Skating

Key focus

Go into the boards on an angle, head up and chin off your chest — never straight at them, never head-first, never with your back to the wall. You decide it several strides out, in the route you pick, which is why it is a skating decision and why it outranks everything else here. A back turned makes the contact a hit from behind — at any speed, whether or not your league allows checking; a tucked chin straightens the neck, and the spinal injury from a head-first collision with the boards can occur at walking speed. If contact is coming, skates parallel to the wall and take it on forearm and hip — not the point of your shoulder, and not the shoulder at all if you can help it. Body Contact and Battles covers the rest — read it in full.

Win the first three steps — they decide more races than your top speed does. The race to a loose puck, to a rebound, for the step on a defender is nearly always settled inside about three strides, which is a coaching observation rather than a measurement. Start with short, quick steps rather than long ones, and use a crossover start when you have to go sideways or turn back.

Change speed on purpose. One speed all shift is easy to defend and leaves you no gear to find. Glide to read the play, then explode out of it — separation comes from the difference between your speed and a defender's, not from your top speed. That is coaching craft rather than a measured finding.

Keep your feet moving when the puck arrives. A player who takes a pass and coasts gives up speed at the moment it was most needed. Skate first and handle second: push the puck into space and skate onto it.

Bend your knees until they cover or pass your toes, and stay low through the glide, the turn and the stop. Standing too tall costs you power, balance, reaction time and edge angle all at once.

Eyes up and scanning — out of a start, through a turn and with the puck. Looking down drags your upper body forward off the balls of your feet, and you cannot read a play you are not looking at.

Train your outside edges — they are where turning, cutting back and escaping come from. Inside edges make power; outside edges give control. Most players are far better on their insides, because an outside edge asks you to commit your weight out over the skate and that feels like falling until you trust it — a coaching observation, not a counted finding.

Take a crossover when you have room and want speed, and a tight turn when you have none. Coming off the wall, escaping a checker or cutting back, turn tight — a crossover needs room you do not have.

Stop on both sides, and go straight back the other way. A stop is only worth what follows it. A player who can stop only one way turns instead of stopping, carries themselves further from the puck and arrives at a battle decelerating rather than loaded. Stop at every blue line and goal line, half of them on the side you do not like.

If you defend, skate backwards fast enough to hold your gap, and pivot late. You cannot hold a gap you are not fast enough to hold, and once you have turned to skate forwards you have given up reacting to a change of direction. Keep your knees bent through the pivot — standing up in it is when players get beaten.

Overview

Skating is the only skill you use every second you are on the ice; everything else is performed while skating and is limited by how well you do it. It is a learned technique, and technique responds to deliberate practice at any age — which is the reason to work on it. That is not the same claim as saying practice rather than what you were born with is what separates a fast skater from a slow one, and nothing here establishes that one. How much of sporting performance deliberate practice accounts for is contested, and the honest figure is a good deal smaller than the folklore. Practice and Development owns that argument, carries the meta-analysis and the reply to it, and lists what the remainder is made of — starting age, physical attributes, coaching quality and genetics among them.

What a teammate notices in a good skater is not a pretty stride. It is a player who gets there first and arrives ready to do something. Most of that is the first three steps rather than top speed: nearly every race you contest is over within about three strides, which is a coaching observation rather than a measured finding, and starting is its own technique — short, quick steps off the front of the blades, the torso well forward and the head up. The rest is refusing to skate at one speed. Glide to look, then explode; keep your feet going when the puck arrives instead of coasting; and save a gear, because a skater flat out all shift has nothing left to change to.

All of it runs on a low, balanced skater, which is why the unglamorous basics are on this list. A player standing tall has nothing left to push with, cannot tilt a blade onto an edge, and is a beat late to everything — so knee bend is not posture for its own sake, it is the reserve that every start, turn and stop draws on. Your eyes work the same way: a player looking down at the puck has tipped their weight forward and stopped reading the play, which is the reason for being out there. And the edges you avoid are the ones that decide whether you can escape. Inside edges carry you forwards; outside edges are what let you cut back against pressure or slip a checker, and most players leave them untrained because trusting one feels like falling.

Then the skating turns into choices, and each one is about what happens next. The room you have decides the route: with space and a need for speed you arc through it on crossovers, but coming off the wall or with a checker on you there is no arc to take, and a tight turn is what gets you out. A stop earns its place through the step after it. A player who can stop on either side arrives at a battle set and goes straight back the other way; one who can stop only one way loops round instead, ends up further from the puck, and loses the stop-and-start exchange, one of the commonest races in the game. And for a defender it narrows to one job — travel backwards fast enough to hold your gap, because a gap you cannot skate is a gap you give up, and stay backwards as long as you can, because the moment you turn to skate forwards you can no longer react to a cut. The mechanics that make each of these work — the push out to the side, a fast return of the foot, the two pushes of a crossover — are in the sections below.

One instruction outranks all of it. Go into the wall around the rink on an angle, never straight at it — "[s]kating into the boards at an angle means better puck control and less risk of injury" (USA Hockey). Head up, chin off your chest. That is the part you control, several strides out, in the route you choose; what to do once contact is unavoidable belongs to Body Contact and Battles, and nothing here replaces it.

If you cannot yet skate at all, this is one step too early — public sessions and a learn-to-skate course first, not a hockey practice.

Every line, zone and named area of the ice is defined in Rink Map — the slot, the half-wall, the point, the trapezoid. Anything that means something particular to skating is defined here where it arrives.

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The Basic Stance

Everything starts here. Get the stance right and half the faults in the rest of this document disappear on their own.

Knee bend — the one that matters

Technique

Bend your knees until they cover or pass your toes — around 90 degrees at the knee

Position

Toe first, knee out in front of it, chest somewhere between the two

Never

Sit back behind your toes onto your heels

Never

Take the "sitting on a stool" cue into the forward stride — it belongs to backward skating

Never

Combine the stacked shoulders-knees-toes line with a deep bend — they are different positions

Key

Standing tall costs you power, balance, reaction time and edge angle

Read

If your thighs don't burn after a hard shift, you weren't low enough

Bend your knees until they are over or past your toes. The description that recurs most often across the coaching material used here is a knee angle in the region of 90 degrees — thigh heading toward horizontal — with your knees "covering" your toes, so that looking straight down you cannot see the toes of your skates.

Two cautions about the cues you will hear for this, because both are widely repeated in forms that do not survive contact with geometry:

• "Shoulders, knees and toes in a straight vertical line" is a different position from a 90-degree knee bend, and you cannot have both. If your knee is bent to 90 degrees, the knee is out past the toe and the shoulders are back behind it — that is the point. Treat the stacked-line image as a description of a shallower athletic stance, not as something to combine with a deep bend.

  Careful with the reference point here, because the next bullet says "chest over the toes" and that sounds like the opposite. It is not. Behind the knee and over the toes are measured against two different landmarks: the knee is out past the toe, so your shoulders can be behind the knee and still be out above the toes at the same time. The order front to back is toe, then knee out in front of it, with your chest somewhere between the two. What you are ruling out is the third position — shoulders back behind the toes, which is sitting back on your heels.

• "Sitting on a stool with your backside almost parallel to the ice" belongs to backward skating, not to the forward stride. That is Robby Glantz's cue and he gives it for the backward stance (see Backward Skating below), where you genuinely do sit that low. Carried into the forward stride it produces the sitting back fault: weight onto the heels, hips behind the feet, no ability to extend. Forwards skating: chest over the toes, backside back but not down on a chair.

Standing too tall costs you four separate things. Power — your push comes from extending a bent leg, and a straight leg has nothing left to extend, so you are shuffling rather than striding. Balance — a low centre of gravity is harder to knock over, which is why players get bumped off pucks by opponents who are not stronger than them. Reaction time — from a deep bend you can push in any direction immediately; from a straight leg you must bend first, and that extra beat is a goal. Edge angle — you cannot tilt a blade onto a steep edge without bending the knee and ankle, so tall skaters are stuck on flat blades.

Standing too tall is named as a common fault by source after source, and ranked by one of them — on assertion rather than on a count. The distinction is worth keeping, because the ranking is the part that gets repeated. Cutting Edge Ice Academy lists "skating too upright" among common edge-work mistakes and "standing too tall" among the reasons players struggle with outside edges. It prints the item first in both lists — and that is worth saying out loud rather than hiding, because neither list states a ranking of any kind. First in a bullet list is not first in a count. Both lists are also written about young players. Athletes Untapped does state a ranking, and it prints the item first too: its list of common skating mistakes opens "Playing Too Tall: This is the number one issue in youth hockey." Read the scope and the standing with it — that is youth hockey, asserted by one coaching provider, with no count and no citation behind it. It is still a ranking, and the two lists above are written about young players too, so the youth scope is not a reason to set this one aside and keep those. USA Hockey's Introduction To Body Contact names "[s]tanding too upright with your feet together" as a common error twice — but in taking a check, not in skating. The Hockey Institute's research summary goes no further than saying players "below ages eight or nine" generally skate more upright, crediting Marino (1984). And the other source that ranks a skating fault ranks a different one: Laura Stamm's material calls pushing straight back "one of the most common errors in hockey skating". So treat "the most common fault" as coaching emphasis rather than a measured finding — nobody has counted skating faults by frequency, and what these sources offer is emphasis stated as a rank. What is not in doubt is the mechanism above.

