly when they cinch up their ankles like that.  It tends to put the player further back on their heels which creates other issues.

[YesLanges 127]

I tried a pair of modern skates (Graf 5035s) w/out tape. When I tied them tight for lateral support, they restricted my ankle & knee bend too much; but when I loosened them enough to bend my ankles and knees, there was too little support for me laterally. I couldn't imagine even walking across the dressing room without laces, forget about skating.

[DarkStar50 679]

http://media.gettyimages.com/photos/serge-savard-of-the-montreal-canadiens-fights-with-dave-schultz-of-picture-id133700126

Regarding Bobby Orr and players of the 70s and 80s, it wasn't so much the ankle of the skate being taped, it was the tendon guards as seen in this picture. The tendon guards were either still all leather(Daoust 301) or a leather/ballistic nylon combination(original CCM Super Tacks as worn by Orr). The old school 60s tendon laces were still in the box when you bought the new skates but through taping the tendon guard the shin pad was also taped snug to your leg. Any support to your skating was minimal through this taping procedure. Bobby Orr's skating was just beyond any other skaters at the time. CCM Super Tacks were the first ballistic nylon/leather boot to provide more strength and stiffness than traditional all leather Tacks. They were lighter since leather Tacks would get heavy from sweat.  First plastic outer sole instead of leather, too. Orr's destruction of skates had to play a part in the Super Tack skate development process.

Skates in the photo left to right: Flyers all leather Bauer Supreme 91, #2 Habs Laperriere Langes, Flyers Dupont probably Bauer, # 22 Habs Shutt CCM Super Tacks, #18 Habs Savard CCM Super Tacks, # 8 Flyers Schultz Bauer Supreme 92 leather/ballistic nylon, NHL linesman CCM Tacks all leather.

[Zac911 317]

1 hour ago, DarkStar50 said:

http://media.gettyimages.com/photos/serge-savard-of-the-montreal-canadiens-fights-with-dave-schultz-of-picture-id133700126

Regarding Bobby Orr and players of the 70s and 80s, it wasn't so much the ankle of the skate being taped, it was the tendon guards as seen in this picture. The tendon guards were either still all leather(Daoust 301) or a leather/ballistic nylon combination(original CCM Super Tacks as worn by Orr). The old school 60s tendon laces were still in the box when you bought the new skates but through taping the tendon guard the shin pad was also taped snug to your leg. Any support to your skating was minimal through this taping procedure. Bobby Orr's skating was just beyond any other skaters at the time. CCM Super Tacks were the first ballistic nylon/leather boot to provide more strength and stiffness than traditional all leather Tacks. They were lighter since leather Tacks would get heavy from sweat.  First plastic outer sole instead of leather, too. Orr's destruction of skates had to play a part in the Super Tack skate development process.

Skates in the photo left to right: Flyers all leather Bauer Supreme 91, #2 Habs Laperriere Langes, Flyers Dupont probably Bauer, # 22 Habs Shutt CCM Super Tacks, #18 Habs Savard CCM Super Tacks, # 8 Flyers Schultz Bauer Supreme 92 leather/ballistic nylon, NHL linesman CCM Tacks all leather.

I had a pair of those old Langes when I was a pup.  They were 3 sizes too big... The lower near the hinge had a pointy piece that would dig into my upper ankle area and my foot would bleed all over the place every time I played.  You couldn't pull me off the ice.

It's a good point about the tape and laces for the shin guards for sure and I do recall that.  The thing about tape is it restricted forward flex more than it helped stabilize lateral movement.  Plenty of those guys had tape around their ankles and you can see the creases in the boot from lateral movement.  

I suppose what my point was before I got taken to task was that many of the the skates over the last 20 or so years restrict motion and that is where I look back at those older guys and you see how they could skate so well-  They had better range of motion and could control their edges.  If you restrict so much range of motion you never develop the muscles and the ability to weight your edges and shift balance points.  I have watched alot of kids skate in extremely popular styles of skates that cannot execute crossovers very well-  They are in a higher / vertical lacing pattern that shifts them to their heels... It's no wonder than can't skate as well,  but hey... Marketing.

