Internally I’m sure many of us think of skating elements on a spectrum of easy to challenging. Pushing on a forward outside edge is easy, landing a triple Axel is challenging. And when we consider our safety, we implicitly assume that easier things are safe, whereas more challenging things are more likely to result in a fall or other injury.
Well… last week I took a terrible spill landing…. a Bunny Hop! I badly bruised both elbows, both knees and both lower ribs, which has been quite painful. Thankfully nothing worse and no head involved. I have dubbed this the Bunnicula Hop after the vampire pet bunny.
Bunny hops are easy, right? We learn them as little kids in the Basic Skills curriculum, as did I. So what’s going on here? Well… as a child I learned the Bunny Hop landing on the right foot. But I took a spill trying a Bunny Hop landing on the left foot. Why was I trying that? Because it is good to train things to both sides. In the process, I underestimated two things:
- The Complexity of Even a Simple Jump: When you break it down and think about it, a lot goes into a Bunny Hop. And the bigger the Bunny Hop is, the more these things matter. In swinging your leg front you create angular momentum in two axes. On one axis, the challenge is to not land too far forward or backwards. And on the other axis, the challenge is to counter-rotate with the shoulders so you do a Bunny Hop not a Waltz Jump. And the landing involves two feet, both of which need to not catch the toe pick. All this happens in a split second in a tightly coordinated manner.
- The Danger of Landing Forward: Any time we land a jump forward, there is danger of falling over our toe pick. That is probably why all the standardized large jumps land backward.
Thus with the humble Bunny Hop, we see something that is easy but dangerous. Dangerous because there is low margin for error and high consequence for that error. What else is easy but dangerous? Walking by the side of a cliff. Again… it’s no different from walking in your living room, except the consequences of one mis step could be catastrophic.
Lesson Learned: Never underestimate anything in skating, consider risk in terms of margin of error / consequences not just difficulty, and always use the meta process to train every movement, no matter how easy you think it might be.
Addendum: In ballet, hops take off and land on one foot, whereas jumps take off of one foot and land on the other. If ballet people get to re-do skating terminology, we would call it a Bunny Jump and a Loop Hop.