A useful self-check: if your thighs don't burn after a hard shift, you probably weren't low enough.

Chest up and back straight

Technique

Bend at the knees and hips, not at the waist

Never

Hunch your upper body forward — it kills your extension and blocks your view

Key

Chest proud, backside back — the bottom of a squat, not reaching for your toes

Technique

Hard acceleration is the one deliberate exception to bending at the knees and hips rather than the waist — torso forward roughly 45 degrees

Bend at the knees and hips, not at the waist. Hunching your upper body forward puts your weight onto the front of the blade, kills your extension and blocks your view. The image most coaches use is "chest proud, backside back" — like the bottom of a squat, not like reaching for your toes.

There is one deliberate exception, covered later: during hard acceleration you do lean the torso forward, roughly 45 degrees, because you're trying to drive horizontally rather than glide.

Weight over the balls of the feet

Position

Weight on the balls of the feet — the pads just behind your toes

Never

Sit on your heels — heel-heavy weight makes you slow to start and easy to knock backwards

Never

Ride your toes — toe-heavy weight is unstable and encourages toe running

Read

You should be able to lift your toes slightly inside the boot and still feel pressure through the front of the foot

Not on your heels, not on your toes. The balls of the feet — the pads just behind your toes. Heel-heavy weight makes you slow to start and easy to knock backwards. Toe-heavy weight makes you unstable and encourages "toe running" (see the stride faults below).

You should be able to lift your toes slightly inside your boot and still feel pressure through the front of the foot.

Head up

Technique

Eyes up and scanning the ice — not just chin up

Never

Look down at the puck — your head drags your upper body forward off the balls of your feet

Key

A player skating with their head down is skating with their weight wrong

Not "chin up" — eyes up, scanning the ice. This is a skating point, not just a hockey-IQ point: your head weighs a lot relative to your balance, and looking down at the puck pulls your whole upper body forward off the balls of your feet. Players who skate with their head down are also skating with their weight wrong. See Scanning and Anticipation for what to do with the information once your eyes are up.

Hands in front, off your body

Position

Hands out in front where you can see them in your peripheral vision

Technique

Stick on the ice, elbows relaxed and away from your ribs

Never

Tuck your hands into your hips — it shortens your reach, locks your upper body and empties the passing lane

Stick on the ice, hands out in front where you can see them in your peripheral vision, elbows relaxed and away from your ribs. Hands tucked into your hips do three bad things: they shorten your reach, they lock your upper body so it can't counterbalance your legs, and they leave you with no stick in the passing lane.

Arriving at the boards — head up, skates parallel, take it along your side

Action

Go into the boards on an angle, never straight at them

Goal

Better puck control and less risk of injury — a leg, side or arm absorbs most of the impact

Key

Arriving at the boards is the case you control completely, because it is decided several strides out in the route you pick

Never

Turn your back to the wall — at any speed, in any league, checking or not. It makes the contact a hit from behind, puts your head first into the boards, and you can neither see it nor brace for it

Never

Duck or tuck your chin going into the boards — a tucked chin straightens the cervical spine, which USA Hockey ties to almost all on-ice cervical spine injuries, citing a six-patient case series

Risk

The spinal injury from a head-down, head-first collision with the boards or a goal post can occur at walking speed — no speed is slow enough to make one safe

Technique

If contact is coming, skates parallel to the wall, forearm and hip into it — not the point of your shoulder, not the whole shoulder if you can help it. Head up, chin off your chest

Priority

Everything after the route is contact, not skating. Read Body Contact and Battles in full

There is one skating decision inside the most important safety rule in hockey, and this is it. Go into the boards on an angle, never straight at them — "Skating into the boards at an angle means better puck control and less risk of injury… A leg or side or an arm will absorb most of the impact" (USA Hockey, Introduction To Body Contact, "Angling In"). This is the case you control completely, because it is decided several strides out, in the route you pick long before anybody is near you — which is why it belongs in a skating document at all.

And the angle is the decision that keeps you out of the posture where the temptation starts. Arrive perpendicular with a checker behind you and turning away from the wall feels like protecting yourself. It is the opposite, three times over. It puts your head first into the boards anyway. It gives you a collision you can neither see nor brace for. And it converts the contact into a hit from behind — the collision USA Hockey addresses to the checker in the plainest words it uses, printed in both its Heads Up Hockey Program Guide and its Introduction To Body Contact: "Even a light hit from behind could inflict a severe head or neck injury." Read that warning for what it says: it is written to cover the light hit, so a slow checker is not the safe case. That is why never take that contact with your back to the boards holds at any speed, in any league, and whether or not the player closing on you is allowed to check you at all — it is a statement about the injury rather than about the rule book. ⚠️ Note which evidence belongs to which prohibition, because the two are against two different injuries. USA Hockey's finding that the injury can occur at walking speed is stated of the head-down, head-first collision, and not of the turn; what makes the turn dangerous at any speed is the light-hit warning, a separate sentence about a separate hazard. Nothing cited here ranks the two, and neither is the lesser one. Going in on an angle is what stops the choice from ever arriving.

Diagram from body contact and battles · What the shapes and fills mean

Everything after the route you pick into the boards is contact, not skating: what to do once a hit is unavoidable, why a chin tucked to the chest straightens the cervical spine and is the posture USA Hockey's Heads Up Hockey guide ties to almost all on-ice cervical spine injuries on head-on contact with the boards or a goal post (that quantifier is the guide's characterisation of research it credits, not its own count, and what can occur at walking speed is the injury), the parallel-skates and forearm-and-hip orientation, the spread-the-load fallback, and being hit from behind. Body Contact and Battles → Receiving a Hit Safely covers all of it — read that section in full. It is the most important section in that document, and nothing here replaces it.

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Edges — Hockey Is Played on Edges, Not on Flat Blades

What an edge is

Technique

The blade is ground with a hollow, leaving an inside edge (big-toe side) and an outside edge (little-toe side)

Never

Skate on a flat blade — both edges lightly touching is a resting position, not a skating one

Key

Almost every functional thing you do on skates is done with the blade tilted onto one edge

Read

Deeper bend, steeper edge, tighter arc

A hockey skate blade is not flat across its width. It is ground with a hollow down the middle, leaving two edges:

• The inside edge — the side nearest your other foot, on the big-toe side.
• The outside edge — the side away from your other foot, on the little-toe side.

Standing on a flat blade means both edges are lightly touching. That is a resting position, not a skating position. Almost every functional thing you do on skates is done with the blade tilted onto one edge.

Which edge you're on is set by how far you lean and how much you bend your knee and ankle. Deeper bend, steeper edge, tighter arc.

What each edge is for

Technique

Inside edges generate power — the stride, the first push of a crossover, stops, tight-turn drive, acceleration

Technique

Outside edges give control — turning, holding an arc, cutting back, puck protection, escapes, deception

Key

Your outside edges are almost certainly your biggest single skating weakness — a coaching observation, not a measured finding

Read

Committing your weight out over the skate feels like falling until you trust it

Never

Move between hollows. Skate on a consistent one instead, because your whole feel for the edges is calibrated to it

• Inside edges generate power. The forward stride, the first push of a crossover, hockey stops, tight-turn drive and acceleration all come off inside edges.
• Outside edges give control. Turning, holding an arc, cutting back against pressure, puck protection, lateral escapes and deception all live on outside edges.

Most players are far better on their inside edges than their outside edges, for a simple reason: inside edges are what you land on naturally when you're upright and nervous. Outside edges require you to commit your weight out over the skate, which feels like falling until you trust it. Coaching material names the same obstacles. Cutting Edge Ice Academy's list of why players struggle with outside edges runs: standing too tall, not bending the knees enough, weak ankle control, fear of leaning, poor balance, too little repetition, and not understanding body position. That list is written about young players, and this document applies it more widely on the strength of the mechanism rather than of the source.

Your outside edges are almost certainly your biggest single skating weakness. That's where the improvement is. Treat that as a coaching observation rather than a measured finding — no measurement ranks skating faults against each other, and where a coaching source ranks one it does so by assertion; what the coaching sources agree on is the mechanism above, that inside edges are what you land on naturally and outside edges have to be trained deliberately.

One equipment note, because it directly changes what your edges do: how deeply your blades are hollowed sets how much they bite. Deeper grips more, shallower glides more, neither is correct — but skate on a consistent hollow, because your whole feel for the edges is calibrated to it. See Equipment.