It's a tricky process for skate mfg's to get the skates stiff enough for direct energy transfer in the right places without sacrificing range of motion yet soft or forgiving enough in the right areas without losing performance.

[YesLanges 127]

1 hour ago, Zac911 said:

 If you restrict so much range of motion you never develop the muscles and the ability to weight your edges and shift balance points.  I have watched alot of kids skate in extremely popular styles of skates that cannot execute crossovers very well-  They are in a higher / vertical lacing pattern that shifts them to their heels... It's no wonder than can't skate as well,  but hey... Marketing.

I don't necessarily disagree with any of this. One minor distinction is that I really don't think it's about developing muscular strength in the ankles. Those muscles are very tiny and, like all muscles developed through exercise, they'd atrophy immediately anytime you took time off from skating and they'd have to be redeveloped to skate again. (The smaller the muscles involved, the faster they atrophy through non-use, too.) I believe it's all neurological balance, which is why skating deteriorates relatively slowly and why it can be recovered so easily by someone who once built those neurological pathways for balance in the brain. If it were muscular, you wouldn't still be able to skate after a year layoff the way you can as long as you were a skater previously. When I first got on the ice in 2014 after a 24-year total layoff, my skating went from very awkward to much closer to my old skating in a few minutes, which couldn't happen (obviously) if it were a matter of redeveloping muscular strength. That quick improvement is indicative of reusing a neural pathway that just hasn't been used in decades but that was still there and able to be reinforced almost immediately by using it again, the same way you recover the abilities to speak languages or play musical instruments quickly even after very long layoffs.

I'm just at the far end of the spectrum as far as dependence on taping, probably because I took that shortcut in the very first year that I started skating at almost 14, which is already pretty late. My skating improved instantly and dramatically the first time I taped up and I never learned to skate without that extra lateral support. I anchor the tendon guards to the bottoms of my shin-guards with the tape, exactly like those two Canadiens in Langes to the far left of DarkStar's photo, but I flex my ankles during taping to avoid restricting flexion. If I forgot to bend my ankles enough while taping (or taped up skates that didn't have an ankle hinge), I'd experience the limitation you're talking about; but not when I get it right. If I didn't tape up, the first thing to go would be my ability to run into my crossovers at any speed; instead, I'd have to concentrate on each cross-under to stay balanced on my outside edge. The fact that I need such an exaggerated forward-pitch profile might be explained by the need to compensate for what you're describing.  On a neutral profile, I feel my weight way too far back on my heels. So, to me, the phenomenon captured by that Darryl Evans photo is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen in hockey.

[Kgbeast 195]

I have asked a physical therapist about how come I have never injured my ankles even though I had plenty of opportunities and not paticularly naturaly born physical specimen; while my wife who is pretty fit from birth have injured her ankles just by basically walking on a paved street. He said, it is not all about how strong the ankles are, but more so how well the brain is connected to the ankles. It is kind of like stabilizing circuits in a quadcaptor or just the way we can stand upright without wobbling or falling over. It is not about strength, but sensitivity and response time. If your brain is not used to "autocorrect" your ankles, this process will be slower, which will require more drastic correction, which in turn require stronger muscles, which often are not strong enough. There are few ankle exercises that aimed to improve the brain functions pertaining this. Obviously start skating in non-supportive skates from the single digit age, probably one of the best.

[YesLanges 127]

47 minutes ago, Kgbeast said:

I have asked a physical therapist about how come I have never injured my ankles even though I had plenty of opportunities and not paticularly naturaly born physical specimen; while my wife who is pretty fit from birth have injured her ankles just by basically walking on a paved street. He said, it is not all about how strong the ankles are, but more so how well the brain is connected to the ankles. It is kind of like stabilizing circuits in a quadcaptor or just the way we can stand upright without wobbling or falling over. It is not about strength, but sensitivity and response time. If your brain is not used to "autocorrect" your ankles, this process will be slower, which will require more drastic correction, which in turn require stronger muscles, which often are not strong enough. There are few ankle exercises that aimed to improve the brain functions pertaining this. Obviously start skating in non-supportive skates from the single digit age, probably one of the best.

