Why No Laces?

[2nhockey 21]

After my first adult hockey league season was in the books I decided to take the off season and improve my play. I figured hockey would be so much more fun if I could skate. So I've been working on skating when I get a chance. No doubt I've gotten so much better but feel like there's a lot more I can do. So, at the end of this month I'm doing 2 days (7 hours) of on ice powerskating clinic that I'm sure will be embarrassing as everybody else there is 1- a kid, and 2- what I would consider a pretty decent skater. In the meantime while getting ready for the clinic I am still trying to improve my skating.

I see in the thread by Amazinmets that he is skating lace free and says doing that improved his skating. Why? What benefit is there to skating lace free?

I pulled my laces today at public skate and... holy buckets! That's hard! So I was able to motivate around the ice and started doing some really careful stops. I just about pulled off some crossovers but couldn't quite get there before I had to quit. My feet were hurting, and my ankles were done!

So, will skating without laces help me improve? What should I be looking for or doing when I take the laces out? What is the improvement and how do I measure it?

[IPv6Freely 2092]

I guess the idea is to have strong ankles and good balance but I don’t really see the point overall.

[YesLanges 127]

Take it from someone who comes from as far from that as anybody could ever get, that the less ankle support you can practice with the better it will be for your skating. The sooner in your development you do it, the better, because your skating won't have to get worse first without the support before you see benefits. For someone my age who relied on a lot of lateral ankle support from day one, it would probably not be possible to relearn to skate without support and ever expect to skate much better than someone who first learns to skate in his 50's. I'm amazed at your description, because if I took out my laces, I would LITERALLY not be able to walk across the dressing room, let alone get on the ice to try "careful stops" NFW.

It's not that you can skate better without laces; it's that if you learn to skate without a lot of lateral support, you can get onto and get more out of your edges in every respect. You can also flex both your knees and your ankles more, and probably open your hips more, too. But you don't go right to lace-free skating; and that's not the way you should try to incorporate the idea into your training. What you want to do is reduce the lateral support gradually and only after you're already able to skate as well as possible (for you) at your current support level, or if you haven't started yet, at the first support level that you drop down to from whatever you're most comfortable with now. Lace-free would be the final level but most of the benefit is already reached by the time you're skating comfortably and playing with the top one or two eyelets not laced up. There's a guy who played for the Kings in the 80s (Daryl Evans) who coaches and plays in AHL Alumni games with his tongues flopping forward and curling over his toe caps. We get it, Daryl: you can skate without laces; you can tuck your tongues into your skates and loosely tie a few eyelets and also avoid a stupid injury from catching a pass on the bare foot. Just tie a little looser and/or skip an eyelet at the top and try to increase the loosening once your comfortable at the previous step. 

Some of us have had this discussion in many different contexts, but it's not really "ankle strength" that's at issue. The Muscles are involved but it's really the neuromuscular connection between brain and muscles that provide critical balance at different levels. When your nervous system has to fire the small muscles near your ankle regularly, it lays down neural pathways that become thicker and stronger, involving more nerves in a larger network communicating signals to and from your brain to balance you. That's the main change that occurs in body tissue, not the muscles in your legs and feet, What's usually referred to as "strong ankles" in connection with skating are more accurately described as well-coordinated ankles. Try loosening up a bit for part of practice sessions until you feel comfortable enough that way to play a game; then continue repeating that process  by going progressively looser as you get more and more comfortable with less lateral support. 

I'm not a bad skater with my taped-locked ankles; but I'd be a much better skater today if I'd hung in there without taping up at 14 as a shortcut to faster improvement than I was making at that time without tape, taking my time to build up to skating well with less support. No. 10 in Maroon.

https://www.dropbox.com/home/red vs white 10-23-16?preview=20161023_210649.mp4

 

[Vet88 674]

9 hours ago, 2nhockey said:

c skate and... holy buckets! That's hard! So I was able to motivate around the ice and started doing some really careful stops. I just about pulled off some crossovers but couldn't quite get there before I had to quit. My feet were hurting, and my ankles were done!

So, will skating without laces help me improve? What should I be looking for or doing when I take the laces out? What is the improvement and how do I measure it?

And there you have your answer. It's hard primarily because your technique isn't great, you keep falling off your inside edges because you have spent most of your skating life laced up in a quasi ski boot and using the sides of the boot to skate with and with no feedback coming from your feet. Now your brain and suddenly discovered muscles are having to work overtime to keep you on top of your blade. We are genetically designed to do things in the most efficient way possible (otherwise we were Saber Tooth tiger fodder as we ran out of gas running across a plain), as you are falling off your edges your brain is going "this is wrong" as your muscles work overtime trying to hold you upright. Your brain very quickly works out that efficient skating and muscle use is when you are on top of your blade. Try pushing a goal across the ice with someone on the other side providing resistance if you want a really graphic example of how poor your technique might be.