Basic edge drills

Action

C-cuts on one foot, forward and backward, inside edges then outside edges

Action

Inside-edge circles, then outside-edge circles, then figure eights forward and backward

Action

Slalom edge transfers and one-foot glides for ankle strength and balance

Technique

Build the outside-edge circle from walking pace on a wide arc, helmet on, adding lean only as the edge holds

Read

Wobbly is the edge of your control and where the improvement is; out of control means slow down

Convention

Ten to fifteen focused minutes, done often, over long exhausting sessions — one source's guidance

Do these slowly and cleanly. Edge work is not conditioning — one source recommends about ten to fifteen focused minutes, done often, over long exhausting sessions. Quality repetitions beat volume.

1. C-cuts. On one foot, push out and curve the blade back in so it carves a "C" into the ice. Do them forward and backward, on inside edges and then on outside edges, one foot at a time. This is the purest isolation of a single edge under load.
2. Inside-edge circles. Skate a faceoff circle on one foot, on the inside edge of the outer foot. Then the other direction. Then the other foot.
3. Outside-edge circles. The same circle, but held on the outside edge of the inner foot. This is the hard one, and it is the one people fall on, because committing your weight out over the skate feels like falling until the edge catches. Build up to it: start at walking pace on a wide arc, helmet on, and increase the lean only as the edge holds. Feeling wobbly means you are at the edge of your current control, which is where the improvement is — feeling out of control means you have gone past it, so slow down rather than pushing through.
4. Figure eights. Two markers (or two faceoff circles) and a continuous figure-eight path. Each lobe forces one foot onto an inside edge and one onto an outside edge, and the crossing point forces you to change edges under momentum. Do them forward, then do them backward — backward figure eights are where most players fall apart, which is exactly why they're valuable.
5. Slalom / edge transfers. Glide straight on two feet and roll both ankles left, right, left, right, weaving down the ice. Cheap, quick, and it builds the ankle strength everything else depends on.
6. One-foot glides. Glide the length of the ice on one foot, flat, then tilted in, then tilted out. Pure balance.

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The Forward Stride

The stride has three parts that cycle continuously: push (extension) → recovery → glide.

The push — sideways-and-back, never straight back

Never

Push straight back — the blade just slides along the ice and gives you nothing

Technique

Push out to the side and slightly back against the inside edge, so the blade cuts across its own direction of travel

Read

If it feels like walking or running, it is wrong — skating is not running

Action

Finish the push — extend until the leg is done, because most players stop far too early

Technique

Finish with the toe — a snap of the toe out and back, not a stab downward into the ice

Key

Laura Stamm's power-skating material puts the toe flick at roughly a third of the push's total power — her own principle, not a measurement

Options

Another coaching source here calls the toe flick itself a common mistake and wants the push through the heel and middle of the blade — ask your coach which they teach

You do not push backwards. A skate blade pushed straight back just slides along the ice and gives you nothing. You push out to the side and slightly back, at an angle, against the inside edge — the blade grips because it's cutting across its own direction of travel.

Laura Stamm's power-skating material calls pushing straight back "one of the most common errors in hockey skating", and explains why it happens: it's what walking and running feel like. Skating is not running. The motion has to be learned deliberately.

Full extension. Finish the push. Coaching references put the pushing leg's extension in the range of roughly 160–180 degrees at the knee — essentially straight — though at least one high-performance source argues the effective power range is nearer 130–170 degrees and that chasing a locked-out leg wastes time. (That 130–170° is the secondary source's retelling, and the page states it with no citation attached. The primary it corresponds to — Pagé's 1975 thesis — says "maximum power range of 130-155 degrees", and takes that from a general kinesiology textbook rather than measuring it on skaters.) Either way, the practical instruction is the same: most players stop their push far too early. Extend until the leg is done.

Finish with the toe. The last part of the push comes off the front of the blade — the "toe flick". Laura Stamm's power-skating material puts its contribution at roughly one third of the total power of the push — "it is actually responsible for one third of the power of the push" — as part of what she calls her "one third, one third, one third" principle, under which the heel, the middle and the toe of the blade each drive a third of it. That is one named coach's own principle, stated on her page with no measurement and no citation behind it, so take it as a reason to train the toe flick rather than as a share you can bank.

And take the flick itself as contested, because another source used here rejects it. Athletes Untapped lists "The Toe Flick" among common stride mistakes: "many players flick their toe backward, kicking ice up into the air. This wastes energy. The blade should stay close to the ice, pushing outward laterally through the heel and middle of the blade." That is a flat denial of the toe's third. Both are coaching positions and neither is a measurement, so this document teaches the flick without pretending it is settled — and the one thing the two do agree on is the direction: a snap of the toe out and back, close to the ice, never a stab downward or a kick upward.

The recovery — bring it back under you

Action

Bring the foot back in under your hips, not down in front of you

Technique

The recovery leg returns with the knee flexed and lands under your centre of mass, deep enough to push the moment the blade is down — one 1975 study's fast-versus-slow difference, not a law

Never

Land the recovery foot in front of you — it acts as a brake on every stride

Key

Speed is not just a bigger push; it's a faster return

After full extension your foot is a long way out to the side. Bring it back in under your hips, not down in front of you. The recovery leg returns with the knee flexed, and the knee is at its smallest angle at the moment the blade is set back down and the inside edge is set — not out in the air before it lands. Pagé's 1975 thesis puts that pre-push angle at 95–114 degrees — and that is the range it records for its fast skaters, not for everyone it filmed: "The smallest recorded angle at the knee ranged from 95-114 degrees for both the fast adult and youth skaters." Its appendix prints all fourteen subjects and the values run from 95 to 130 degrees; the ones outside the band are the slower skaters, who the thesis describes as failing "to bend the knee around the favorable range of 95-114 degrees prior to the initiation of the thrusting phase." Read it as a correlational comparison of fast against slow on fourteen players of mixed levels. A second figure of roughly 90–110 degrees is also in circulation, and it is NTC Hockey's — the stride-mechanics article in this document's sources gives that range for the recovery phase itself, "maintaining a flexed knee (90-110 degrees is optimal)", with no citation attached to it. It is not Pagé's, and it is not the same instant: Pagé's 95–114 is the angle immediately before the push begins, which his thesis lists separately from the recovery period. The foot lands under your centre of mass, ready to become the next glide leg or the next push.

Recovery speed is one of the clearest differences between fast and slow skaters. The Hockey Institute's summary of the skating-biomechanics literature puts it plainly — "faster skaters return the recovery skate to the ice after push-off quicker than slow skaters" — attributing it to Page (1975). That study backs the claim with numbers: Pierre Pagé's 1975 Dalhousie master's thesis Biomechanics of Forward Skating in Ice Hockey measured "[t]he mean total recovery time of the skate blade" at 0.37 seconds for the fast skaters compared with 0.48 seconds for the slow skaters — nearly a quarter off the return time. In a discriminant analysis with velocity removed, recovery time "accounted for 74.2 percent of the differentiation" between the fast and slow groups. (Read it for what it is: fourteen players — six bantam, two recreational, three university varsity and three professional — filmed on 16 mm in 1975, and correlational. The effect is large and the direction is not in doubt, but this is a small mixed-level sample, not a modern controlled study.) Speed is not just a bigger push; it's a faster return.

Landing the recovery foot in front of you is a specific and common error — it acts as a brake on every stride.

The glide

Position

Your weight rides on a single bent leg between pushes

Technique

Keep the knee bent during the glide

Never

Straighten up mid-glide — you then have to re-bend before the next push

Between pushes, your weight rides on a single bent leg. Keep the knee bent during the glide. Straightening up while you glide is the standing-tall fault reappearing mid-stride, and it means you have to re-bend before the next push.

Arms — and an honest disagreement between coaching schools

Convention

Front-to-back arm drive is the traditional and most widely taught method — a coaching choice, not settled fact

Options

Two of the sources here teach a side-to-side swing instead, mirroring the lateral leg push, and one of them calls front-to-back a cause of a narrow stride

Options

A front-to-back source in the same list calls that side-to-side swing a mistake — the two schools disagree about the motion itself, not merely its details

Never

Let the swing turn your shoulders off line — the side-to-side source that mentions shoulders and the front-to-back one both want them square up the ice

Key

Both schools of arm technique agree the action must be rhythmic and coordinated with the legs, not a random flail

Action

Use whichever arm action your coach teaches; start front-to-back if nobody has taught you either

The traditional and most widely taught method is front-to-back — arms driving straight forward and straight back, elbow bending on the way back, shoulders staying square up the ice. But this is a coaching choice, not settled fact, and the disagreement is sharper than it usually gets presented. Two of the coaching sources here teach a side-to-side swing outright, on the grounds that the legs push laterally and the arms should mirror them: Prodigy Hockey tells you to swing "from east to west instead of north south", and the Hockey Institute's research summary states it flatly — "[t]he correct movement of the arms/shoulders is side-to-side, to accomplish the action-reaction of the legs pushing to the side" — and adds that forward-and-back shoulder movement "causes a narrow stride." A front-to-back source in the same list, Athletes Untapped, calls that same side-to-side swing a common mistake which "twists the torso and fights forward momentum", and wants the arms driven "straight forward and straight back, exactly like a track sprinter."