Exactly. Your brain is like a computer in a car or plane that auto-corrects hundreds or even thousands of times each second. It's all about building those circuits at a time when the brain is most ripe for that kind of cognitive learning and then using them again after a layoff to reinforce weakened pathways that are still there. That's also why many (if not most) people can't ever learn to skate as well as adults as they could have as kids. It's not impossible and there are exceptions, but as a general rule, there's a prime time for building those kinds of circuits, just like for learning language and music.

[flip12 715]

I have a hard time believing it's a pure either/or: all neural circuitry or all physical strength. I can't see how both don't come into play.

When I stop riding a bike for a long time, I don't forget how to ride a bike. I'm just a lot slower and a lot less sure of my handling. One of those is mostly physical strength, the other mostly mental sharpness, but they're two sides of the same person doing the activity.

[YesLanges 127]

47 minutes ago, flip12 said:

I have a hard time believing it's a pure either/or: all neural circuitry or all physical strength. I can't see how both don't come into play.

When I stop riding a bike for a long time, I don't forget how to ride a bike. I'm just a lot slower and a lot less sure of my handling. One of those is mostly physical strength, the other mostly mental sharpness, but they're two sides of the same person doing the activity.

Whatever muscular strength you develop through any type of training or activity disappears quickly once you suspend those activities for any length of time, restoring you to whatever natural strength you had before you started training or playing that sport. Muscle atrophy is unavoidable and regaining muscular strength takes time; it's not something you can recover in one day.

Stamina, top speed, acceleration, and smoothness of stride all have strength components; but the pure ability to balance yourself on skates has almost nothing to do with muscular strength. If it did, someone who hasn't skated in many years wouldn't be able to skate again at all before spending time rebuilding that lost muscle tissue and strength.

My recent return to hockey after 24 years is typical. It took me less than 5 minutes to recover about 60% of my skating ability, a few dozen skates to recover about another 25%, and then a full season of play to skate essentially 100% of the way I used to skate minus some speed and acceleration attributable to the difference between being 29 the last time I skated and almost 53 when I got back on the ice. I believe a neurologist would tell you that all of that represents the fact that the original neural pathways for balancing on skates remain in the brain but become dormant through non-use and that going back to that activity reactivates those circuits and that the improvement after that represents the restoration of previously-faded inactive circuits to active circuits. All of that takes place in the brain and nerves to your ankles and not the muscular strength of any muscles around your ankles. 

 

[Larry54 243]

5 hours ago, DarkStar50 said:

http://media.gettyimages.com/photos/serge-savard-of-the-montreal-canadiens-fights-with-dave-schultz-of-picture-id133700126

Regarding Bobby Orr and players of the 70s and 80s, it wasn't so much the ankle of the skate being taped, it was the tendon guards as seen in this picture. The tendon guards were either still all leather(Daoust 301) or a leather/ballistic nylon combination(original CCM Super Tacks as worn by Orr). The old school 60s tendon laces were still in the box when you bought the new skates but through taping the tendon guard the shin pad was also taped snug to your leg. Any support to your skating was minimal through this taping procedure. Bobby Orr's skating was just beyond any other skaters at the time. CCM Super Tacks were the first ballistic nylon/leather boot to provide more strength and stiffness than traditional all leather Tacks. They were lighter since leather Tacks would get heavy from sweat.  First plastic outer sole instead of leather, too. Orr's destruction of skates had to play a part in the Super Tack skate development process.

Skates in the photo left to right: Flyers all leather Bauer Supreme 91, #2 Habs Laperriere Langes, Flyers Dupont probably Bauer, # 22 Habs Shutt CCM Super Tacks, #18 Habs Savard CCM Super Tacks, # 8 Flyers Schultz Bauer Supreme 92 leather/ballistic nylon, NHL linesman CCM Tacks all leather.

Just to add to this, I found this picture of Bobby Orr where the top 2 eyelets are not laced.

http://dailydsports.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/20150826-5-orr.jpg

[YesLanges 127]

Deleted double post

[YesLanges 127]

24 minutes ago, Larry54 said:

The old school 60s tendon laces were still in the box when you bought the new skates but through taping the tendon guard the shin pad was also taped snug to your leg. Any support to your skating was minimal through this taping procedure.*

*Sorry for the incorrect attribution...this was DarkStar50's quote, but I can't figure out how to fix it.