No laces is really really hard, even with a perfect fitting skate boot. What I would recommend is you slowly drop eyelets, say drop 2 first off, and skate until you become comfortable with this. Then drop another 2 and repeat. Every time you drop more eyelets it's like you have to learn to skate all over again and you will hate it. Persist with it, it will make a huge difference to your skating. This is how Amazinmets got there.

And DON'T play a scrimmage or a game like this until you are really really confident in your ability at whatever stage you are at. Lace up come game time.

There is no other training in the world that will teach you how to skate better, PERIOD. I train with no laces but lace up the bottom 3 eyelets to play so I'm rules compliant. Also accelerating hard in game play with no laces is very very difficult and I just can't afford to give away that yard of pace during a game.

Once you can accelerate hard, transition front to back and back to front (at speed) and perform high speed escape turns without falling off your edge, you are starting to get there. You will know it because there is no hiding from your technique when you skate this way. When you start hitting every edge perfectly, this is how you measure your improvement.

And having been through this, I partially disagree with YesLanges as to muscle strength. It's not that you will develop new muscles but you will use the ones you have differently and this will lead to a lot of tiredness and sore muscles for a while as they build strength /  condition. Calves and the outside shin muscles and quads have to work extra hard. Also if you have any alignment issues (feet / ankles / knees / hips) then no laces helps to sort these out but this can lead to sore knees for a while as the torsional forces thru the knee will change as your technique improves. It's never to late to learn and how fast you learn is up to you and how much training you do. If you want any advice or drills pm me, I'll help as much as possible.

[BenBreeg 493]

I hadn’t thought about this for years until reading about it here.  I remember as a kid (30+ years ago) one coach telling is about the Russians training this way.  Now that my son is playing i really want to start lacing his skates down one eyelet at a time.  Fully laced he has little forward flexion.  I also still want to improve my own skating now that i started playing again, that way i will only have to deal with my sore elbows, groin pull, and embarressing lack of conditioning 🙂 

[YesLanges 127]

2 hours ago, Vet88 said:

 

And having been through this, I partially disagree with YesLanges as to muscle strength. It's not that you will develop new muscles but you will use the ones you have differently and this will lead to a lot of tiredness and sore muscles for a while as they build strength /  condition. Calves and the outside shin muscles and quads have to work extra hard.

We're not really disagreeing. Anytime you change something about your skates (or do anything athletically that's new to you, more generally), the muscles involved will work differently and in ways that are new to them and they'll get sore in places reflecting those differences until they adapt. As they become used to it, the soreness goes away. It's not that they don't also become stronger in the process; but the critical difference between being able to balance on an edge without support and not being able to isn't really a matter of the strength of those muscles, per se. If it were, in principle, you'd also be able to improve your skating without laces by exercising those same muscles on a weight machine designed to provide resistance in every plane of ankle movement. That's not the case, and all the targeted ankle-strength resistance training in the world wouldn't enable you drop eyelets and skate as well as lacing them up, because what you're really doing with this kind of thing is training your brain and your brain-muscle connection, rather than strengthening muscles, exactly as you describe right here:

2 hours ago, Vet88 said:

Your brain very quickly works out that efficient skating and muscle use is when you are on top of your blade.

This is all I'm saying: the critical component here is neurological learning rather than increased muscular strength of the muscles involved. 

[salibandy 21]

My experience with looser lacing has led me to the conclusion that it's about ankle control. With a more loosely tied skate, you can manipulate your edges to a greater degree than if your skates were laced tightly like a ski boot. I have gone from tying my skates so tight that blood would get cut off (I had just started to learn how to skate) to dropping one eyelet and tying it snugly, and though I had to relearn how to skate when I decided to do that, I think it's been well worth it. I am not the best skater by far and large, but now I do feel more natural in my stride than before.

[Amazinmets73 69]

On 7/12/2018 at 1:10 PM, salibandy said:

My experience with looser lacing has led me to the conclusion that it's about ankle control. With a more loosely tied skate, you can manipulate your edges to a greater degree than if your skates were laced tightly like a ski boot. I have gone from tying my skates so tight that blood would get cut off (I had just started to learn how to skate) to dropping one eyelet and tying it snugly, and though I had to relearn how to skate when I decided to do that, I think it's been well worth it. I am not the best skater by far and large, but now I do feel more natural in my stride than before.

Yea, I've noticed this as well. When I go up eyelets now I feel more stable but extremely restricted in movement

[2nhockey 21]

We finally got ice back so I was able to play Monday night. I decided to try changing up my lacing a bit so I went down one eyelet and laced snug, not tight at all. Went thru warm ups and about half the game before I finally felt super fatigued in my ankles, shins, and calves. Went to the bench, laced up normally and tightly, jumped back on the ice and with my first stride, down I went! After a couple minutes I was skating ok, but wow! Now I understand the ski-boot stiffness references I hear on here. No doubt I was skating so much better before I re-laced but I have some muscle building work to do before I can do that all the time. I was surprised by the huge mobility and ability difference I had in the much looser skate. Bonus was the skates were more comfortable when laced loose, too. Looking forward to being able to play entire games laced looser. Glad I took the suggestion to go down an eyelet.