So do not be told the two camps agree about swinging across your body — they disagree about the motion itself. What they do agree on is that the action must be rhythmic and coordinated with the legs, not a random flail, and that your shoulders should not be twisted off line: Prodigy Hockey wants them "square up ice" even while the hands travel east to west, and Athletes Untapped's whole objection to the lateral swing is that it twists the torso. So whichever direction your hands go, the shoulders stay square. Use whichever your coach teaches; if nobody has taught you either, start front-to-back — the default here because it is the more widely taught, not because it won the argument.

Common stride faults

• Short, choppy strides. Lots of leg movement, no extension, no distance covered. Looks busy, goes nowhere. Cure: exaggerate the finish of the push and the width of the leg.
• Running on your toes. Digging the front of the blade in and taking little running steps. This is the correct technique for the first two or three steps of a start, and wrong for everything after that. Cure: consciously get back onto the whole blade once you're moving.
• An arm swing that turns your shoulders off line. Whichever direction your hands travel, the shoulders stay square up the ice; the two coaching schools of arm action, and their genuine disagreement, are covered under the forward stride above.
• Standing tall. The root cause of most of the other stride faults.
• Skating with your head down. A hockey-IQ fault, a stride fault and a safety fault at once, and the third is the one that can hurt you. Your head pulls your weight forward off the balls of your feet (see Head up); you cannot read what you are not looking at; and the habit is what puts your head down at the moment you reach the wall, where the spinal injury from a head-down, head-first collision with the boards or a goal post can occur at walking speed — see Arriving at the boards. Cure: pick something at the far end of the rink and stride to it without looking at the puck.
• Recovering the foot in front instead of underneath. A brake on every stride.
• Pushing straight back. No grip, no power.

A self-test

Action

Skate goal line to goal line at a comfortable pace and count your strides

Action

Skate it again trying to use fewer strides

Read

If your stride count drops significantly, you weren't extending

Key

Repeat the goal-line-to-goal-line stride count monthly — a free, honest measure of your extension

Skate goal line to goal line at a comfortable pace and count your strides. Then do it again trying to use fewer. If your count drops significantly, you weren't extending. Repeat it monthly — it's a free, honest measure of your extension that requires no equipment and no coach.

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Acceleration and the First Three Steps

Starting is a different technique from striding, and this catches almost everybody.

Why the first three steps matter more than top speed

Read

You are constantly starting, stopping, turning and re-starting, not running long straight sprints

Goal

Win the loose puck, the rebound, the step on a defender, the recovery when you get turned around

Read

Almost every race you contest in a game is decided within about three strides — a coaching observation about how long a race lasts, not a measurement and not a claim you are at full speed

Key

Your top speed is rarely the deciding factor; your first three steps almost always are

Almost every race you contest in a game is decided within about three strides — the race to a loose puck, the race to a rebound, the step you gain on a defender, the recovery when you get turned around. That is a coaching observation rather than a measurement, and it is enough to act on: drive your first three steps hard, every time.

Hockey is not a sport of long straight sprints. The Hockey Institute's summary of game-play analysis reports that "the average length of time spent in a skating characteristic is 1.5 seconds", attributing it to Bracko (1998) — you are constantly starting, stopping, turning and re-starting. (The study is Bracko, Fellingham, Hall, Fisher and Cryer, "Performance skating characteristics of professional ice hockey forwards", Sports Medicine, Training and Rehabilitation 8(3):251–263. It observed twelve NHL forwards, and a "skating characteristic" is one of 27 discrete on-ice movement states — 15 scored by time, 12 by frequency — with two-foot glide the largest at 39% of on-ice time. That 1998 paper is paywalled, so the figures here are read from Bracko's own restatement of its tables — "Biomechanics powers ice hockey performance", Biomechanics, September 2004, page 47, which credits the 27 characteristics and its Tables 1 and 2 to the 1998 study and prints the glide figure as a whole number, 39, in both its prose and its table. The Hockey Institute page quoted in this same sentence prints 40 for the same finding — "Bracko (1998) found that NHL forwards spend 40% of the time on the ice gliding in a two foot balance position", read 2 September 2026 — so a reader who follows the link will find a different number, and nothing held here settles which of the two is the 1998 paper's own. But the 1.5-second figure itself is not in the published paper's abstract or in Bracko's own published tables; it appears on the Hockey Institute page quoted above, which is Bracko's own site, self-cited there to the 1998 study. The nearest published sequence — seventeen consecutive characteristics timed from a faceoff — averages nearer 1.8 seconds. Treat 1.5 s as the author's rounded rule of thumb rather than a reported statistic.) The direction — that game skating comes in bursts of a second or two — is not seriously disputed.

Treat that "three strides" as a coaching observation rather than a measured finding. No study was found that puts a stride count on how long a game race lasts, and it is repeated here because it matches Bracko's burst lengths, not because anyone has counted it. What is sourced is only the direction: USA Hockey's Introduction To Body Contact tells coaches to build practices around "winning the short races" to the puck. And it is not the same claim as the separate assertion that a skater reaches full speed in two to three strides, which the biomechanics literature does flatly contradict. This one is about how long a race lasts. That one is about how fast you are travelling at the end of it — and you are not yet at full speed when most races have already been settled.

Your top speed is rarely the deciding factor. Your first three steps almost always are.

Acceleration and the first three strides: the technique

Technique

Run the first few strides on the toes — the front two to three inches of the inside edges of both blades

Position

Feet turned out slightly, heels closer together than toes, so both blades bite

Technique

Lean the torso forward around 45 degrees, "nose over toes" — drive horizontally, don't lift yourself upwards. The torso goes forward; the eyes stay up

Technique

Short strides first, lengthening with each step — but the pushing leg still extends fully every time

Action

Quick feet, high stride rate — in the start, cadence beats reach

Options

Drive the arms hard if your coach teaches it — one research summary used here says arm movement is not an important factor in acceleration, so this is contested too

Technique

Use a T-start, the pushing skate set perpendicular behind you, to drive along the ice

Never

Hop from a standstill when starting straight ahead — that spends energy going up. For a sideways or turn-back start, use a quick crossover start

Starting is short, quick and toe-driven. Striding is long, extended and whole-blade. Specifically, for the start:

• Run the first few strides on the toes — roughly the front two to three inches of the inside edges of both blades. Your feet are turned out slightly (heels closer together than toes), so both blades bite.
• Lean the torso forward, around 45 degrees, "nose over toes". You want to generate horizontal force, not lift yourself upwards. If you feel like you'd fall on your face if you stopped moving your feet, that's roughly right. The lean is a torso cue and nothing else — the torso goes forward, the eyes do not. Keep your head and eyes up out of the start. It is the same point as Head up above: looking down at the puck drags your upper body forward off the balls of your feet, and in a start you are already as far forward as you meant to be. And the start you use to chase a loose puck into a corner is the one that finishes at the wall, where Arriving at the boards is what you need.
• Short strides first, lengthening with each step. The acceleration pattern goes short-short-short and then progressively longer as you convert into the full stride. Note that "short" describes what it looks like — the pushing leg should still extend fully; it just doesn't have far to travel yet.
• Quick feet, high stride rate. In the start, cadence beats reach.
• Arms drive hard — but not even this is agreed. It is the usual coaching instruction, and the Hockey Institute's acceleration summary says the opposite: "Arm movement appears not to be an important performance factor in acceleration", crediting Bracko (1996), and tells you to spend your attention on the lean, the toe-driven steps and the T-start instead. Nothing is lost by driving the arms; just do not treat it as the settled part.

One high-performance reference asserts that skaters reach full speed in as few as two to three strides when the start is done well. The biomechanics literature contradicts that flatly, and it is worth knowing why the claim persists. Budarick and colleagues tracked elite male and female players through a 34-metre sprint from a standing start and found that "the skaters did not reach their ultimate maximum speed even after 34 m, as marginal increases in speed (acceleration) still occurred" — elite men were still only around three-quarters of peak speed seven steps in, and did not enter the maximal-speed zone until the tenth step. Marino's review of the power-skating research says the same in plain words: "it takes several strides and a considerable distance for a skater to reach full velocity."