This is the only part I disagree with. That's exactly how I tape and that's what makes all the difference in the world to my skating. Securing the TG to your shin-pads provides tremendous lateral support, at least with a stiff boot. I can't speak to what it does with a softer leather upper, but I suspect the effect is similar if not as dramatic. You can see it on the same skate I still use on the 3 left-most Canadiens skates in that fight picture posted by Dark Star.

That practice of leaving the top 2 eyelets loose but taping the tendon guards makes perfect sense. It allows maximum ankle flexion and the taping restores the lateral stability lost by skipping the eyelets. Darryl Evans says he skipped all 5 top eyelets but "used some tape."

[flip12 715]

43 minutes ago, YesLanges said:

Whatever muscular strength you develop through any type of training or activity disappears quickly once you suspend those activities for any length of time, restoring you to whatever natural strength you had before you started training or playing that sport. Muscle atrophy is unavoidable and regaining muscular strength takes time; it's not something you can recover in one day.

Stamina, top speed, acceleration, and smoothness of stride all have strength components; but the pure ability to balance yourself on skates has almost nothing to do with muscular strength. If it did, someone who hasn't skated in many years wouldn't be able to skate again at all before spending time rebuilding that lost muscle tissue and strength.

My recent return to hockey after 24 years is typical. It took me less than 5 minutes to recover about 60% of my skating ability, a few dozen skates to recover about another 25%, and then a full season of play to skate essentially 100% of the way I used to skate minus some speed and acceleration attributable to the difference between being 29 the last time I skated and almost 53 when I got back on the ice. I believe a neurologist would tell you that all of that represents the fact that the original neural pathways for balancing on skates remain in the brain but become dormant through non-use and that going back to that activity reactivates those circuits and that the improvement after that represents the restoration of previously-faded inactive circuits to active circuits. All of that takes place in the brain and nerves to your ankles and not the muscular strength of any muscles around your ankles. 

 

Paragraph 1: completely agree and that was the point I was trying to make.

Paragraph 2, sentence 2 I disagree with. You still have musculature from everyday use that can translate. I'd imagine you'd need those to recover the neural pathways.

Paragraph 3 is anecdotal and imprecise. Depending on what your level of ability and conditioning were at your peak, there may be further to go depending on the level of degradation of physical form: not only muscles but joints, tendons, etc. There are also those people who skate with near perfect neurological ease, balancing themselves on their edges with remarkable refinement, within the first five minutes of ever stepping on the ice. That's rare, and I agree your case is more typical than that, but without doing proper analysis, we remain in the realm of anecdota and can only pitter-patter about the issue.

I don't wholly disagree with your perspective, I'm just skeptical of its balance between physical and mental conditioning in the specific case of re-approaching peak form.

[YesLanges 127]

3 minutes ago, flip12 said:

Paragraph 2, sentence 2 I disagree with. You still have musculature from everyday use that can translate. I'd imagine you'd need those to recover the neural pathways.

I'm not suggesting that you could skate without any muscles to control your ankles. I'm just suggesting that the strength of those muscles isn't the difference between someone who can skate and someone who can't. If it were just the "everyday" muscles that you needed, anybody who could walk would also be able to skate. More importantly, as I've suggested already, if it were about muscular strength, a skater who hasn't skated in many years (whose skating muscles have all atrophied to the same condition as a fit non-skater's) wouldn't necessarily be able to skate much better on his first day back on skates than the non-skater.

[flip12 715]

1 minute ago, YesLanges said:

I'm not suggesting that you could skate without any muscles to control your ankles. I'm just suggesting that the strength of those muscles isn't the difference between someone who can skate and someone who can't. If it were just the "everyday" muscles that you needed, anybody who could walk would also be able to skate. More importantly, as I've suggested already, if it were about muscular strength, a skater who hasn't skated in many years (whose skating muscles have all atrophied to the same condition as a fit non-skater's) wouldn't necessarily be able to skate much better on his first day back on skates than the non-skater.

I still just don't see why it's so binary in your perspective. Why all the polarization?

