Stop and Slide

Welcome to Stop and Slide!

This post will discuss traveling on the game play surface by rolling, and sliding. Sliding can be thought of as moving without your wheels rotating, or in another way as extending your stop. There are a few ways to ease slide in and out of stopping, and rolling.

  

As you become a more dynamic skater you discover more stops, and subtleties of positioning in stops. As this blog progresses we will cover stopping itself more in depth. For now, let's explore the main way wheels travel on the floor, which is to say by rolling.

Rolling is a combination of rotational and translational motion. 

Center of mass moves in a translational motion

ie. Center mass of the circle moves in parallel with the surface.

The rest of the body is rotating around the center of mass.

ie. The cirlce rotates around its center.

Wheels can also travel via slide! There are many instances where pivoting your skates to allow for roll isn't the most efficient action. Stepping and sliding are great tools to travel around the pack, especially while maintaining a forward or backward facing position.

A slide is a (translational) move, without rotating.

Grab a partner and begin feeling out the differences between rolling, stopping, stepping, and sliding. Once you get comfortable easing between the different modes of travel you can use slide to reposition in front of blockers, and stepping to create force on impact.

Dynamic transitions between stop and slide also help with direction changes. In game play, being able to laterally change directions, while staying positioned forward is a real advantage. 

I'm working a lot on staying forward while maintaining contact, and in anticipation for impact.

On 10' lines you can practice lateral direction changes with hockey stop crossovers. 

You can incorporate slide into your practice this week by warming up with hockey stop crossovers, and then by working with a partner to ease into sliding, stopping, stepping, and rolling. There are a world of possibilities for your team to use slide in traveling on the game-play surface, positioning, and blocking. If you come up with some great ones, please share with us!

Next week we will cover maintaining body contact while blocking, as we continue the quest for footwork to help us maintain our strength in positioning. 

Note: If you're interested in nerding out  harder - I'm learning 3D browser modeling, and my first scene is letting the user control a box to illustrate hockey stops and c-cuts. 
You can access the model by clicking here.