But something real does happen at the third stride, and that is almost certainly what the claim has garbled. It is the run-to-glide transition — the point where the running-style start turns into true skating. Budarick found that "the run to glide transition can be identified at approximately the third stride (fifth step), where marked differences in forward COM acceleration and step widths occurred", and the same transition had already been measured a decade earlier: Buckeridge and colleagues (2015) summarise it as "as hockey players reached the third stride, skating technique shifted towards a gliding motion, as characterised by larger knee flexion amplitudes" — note that this sentence sits in Buckeridge's literature review and reports Lafontaine (2007), not Buckeridge's own data, so it corroborates Budarick from a genuinely separate study rather than from the Buckeridge measurements themselves. So: not full speed in three strides, but the change from digging out to skating in three strides — which is still why the first three matter so much. The uncontroversial half of the same point is the part worth acting on: horizontal-driving starts beat vertical ones. The T-start (pushing skate set perpendicular behind you, like the top of a T) drives you along the ice; hopping from a standstill spends energy going up. A crossover start is a different tool, not a fault: when the start is sideways or a turn back, USA Hockey's Introduction To Body Contact drills "the quick cross-over start when beginning a backcheck", and the IIHF's Level I coaching programme has players perform a "crossover start through sticks" alongside the V-start.

The transition out of the start

Action

Once you're moving, get off your toes onto the full blade and lengthen into the stride

Never

Stay on your toes — you are then permanently accelerating and never gliding, for a low top speed

Action

Whistle starts — three explosive steps from a dead stop, then glide; ten of them

Action

Start out of a hockey stop in both directions, because most game starts begin from a stop

Action

Race a teammate over 10–15 metres; anything longer stops being an acceleration drill

Once you're moving, get off your toes and onto the full blade and lengthen into the stride described in the previous section. Players who stay on their toes are permanently accelerating and never gliding — they burn enormous energy and hit a low top speed.

Drills: whistle starts (three explosive steps from a dead stop, then glide — ten of them); starting out of a hockey stop in both directions, because most game starts begin from a stop rather than from standing still; and short races of 10–15 metres against a teammate. Anything longer stops being an acceleration drill.

Changing speed — the skating half of it

Action

Glide to read the play, then explode out of it — the glide buys the look, the start goes where you looked

Key

Separation comes from the difference between your speed and a defender's, not from your top speed

Never

Skate flat out the whole shift — you have no gear left to change to, and no moment to get your head up

Action

Change speed off the puck too — drift, let your check relax, then break

Convention

That a change of speed beats top speed is coaching craft, not a measured finding — Time and Space owns it and its sources

Change speed on purpose, because a skater at one speed is easy to defend. A defender matching a steady skater only has to pick a speed and hold it. Glide, and they have to decide whether to close harder or ease off; then explode out of the glide, and whichever they chose, you have made the difference between your speed and theirs, which is where separation comes from. Two players flat out at the same speed stay the same distance apart. The same works without the puck: drift, let your check relax, then break.

That a change of speed beats top speed is coaching craft rather than a measured finding, and Time and Space → Changing pace owns the argument and its sources; Puck Handling owns its use one-on-one. What belongs here is that it is a skating skill. The explosion is the first three steps above, or a hard crossover; the slow-down that sets it up is a glide on a bent knee or a stop that leaves you loaded. A skater who cannot start hard from a glide has only one speed to offer, however fast it is.

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Crossovers

A crossover is how you generate speed while travelling on a curve. Instead of losing speed through a turn, you gain it.

Crossovers: the mechanics

Key

A crossover has two pushes, and most players only do one

Technique

Stride-push — the outside skate drives low and hard to full extension on its inside edge, finished with the toe, then crosses over in front

Technique

Under-push — the inside skate pulls under and out on its outside edge to full extension, snapping at the toe

Never

Just pick one foot up and put it over the other — that is a crossover with half its propulsion switched off

Action

To go faster around a turn, drive the under-push leg back under your body faster — not wider, not harder

Action

Skate laps doing nothing but the under-push, never crossing the outside foot over at all

Skating around a circle to your left, your left skate is the inside skate and your right is the outside skate. There are two pushes per crossover, and most players only do one:

1. The stride-push (outside leg). Your outside (right) skate drives low and hard against the ice on its inside edge, to full extension, finished with the toe flick. It then recovers low across the ice and crosses over in front of the inside leg.
2. The under-push (inside leg). While that is happening, your inside (left) skate pulls under and out from beneath your body, held on its outside edge, until it reaches full extension and snaps at the toe. Robby Glantz calls this the "y-pull" because of the leg shape at the finish; it's also widely called the crossunder or X-push.

The under-push is the half that most players are missing. If you are simply picking one foot up and putting it over the other, you have a crossover with 50% of its propulsion switched off. The way to feel it: skate a circle and, for a few laps, do nothing but the under-push — never cross the outside foot over at all, just repeatedly pull the inside leg out from under you on its outside edge.

To go faster around a turn, drive the under-push leg back under your body faster. Not wider, not harder — faster.

Body position

Position

Knees deeply bent, back straight, and lean the whole body into the circle from the ankles

Key

The back of your helmet out in front of your knees

Never

Lean the upper body in while your legs stay upright — the edges aren't engaged, so you're just falling sideways

Technique

Land each skate on a genuine edge — inside skate on its outside edge, crossing skate on its inside edge

Never

Cross over too early — the under-push happens out to the side first, or your skates collide

• Knees deeply bent, back straight, and lean the whole body into the circle from the ankles, not from the shoulders. Glantz's cue is again "the back of your helmet out in front of your knees."
• Don't lean the upper body into the turn while your legs stay upright. That's the classic amateur crossover: it looks like leaning, but the edges aren't engaged, so you're just falling sideways.
• Land each skate on a genuine edge — the inside skate lands on its outside edge, the crossing skate lands on its inside edge, both at a real angle rather than flat.
• Don't cross over too early. The under-push has to happen out to the side before the outside foot comes over, or your skates collide.

Strong side and weak side

Read

Almost everyone has a stronger crossover direction and a weaker one — find out which is yours

Risk

You drift toward turns in your strong direction without noticing, which makes you predictable

Risk

A defenceman with a weak backward crossover side gets beaten wide there once an opponent notices

Risk

A winger with a weak side takes a worse backcheck route — the race back to your own end — because turning that way costs speed

Convention

Two laps weak for every one strong, sustained over a season — a rule of thumb, not a measured optimum

Never

Take any claim about which side is the weak one as fact — one power-skating coach says it is usually the left, and nothing measured establishes it

Almost everyone has a stronger crossover direction and a weaker one. This is not only a beginner problem — Robby Glantz writes that of the hundreds of professionals he has coached, "everyone of them asks me to work on there weaker side". He also adds a parenthesis this document will not pass on as fact, and you should know it exists rather than meet it cold: "(usually the left side)". That is one coach's impression of his own students. Nothing measured establishes which side is more commonly weak, so find out which is yours instead of assuming you already know.

The cost of a weak side in games is concrete and specific:

• You will drift toward turns in your strong direction without noticing, which makes you predictable.
• A defenceman with a weak backward crossover side gets beaten wide on that side once an opponent notices, and good opponents notice within a period.
• Wingers with a weak side take a worse route on the backcheck — the race back to your own end — because turning that way costs them speed.

Fix: whenever you do circle work, weight it deliberately toward the weak side — a common coaching prescription is two laps weak for every one strong, sustained over a season rather than a week. Weak-side circle work is dull, and it is worth doing anyway. The ratio is a rule of thumb, not a measured optimum; the part that matters is that the imbalance is deliberate and persistent.

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Backward Skating

Skating backwards well is the defining physical skill of a defenceman, and the clearest divide between defencemen who can hold a tight gap and those who cannot. That ranking is coaching craft rather than measurement — no study ranks the skills that separate them — but the mechanism below is not in dispute. See Defender and Defending the Rush for what you do with it tactically; this is how you do it physically.

Why it's a defenceman's skill specifically

Key

Gap control is entirely a skating problem — you cannot hold a gap you are not fast enough to hold

Risk

Too big a gap and you get walked into the zone; pivot early to skate forwards and the first change of direction beats you

Read

Too big a gap and an early pivot are both skating failures being scored as decision failures

Action

Forwards need backward skating too — retreating through the neutral zone, and covering for a pinching defenceman

Gap control — the distance you maintain between yourself and an oncoming puck carrier — is the core defensive skill, and it is entirely a skating problem. You cannot hold a tight gap against a forward with speed unless you can travel backwards nearly as fast as they travel forwards. Defending the Rush covers the distances and puts it at around a stick and a half as the carrier crosses the centre red line — a figure the one published page anchoring a distance to that line disagrees with, printing two stick lengths there, and one that document calls a guide, not a law, moving with your backward speed and the attacker's skill, which is precisely why this is a skating problem before it is a positioning one. A defenceman who can't will do one of two things: leave a huge gap (and get walked into the zone), or pivot early to skate forwards (and get beaten by the first change of direction). Both of those are skating failures being scored as decision failures.