[YesLanges 127]

I just think KGbeast's post about what his PT explained is exactly correct. If you find that difficult to accept, consider the following analogy:

Your tongue is 100% muscle. A person who learns a foreign language as a child usually speaks it with no hint of an accent. Someone who learns a foreign language as an adult usually cannot do that, at least not without much more effort on the accent. If you don't use that foreign language for many years, you forget vocabulary and other elements of speech, but you recover the ability to speak it very quickly once you start practicing it again, and much faster than someone learning that language for the first time at the same age; and your accent will be the same accent that you perfected as a child.

Your tongue (muscle) is critical to speaking and to accents, but it's not the strength of that muscle that matters, or the everyday strength of that muscle from speaking other languages or eating and chewing food. Further, we know that if you don't learn how to make certain language-specific sounds that aren't common to all languages as an infant, it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to learn to make those sounds later in life. That's particularly evident in some Asian languages. None of that relates to the muscular strength of your tongue; it's all neurological. In my opinion, the same is true about the balance aspect of skating. We can certainly agree to disagree, but that's what makes the most sense to me. 

 

 

 

[Kgbeast 195]

Bicycle riding is good analogy, so is language, and an ability to stand on 2 feet. Things that pertain any subconsciously performed tasks are deeply rooted in the brain and it's cicuitry, obviously if you spend a year in bed in coma you will find yourself unable to stand or walk. Any autocorrection mechanism has sensors, processing circuitry, and some kind of motor, but the required power of the motor is finate  and any more power is simply more weight with no use. Kind of like Bobrovsky. He was heavier and moved slower and more  susceptible to injuries. Now, he has lost several pounds of muscles and his performance is closer to the peak. Many things in life are about balance.

[DarkStar50 679]

4 hours ago, YesLanges said:

*Sorry for the incorrect attribution...this was DarkStar50's quote, but I can't figure out how to fix it.

This is the only part I disagree with. That's exactly how I tape and that's what makes all the difference in the world to my skating. Securing the TG to your shin-pads provides tremendous lateral support, at least with a stiff boot. I can't speak to what it does with a softer leather upper, but I suspect the effect is similar if not as dramatic. You can see it on the same skate I still use on the 3 left-most Canadiens skates in that fight picture posted by Dark Star.

That practice of leaving the top 2 eyelets loose but taping the tendon guards makes perfect sense. It allows maximum ankle flexion and the taping restores the lateral stability lost by skipping the eyelets. Darryl Evans says he skipped all 5 top eyelets but "used some tape."

This raises the question given how today's skates are severely stiffer than skates were in the mid 90s, why is it that today so few NHL skaters cover their TG in tape wrapped around the bottom of their shin pad? These are the elite skaters of hockey and hardly any do this for "tremendous lateral support." ? The best place to watch NHLers skate is from behind the goal line so you can watch their C cuts on their strides. I'm having a hard time correlating what my eyes see and what you are explaining as it translates to lateral support from a tendon guard. Do you know the history of the tendon guard to the skate? It has nothing to do with performance. It was added in the 50s as a safety measure.

[Zac911 317]

8 hours ago, YesLanges said:

I don't necessarily disagree with any of this. One minor distinction is that I really don't think it's about developing muscular strength in the ankles. Those muscles are very tiny and, like all muscles developed through exercise, they'd atrophy immediately anytime you took time off from skating and they'd have to be redeveloped to skate again. (The smaller the muscles involved, the faster they atrophy through non-use, too.) I believe it's all neurological balance, which is why skating deteriorates relatively slowly and why it can be recovered so easily by someone who once built those neurological pathways for balance in the brain. If it were muscular, you wouldn't still be able to skate after a year layoff the way you can as long as you were a skater previously. When I first got on the ice in 2014 after a 24-year total layoff, my skating went from very awkward to much closer to my old skating in a few minutes, which couldn't happen (obviously) if it were a matter of redeveloping muscular strength. That quick improvement is indicative of reusing a neural pathway that just hasn't been used in decades but that was still there and able to be reinforced almost immediately by using it again, the same way you recover the abilities to speak languages or play musical instruments quickly even after very long layoffs.

 

I completely agree with this.  I didn't mean to mispeak.  Nerve strength plays a big part of this.  I should have been more clear.  Sorry about that!

[YesLanges 127]

3 hours ago, DarkStar50 said:

This raises the question given how today's skates are severely stiffer than skates were in the mid 90s, why is it that today so few NHL skaters cover their TG in tape wrapped around the bottom of their shin pad? These are the elite skaters of hockey and hardly any do this for "tremendous lateral support." ? The best place to watch NHLers skate is from behind the goal line so you can watch their C cuts on their strides. I'm having a hard time correlating what my eyes see and what you are explaining as it translates to lateral support from a tendon guard. Do you know the history of the tendon guard to the skate? It has nothing to do with performance. It was added in the 50s as a safety measure.

I'm not sure we're even in disagreement about anything. I never suggested that elite skaters need any more lateral support than their modern rigid skates provide. I just said that it makes perfect sense to me that they taped around their TGs exactly as depicted in those Bobby Orr photos when they left their upper eyelets untied on their skates 50 years ago when skates were far less rigid than they are today. 

Yes, I'm aware of the history of the TG and I wasn't suggesting, even remotely, that its purpose or design had anything at all to do with providing an anchor for taping around shin-guards. I just said that doing that does happen to provide tremendous additional lateral support for those of us who need it. I'm speaking from extensive personal experience about how much additional support that provides. I can't know why the two Canadiens players in your photo chose to tape around their TGs, either; but I noticed that they're both wearing the exact same Lange model that I wear and that their taping pattern happened to be exactly what I still use on those same skates, most recently, about two hours ago.

I fully acknowledged in earlier posts on this topic that the best skaters seem to be those who rely on the least amount of ankle lock and that my reliance on tape is a crutch upon which I became dependent because I started doing it when I first started skating. I've also acknowledged openly that I'm very envious of those who skate with very little need for ankle support. While skating is actually the strongest part of my game and while I'm usually one of the better skaters on my teams, I'm sure that I'd skate better and faster if I didn't need the tape. I don't think that necessarily means that changing taping habits now will make someone like me a better skater after a lifetime of relying on it; just that those who learned to skate well in softer skates always seem to be the best skaters as adults. That would obviously include the elite skaters in the NHL.

Are we disagreeing about anything that I'm missing?

 

 

[DarkStar50 679]

^^^ I guess not !! sorry for misunderstanding your points. I think the Habs taping the TG on the Langes was just to lock in the shin pad. I taped over the TG since the 70s too for mainly the same reason. I no longer do it as my shin pads have a lower strap.    ??? Are you still skating in those Langes???

[the_game 452]

Don't worry guys, I think I might be a good Guinea pig for the muscle memory/neural pathway discussion. I'm 2 weeks post op from Neck fusion surgery where my spinal cord was severely compressed and I had nerve impingement. I can already notice subtle differences with how I am walking, doc said its my body adjusting for the abnormalities and is now getting back to a new normal. We'll see what happens when I finally get back on skates. I guess I'll have to mess around and start taping my tendon guard too so I can include that variable in my experiment, ha.

[chippa13 1844]

21 hours ago, YesLanges said:

I just think KGbeast's post about what his PT explained is exactly correct. If you find that difficult to accept, consider the following analogy:

Your tongue is 100% muscle. A person who learns a foreign language as a child usually speaks it with no hint of an accent. Someone who learns a foreign language as an adult usually cannot do that, at least not without much more effort on the accent. If you don't use that foreign language for many years, you forget vocabulary and other elements of speech, but you recover the ability to speak it very quickly once you start practicing it again, and much faster than someone learning that language for the first time at the same age; and your accent will be the same accent that you perfected as a child.

Your tongue (muscle) is critical to speaking and to accents, but it's not the strength of that muscle that matters, or the everyday strength of that muscle from speaking other languages or eating and chewing food. Further, we know that if you don't learn how to make certain language-specific sounds that aren't common to all languages as an infant, it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to learn to make those sounds later in life. That's particularly evident in some Asian languages. None of that relates to the muscular strength of your tongue; it's all neurological. In my opinion, the same is true about the balance aspect of skating. We can certainly agree to disagree, but that's what makes the most sense to me. 