Forwards need it too, in smaller doses: reading the play while retreating through the neutral zone, and any forward covering for a pinching defenceman — pinching means a defenceman stepping down from the offensive blue line to keep a puck in the zone, which leaves their spot empty and someone else has to fill it.

The backward stride — C-cuts

Technique

One foot at a time carves a C into the ice, pushing out then back in, while the other skate glides straight back

Action

Push one foot at a time to full extension, finishing with a snap of the toes inward

Action

Transfer your full weight onto the pushing foot during the thrust

Action

Recover the foot back underneath you, exactly as in the forward stride

Never

Push weakly with both feet at once — the slow way most beginners default to

The engine of backward skating is the C-cut: one foot at a time carves a "C" or half-moon into the ice, pushing out and then back in, while the other skate glides straight back beneath your body.

• Push one foot at a time to full extension, finishing with a snap of the toes inward. Pushing weakly with both feet at once is the slow way that most beginners default to.
• Transfer your full weight onto the pushing foot during the thrust. Weight left behind on the other skate is power you didn't apply.
• Recover the foot back underneath you, exactly as in the forward stride.

Stance — even lower than forwards

Position

Sit as if on a stool, backside almost parallel to the ice, knees covering your toes, back straight

Key

The back of your helmet in front of your knees — a hip hinge, not a tip at the waist

Position

Weight over the middle of the blade — you should be able to lift your toes and still feel it fully loaded

Never

Lean too far forward — weight on the front of the blade kills speed and control going backwards

Never

Swivel your hips during the recovery — it destroys directional control and drifts you off your line

Read

If you feel the front of the blade digging, you have leaned too far forward whatever your helmet is doing

Glantz's material describes the backward stance as sitting on a stool with your backside almost parallel to the ice, knees bent deeply enough that they cover your toes, back straight, and the back of your helmet in front of your knees.

The critical error is the reverse of the forward-skating one: leaning too far forward puts your weight on the front of the blade, which kills both speed and control when you're travelling backwards.

"Too far" needs a boundary you can actually feel, because the cue above and the fault here point in the same direction. Use two different checks for two different body parts:

• Upper body — use Glantz's cue. The back of your helmet in front of your knees. That is a hip-hinge position: you get there by sitting your backside down and back onto the stool, which throws your chest forward as a counterweight. It is not achieved by tipping over at the waist.
• Feet — use blade pressure as the referee. Weight sits over the middle of the blade. If you can feel the front of the blade digging, or you are up on the ball of your foot, you have gone past it regardless of what your helmet is doing. You should be able to lift your toes slightly inside the boot and still feel the blade fully loaded underneath you.

The failure mode is bending at the waist instead of sinking at the hips: that moves your chest forward without moving your backside back, so your weight goes onto the toe of the blade. Sink first, then let the chest follow. Swivelling your hips during the recovery is the other common fault — it destroys your directional control and sends you drifting off the line you meant to hold.

And, as always: standing tall is why defencemen get beaten wide.

Backward crossovers

Goal

C-cuts are your cruising gear; backward crossovers are your acceleration and your lateral coverage

Technique

The outside leg lifts and steps over the top of the inside leg, landing on its inside edge

Technique

The inside leg pulls under and out, rolling from inside edge to outside edge, finishing at full extension off the toe

Position

Shoulders level and hips open to the play, so you keep the puck and the attacker in view

Key

The under-pull of the inside leg is the half most players are missing

Never

Deliberately switch the outside leg off — both sources here give it a push of its own, a C-cut driven to full extension

Action

Learn crossovers standing still and C-cuts separately, then both together, then around the circles

C-cuts are your cruising gear; backward crossovers are your acceleration and your lateral coverage. When an attacker steps on the gas or attacks a lane, C-cuts alone will not keep up.

The mechanics mirror the forward crossover — the outside leg crosses, the inside leg pulls under. Skating backwards around a circle to your left, your left skate is the inside skate (nearest the centre of the circle) and your right is the outside skate.

• The outside leg crosses over. Your outside (right) skate lifts and steps over the top of the inside leg, landing on its inside edge on the far side. How To Hockey states it directly: "cross the outside leg over the inside leg. By crossing over with your outside leg you will be forced to bring the inside leg under." Robby Glantz teaches the same manoeuvre with the opposite emphasis, so know both before a coach corrects you: he calls it a crossunder and asks you to picture it "by keeping both skates on the ice (not kicking over with the outside leg)", with the inside leg doing the pulling. Same X on the ice, different feel to learn it by.
• The inside leg pulls under and pushes. As the outside foot crosses, your inside (left) skate is pulled under and out from beneath you, rolling from its inside edge onto its outside edge, finishing at full extension with a drive off the toe. How To Hockey again: "Your inside leg will start on it’s inside edge, you will pull it under your body and transfer to your outside edge, and then get a final push by fully extending your leg and driving off with the toe."
• The legs form an "X" before recovery, and the inside leg recovers back underneath your hips.
• Keep your shoulders level and your hips open to the play so you can still see the puck and the attacker while you're covering ground sideways.

If you take one thing from this section: the under-pull of the inside leg is the half most players are missing. Stepping the outside foot over without pulling the inside leg out from under you is a crossover with most of its power switched off — and for a defenceman, that is the difference between holding a gap and getting beaten wide.

Learning progression. How To Hockey's step-by-step method starts off the circle and then breaks the manoeuvre apart on it. First, the two building blocks: crossovers while standing still, and backward C-cuts. Then use both together, taking a few backward strides and crossing over as you glide. Then take it around a circle, and there isolate the legs one at a time — first the inside leg, over-extending the C-cut and pulling it right under your body while the outside leg just glides; then the outside leg, crossing it over the inside one, which forces the inside leg under whether you think about it or not; then both together, with "a push from both legs". Last, practise the quick version, which is the one you will actually use coming out of a transition.

Backward skating drills

Action

Goal line to goal line C-cuts, nothing else, full extension on each push

Action

Backward figure eights around two faceoff circles, and single-leg backward skating for edge strength

Action

Partner mirroring — hold a constant gap of about one stick length while your partner changes speed and direction; that is a drill setting rather than a game distance

Action

Transition combinations — backward crossovers, mohawk, forwards, pivot back to backwards, repeat

Key

Partner mirroring is the drill that most directly transfers to games

• Goal line to goal line C-cuts. Nothing else. Full extension each push.
• Backward figure eights around two faceoff circles, and single-leg backward skating for edge strength.
• Partner mirroring. Your partner skates forwards with changes of speed and direction; you skate backwards holding a constant gap of about one stick length. That figure is a drill setting chosen to keep you working, not the gap a game asks for: the game distance changes with where you are on the ice, and Defending the Rush sets out that ladder — including that the published coaching pages disagree with each other and with that ladder, the only page found anchoring a distance to the centre red line printing two stick lengths there rather than a stick and a half. This is the drill that most directly transfers to games.
• Transition combinations. Backward crossovers → mohawk turn → forwards → pivot back to backwards → repeat. This builds the conditioning needed to keep your technique clean when you're tired, which is when gaps get lost.

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Pivots and Transitions

A pivot (or transition) is changing between skating forwards and skating backwards without stopping. Losing speed in a pivot is losing the play.

Forward to backward — the open-hip pivot

Action

Stay square as long as you can — every moment going forwards is a moment you could step up on the puck, moving forward to challenge the carrier

Technique

Open your hips, not your shoulders; the hips and lead leg initiate and the upper body follows

Technique

Open the lead skate outward, transfer weight onto it, bring the trailing skate around, and start C-cutting immediately

Never

Turn your shoulders first — it spins your head off the play and your eyes off the puck carrier

Never

Stand up as you pivot — that is precisely when players get beaten

You're skating forwards and need to be skating backwards, facing the same way you were.

• Stay square as long as you can. Every moment you're still going forwards is a moment you could still step up on the puck — moving forward to challenge the carrier early. That is not the same move as a pinch, where a defenceman steps down from the offensive blue line to keep a puck in.
• Open your hips, not your shoulders. The hips and the lead leg initiate; the upper body follows. Turning your shoulders first spins your head off the play and takes your eyes off the puck carrier.
• Open the lead skate outward, transfer weight onto it, bring the trailing skate around, and immediately start C-cutting so you don't decelerate.
• Keep your knees bent through the whole thing. Most players stand up as they pivot, which is precisely when they get beaten.

The mohawk

Technique

Heels come together and the feet open out toward 180 degrees, rotating heel-to-heel without crossing your feet

Goal

Change forwards-to-backwards or backwards-to-forwards fast and low, with no crossover step

Read

The mohawk needs real hip mobility and comfortable outside-edge control, so it is usually taught after crossover-based pivots

Key

Elite defencemen flow between C-cuts, crossovers, edge changes and mohawks without thinking about which one they're using

A mohawk is a pivot in which your heels come together and your feet open out toward 180 degrees, so you rotate through a heel-to-heel position without crossing your feet. It's fast, it keeps you low, and it lets you go forwards-to-backwards or backwards-to-forwards without a crossover step.