 

 

 

Another reason things are easier to learn as a kid is because they generally have more flexibility, both mental and physical, than an adult. The younger one starts learning something the easier it is to become a natural thing. I started skating at a very young age, honestly can't remember my first time on skates which I think was around age 3. That is one reason I find it so hard answer questions and/or discuss skating mechanics, because I've never had to think about skating, I just have always done it.

[YesLanges 127]

10 hours ago, DarkStar50 said:

^^^ I guess not !! sorry for misunderstanding your points. I think the Habs taping the TG on the Langes was just to lock in the shin pad. I taped over the TG since the 70s too for mainly the same reason. I no longer do it as my shin pads have a lower strap.    ??? Are you still skating in those Langes???

No problem. Yes, still in those Langes, hence the Screen Name here. I tried NXGs and Grafs and both seemed to me that it would take me about as long as I still hope to be playing just to skate in them as well as I skate in my old Langes because I never really skated in anything else.

3 hours ago, the_game said:

Don't worry guys, I think I might be a good Guinea pig for the muscle memory/neural pathway discussion. I'm 2 weeks post op from Neck fusion surgery where my spinal cord was severely compressed and I had nerve impingement. I can already notice subtle differences with how I am walking, doc said its my body adjusting for the abnormalities and is now getting back to a new normal. We'll see what happens when I finally get back on skates. I guess I'll have to mess around and start taping my tendon guard too so I can include that variable in my experiment, ha.

Best of luck. You're only a good experiment for getting back your previous abilities. The issue in contention here is whether balance is "remembered" in your brain or in your muscles. You're dealing with both variables (muscle atrophy and brain/nerve issues) simultaneously, which doesn't make for a good experiment. Not sure where you're being serious and where you're joking, but if you haven't been skating all your life with a taped TG -- or, alternatively, if you aren't having lateral stability issues that might be helped by TG taping -- there's not really any experiment that you could do.

The real experiment here would be for someone like me to ditch the tape and spend the next year or two finding out whether I could learn to skate as well as I skate with the tape I've been using since I was a kid...and I ain't interested in doing that experiment.

43 minutes ago, chippa13 said:

Another reason things are easier to learn as a kid is because they generally have more flexibility, both mental and physical, than an adult.

You're making my point. What we refer to as mental "flexibility" is precisely what I'm talking about: Neural pathways for many types of things are formed much more easily in early childhood than later. I'm saying that balancing on skates is an example of a physical skill that is much harder to learn as an adult and that's why adults starting to skate only very rarely become as good skaters as anybody who learned as a child. The same is true for learning languages and music. The difference isn't in the muscles; it's in the brain and brain-nerve connection to the muscles.

Physical flexibility (in the literal sense) may or may not have similar neurological components that make it easier to become very flexible as a child; but muscle and joint flexibility aren't significant barriers to learning to skate as a young adult, especially for a young athletic adult. Even a good athlete who's flexible would still have a much harder time (or find it impossible) to learn to skate as well as someone who learned to skate as a kid, because of the optimal neurological "window" to learn skating.

[flip12 715]

19 hours ago, DarkStar50 said:

This raises the question given how today's skates are severely stiffer than skates were in the mid 90s, why is it that today so few NHL skaters cover their TG in tape wrapped around the bottom of their shin pad? These are the elite skaters of hockey and hardly any do this for "tremendous lateral support." ? The best place to watch NHLers skate is from behind the goal line so you can watch their C cuts on their strides. I'm having a hard time correlating what my eyes see and what you are explaining as it translates to lateral support from a tendon guard. Do you know the history of the tendon guard to the skate? It has nothing to do with performance. It was added in the 50s as a safety measure.

There are a few that still do it. Of the ones I can think of in today's NHL that do, roughly half of them have played significant lengths of time without tape at all: Kucherov, Jamie Benn, Bryan Little and the other way around (used to tape and then stopped) Viktor Stalberg, Kopitar, Gaborik. Clearly these guys don't need the tape, but sometimes they like to use it.

A few others like Panarin, Oduya, and Paajarvi I've never seen not tape. But they also skip eyelets and tape less than their whole tendon guards completely tight to their legs.