It also requires real hip mobility and comfortable outside-edge control, which is why it's usually taught after crossover-based pivots. It's worth the work: elite defencemen flow between C-cuts, crossovers, edge changes and mohawks without thinking about which one they're using.

Backward to forward

Read

You're retreating, the puck turns over, and you need to go

Technique

Open the hip toward the direction you want to travel, plant, and drive out on your inside edge with a short toe start

Key

The backward-to-forward transition is where most forwards lose a step on a rush going the other way

Action

Drill the backward-to-forward transition in both directions specifically

The reverse transition — you're retreating, the puck turns over, and you need to go. Open the hip toward the direction you want to travel, plant, and drive out on your inside edge with a short toe start. This transition is where most forwards lose a step on a rush going the other way, and it's worth drilling both directions specifically.

Which way to pivot — a coaching default, not a law

Convention

Defencemen pivot toward the boards rather than the middle — the standard coaching instruction, not a law

Goal

If you are beaten during the pivot, be beaten toward the wall, where the boards are a second defender and the angle is poor — how much the boards help depends on how wide your rink is

Never

Read "the boards are a second defender" as a licence to ride an opponent into them — every rulebook has a boarding rule that reaches that, and they do not grade it the same way

Options

Some coaches want a pivot to the middle on specific reads — when pivoting away would blind you to the puck, or when you have inside help

Read

The correct pivot direction is decided by where the attacker is, not by which way you happen to be good at

Action

Ask your coach which pivot direction they want, and drill both

Key

Pivot late — once you've turned to skate forwards, you have given up your ability to react to a change of direction

The standard coaching instruction for defencemen is to pivot toward the boards, not toward the middle of the ice. The reasoning is about failure mode, not aesthetics: if the pivot goes wrong or the attacker beats you during it, you want to be beaten toward the wall — where the boards act as a second defender and the shooting angle is poor — rather than beaten into the slot, which is a scoring chance. The slot is the ice directly in front of the net between the two faceoff circles, running from the top of the circles down to the goalmouth.

What the shapes and fills mean

How much the wall is worth here depends on the sheet you are on. The IIHF book sets a width range — 26 m to 30 m, roughly 85 ft to 98 ft — where the NHL sets a single 85 ft, so an IIHF sheet runs from an NHL width to about thirteen feet wider. ⚠️ Do not read a width range as an international peculiarity, and do not hear "wide ice" as a foreign thing. USA Hockey Rule 102(a) and Hockey Canada Rule 1.2(a) each set a range too, and both of them reach 100 ft — wider than any legal IIHF sheet. Note the difference in force, though: those two books word the size as a recommendation, where the IIHF states its range as the official size and requires approval for a deviation. The practical version is that the width you play on is a fact about the building you are standing in, not about whose flag is on the rule book. On a wide rink an attacker forced outside still has room to keep skating, which is why Rink Map says that on wide ice gap control and stick position matter more than steering. ⚠️ That is not a licence to assume your own rink is wide — the same document tells a British reader to assume theirs is smaller than both standards until measured, and it owns those dimensions. What does not change with width is the direction of the choice: the slot is where goals come from, so being beaten toward the wall is the better failure on any sheet. ⚠️ And being beaten toward the wall is not an invitation to ride them into it — driving an opponent into the boards is a separate act, every rulebook has a boarding rule that reaches it, and they do not grade it the same way: Rules Primer → Body fouls sets out the tiers book by book.

Two honest caveats:

• Pivoting toward the boards is a default, not an absolute. Some coaches will have you pivot to the middle in specific reads — for example when you must keep your eyes on the puck and pivoting away would blind you, or when you have inside help and the greater risk is the attacker cutting behind you. Ask your coach which they want.
• Either choice requires you to be competent pivoting both ways, because the correct pivot direction is decided by where the attacker is, not by which way you happen to be good at. Drill both.

The more universal version of the instruction: pivot late. Once you've turned to skate forwards, you have given up your ability to react to a change of direction. Hold your backward skating as long as you possibly can.

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Falling and Getting Up

Learn-to-skate progressions teach this before they teach stopping, and for a good reason: you will fall long before you can stop, and a fall you have rehearsed costs you a bruise while a fall you have not can cost you a wrist or a head. It takes about five minutes to learn and almost nobody who came to hockey as an adult has been shown it.

How to fall

Action

Get low first — bend the knees and sink as you feel yourself going

Action

Go to the side, onto your hip, thigh and the side of your backside

Never

Land on your tailbone, your knees, or a straight arm

Action

Going into the boards, skates parallel to the wall if there is any time at all. Forearm and hip meet the wall — not the point of your shoulder, not the whole shoulder if you can help it

Never

Put a hand out to break your fall to the ice — a locked arm takes your whole weight through one wrist. Facing the wall with no time to turn, spread stick, gloves and forearms on the glass instead

Action

Slide with it — sliding spreads the impact over time, and fighting the fall turns it into a collision

Key

Falling backwards to the ice, tuck your chin to keep your skull off it. Sliding toward the boards, head up — turn skates or side to them, or arms out if you cannot; anything but your head first

Key

Going forwards into the boards, head up and chin off your chest — a tucked chin straightens the cervical spine, and the spinal injury from that head-first collision can occur at walking speed

• Get low first. As you feel yourself going, bend the knees and sink. The closer you are to the ice when you land, the less there is to absorb.
• Go to the side, onto the fleshy part. Aim for your hip, thigh and the side of your backside. Those have padding, both anatomically and in your kit. Avoid landing on your tailbone, your knees, or a straight arm.
• Do not stick a hand out to catch yourself as you fall to the ice. A locked, outstretched arm concentrates your whole body weight into a wrist. Keep the hands loose and close, and let your side take it.
• Slide with it. Ice lets you slide, and sliding spreads the impact over time instead of delivering it all at once. Fighting the fall is what turns it into a collision.
• Tuck your chin toward your chest if you are going over backwards. This one stops the back of your head hitting the ice.
• If the fall leaves you sliding toward the boards, you are in the wall case, not the ice case. Turn so your skates, legs and side meet the boards first if you can; if you cannot — a head-first slide on your stomach may not let you — get your arms out, anything but your head first, and get your head up. USA Hockey's Heads Up Hockey guide asks players to keep their heads up "whether they’re skating or sliding after a fall", and its sliding drill has them take the end boards "using arms, knees, legs and skates to absorb the impact", with the heads-up position stressed. The tucked chin is for the ice, never for the wall.

How to get up

Priority

Assess first — two or three seconds to check you are not injured, before anything else

Never

Get up fast off a fall you have not checked — the two or three seconds are the check, not a formality

Never

Play on if you are hurt. Stay down instead and let play be stopped

Risk

A fall is one of the ways a concussion happens, and you need not have been knocked out — Conditioning and Recovery has the red flags and the signs

Action

Roll onto your hands and knees, then bring one skate up and plant it flat beside your hands, knee at a right angle

Action

Push down through that front skate and your hands, and bring the second skate up beside it

Technique

Come up into your stance — knees bent, chest up — not up to standing tall

Key

The order is assess, then hurry; two seconds against six is a scoring chance

1. Assess first. The cited get-up sequence opens with "take a moment to assess" — two or three seconds to check you are not injured. Do this before anything else, and do not let the rest of this section talk you out of it. Getting up fast off a fall you have not checked is how a manageable injury becomes a worse one — that is coaching caution rather than a sourced clinical finding, and no study is cited for it here. If you are hurt the correct action is to stay down and let play be stopped. And know what you are checking for: a fall is one of the ways a concussion happens, and you do not have to have been knocked out for it to be one — Conditioning and Recovery → Concussion has the red flags that mean an ambulance and the ordinary signs to look for.
2. Roll onto your hands and knees, facing the ice.
3. Bring one skate up and plant it flat beside your hands, knee bent to roughly a right angle. This is the whole trick — you are building a base under yourself before you try to rise.
4. Push down through that front skate and your hands, and bring the second skate up beside it.
5. Come up into your stance — knees bent, chest up — not up to standing tall. Rising all the way up just means you fall again.

Practise it at home on a carpet until it needs no thought, then do it on the ice a few times deliberately at the start of a session. Once you have cleared step 1, speed matters: a shift does not stop because you fell over, and the difference between two seconds and six seconds on the ice is a scoring chance. The order is assess, then hurry — not the other way round.

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Stops and Starts

The two-foot hockey stop

Technique

Rotate your hips roughly 90 degrees so both skates turn perpendicular to your direction of travel, and let the blades scrape

Position

Feet roughly shoulder-width apart, shoulders level, weight toward the balls of the feet, chest up, head facing forward

Technique

The outside skate rides its inside edge; the inside skate rides its outside edge

Action

Keep the knees bent and sink further as you stop — the stop is absorbed by your legs

Never

Lean back away from the stop — that's the instinct, and it puts you on your backside

Risk

Stopping on the leading inside edge alone is slower, costs more energy and wears the edge — one uncited Wikipedia sentence, and nothing else cited here says it

Risk

A one-edge stop also leaves you off-balance for the start out of it — this document's reasoning rather than a sourced claim

The standard stop. From forward motion, rotate your hips roughly 90 degrees so both skates turn perpendicular to your direction of travel, and let the blades scrape the ice.

• Feet roughly shoulder-width apart, shoulders level.
• The outside skate (the one further from the side you're turning toward, which ends up leading) rides its inside edge; the inside skate rides its outside edge.
• Knees stay bent and sink further as you stop. The stop is absorbed by your legs. Straightening up throws you over.
• Weight toward the balls of the feet, chest up, head facing forward.
• Don't lean back away from the stop — that's the instinct, and it puts you on your backside.

The reason both edges matter, and know how thin the evidence for it is. Wikipedia's Hockey stop article states it: "Sometimes skaters like to use just the inside edge of their outside skate. While they are still stopping, it takes longer and more energy as well as wears out the edges faster." ⚠️ That sentence carries no citation, and nothing else cited here says it — the Hockey Monkey page lists the both-feet-inside-edge stop without comment, and the article as a whole now carries Wikipedia's own "relies on a single source" banner over a 1989 newspaper feature that says nothing about energy or wear. So treat it as folk knowledge rather than a finding. What does not depend on it: a stop on one edge leaves you off-balance for the start out of the stop, which is the point of stopping in the first place — and that is reasoning from the section above, not a sourced claim either.

The one-foot stop

Technique

The same idea on one skate — usually the leading foot on its inside edge, the other lifted or trailing

Goal

Quicker to initiate, and it leaves one foot free to push off immediately in a new direction

Read

The one-foot stop demands more balance — learn the two-foot stop first

Same idea, on one skate — usually the leading foot on its inside edge, with the other skate lifted or trailing. It's quicker to initiate and lets you keep one foot free to immediately push off in a new direction, which is why you see it constantly in games. It demands more balance. Learn the two-foot stop first.

The snowplough

Technique

Point both toes slightly inward, press on both inside edges, and bend the knees to push the blades outward

Risk

The snowplough is slow and it doesn't leave you in an athletic position

Options

The half-snowplough, one foot ploughing, sheds a little speed without committing to a full stop

Key

The snowplough always works

The beginner's stop: point both toes slightly inward, press on both inside edges, and bend the knees to push the blades outward against the ice. It's slow and it doesn't leave you in an athletic position, but it always works, and the half-version (one foot ploughing) is genuinely useful for shedding a little speed without committing to a full stop.

The point most players never fix

Read

If you can only stop properly one way it costs you constantly — how common that is has never been counted, so test your own weak side rather than assume

Risk

You unconsciously take longer routes to avoid the weak side, and turn instead of stopping, which carries you further from the puck

Risk

You arrive at battles decelerating instead of set, and lose the stop-and-start-back-the-other-way exchange

Action

In any stop-and-start drill, alternate sides deliberately rather than always stopping the comfortable way

Action

In your own skating, stop at every blue line and goal line, half of them on the weak side

A great many players can only stop properly one way, and it costs them constantly — how many has never been counted, so test your own weak side rather than assume you are the exception. If your other side is a wobbly snowplough you will, unconsciously, take longer routes to avoid stopping that way, turn instead of stopping (which carries you further from the puck), arrive at battles decelerating instead of set, and lose the stop-and-start-back-the-other-way exchange — one of the most common races in the game.

Fix: in any stop-and-start drill, alternate sides deliberately rather than always stopping the comfortable way, and in your own skating stop at every blue line and goal line, half of them on the weak side.

Starting out of a stop

Goal

The stop should leave you loaded — low, on your edges, weight balanced — so the first step out is immediate

Action

Practise them as one movement: stop, three explosive steps the other way, stop, three steps back

Key

A stop is only valuable because of what follows it

A stop is only valuable because of what follows it. The stop should leave you loaded — low, on your edges, weight balanced — so the first step out is immediate. Practise them as one movement: stop, three explosive steps the other way, stop, three steps back. That single drill contains most of what hockey actually asks of your legs.

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Tight Turns and Agility

A turn is not a crossover

Technique

A crossover generates speed through a wide arc — your feet cross and you accelerate

Technique

A tight turn changes direction in the smallest possible space — feet parallel, both skates on the ice, carving a small radius

Position

In the tight turn the outside skate is on its inside edge and the inside skate on its outside edge

Read

Take a crossover route when you have room and want speed; take a tight turn when you have no room

Options

Coming off the wall, escaping a checker, cutting back on the forecheck — pressure in the opposition's end — or turning back into the middle after a dead rush

These are different tools and players conflate them constantly:

• A crossover is for generating speed through a wide arc. Your feet cross; you're accelerating.
• A tight turn is for changing direction in the smallest possible space. Your feet stay parallel and both skates stay on the ice; you carve around a very small radius on two edges — the outside skate on its inside edge and the inside skate on its outside edge — leaning your whole body into the turn.

You take a crossover route when you have room and want speed. You take a tight turn when you have no room — coming off the wall, escaping a checker, cutting back on the forecheck — the pressure you apply in the opposition's end to win the puck back, as opposed to the backcheck, which is racing back toward your own end — or turning back into the middle after a rush is dead.

How to turn tighter

Key

You cannot make a tight turn standing up — radius is set by lean angle, and lean angle by knee and ankle bend

Action

Sink lower, get the edges to a steeper angle, and keep the chest up

Technique

Let your whole body go into the circle, not just your feet

Never

Drop your gaze through the turn — it drags your weight forward

Radius is set by lean angle, and lean angle is set by knee and ankle bend. You cannot make a tight turn standing up. Sink lower, get the edges to a steeper angle, keep the chest up, and let your body — not just your feet — go into the circle.

Keep your head and eyes up through the turn. Turning is one of the moments where players reflexively drop their gaze, and it drags their weight forward.

Edge work in traffic

Read

Games rarely give you a clean circle

Action

Cutback or escape turn — tight-turn back against your own momentum to shake a checker committed to your original direction

Action

Lateral escapes — one or two hard lateral pushes sideways out of a stick-check, without giving up the puck

Technique

Turning under a stick means dropping your shoulder and your knee bend at the same time, so you pass under a checking stick rather than into it

Key

The cutback is entirely an outside-edge skill

Never

Train the tight turn one way only — it has a weak side too

Games rarely give you a clean circle. What you actually need is:

• The cutback / escape turn. With the puck along the wall, tight-turn back against your own momentum to shake a checker who is committed to your original direction. This is entirely an outside-edge skill.
• Lateral escapes. One or two hard lateral pushes to move sideways out of a stick-check without giving up the puck.
• Turning under a stick. Dropping your shoulder and your knee bend at the same time so you pass under a checking stick rather than into it. See Body Contact and Battles.
• Turning both ways at speed. The tight turn also has a weak side. Same fix as everything else in this document.

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Skating With the Puck — and by Position

Action

Do your crossover, transition and tight-turn drills with a puck at least half the time

Never

Slow down the moment you receive the puck — the fixes are in Puck Handling, but the fault shows up in your stride

Convention

These positional priorities assume a 2-1-2 forecheck and a low zone collapse — a containment structure weights them differently, so ask your coach

Convention

Centre — prioritise transitions, turning both ways, and holding technique together when tired

Convention

Winger — prioritise the first three steps, straight-line speed, and the forecheck-to-backcheck reversal

Convention

Defenceman — prioritise backward skating, backward crossovers, pivots both ways, and lateral mobility along the blue line

Action

Goaltenders — train the position-specific movement, shuffles and T-pushes and post play, with a goalie coach

Key

If you are changing position, the skating is where the switch is won or lost

Two topics belong to skating but are covered in full elsewhere, so they are linked rather than repeated here.

Skating with the puck. Adding a puck degrades your stride until you deliberately train it: your arms stop driving, your head drops, your feet narrow, and the usual result is that you stop striding and coast. The visible symptom is a player receiving the puck and immediately slowing down, at the moment they most needed speed. The fixes — skate first and handle second, push the puck into space and skate onto it, one-handed carries, head up with the puck in peripheral vision — are in Puck Handling → Carrying at Speed, which covers them in full. Only one instruction belongs on the skating side: do your crossover, transition and tight-turn drills with a puck at least half the time, because that is how you will use them.

Skating by position. Everyone needs everything, but if practice time is limited: a centre should prioritise transitions, turning both ways, and holding technique together when tired; a winger should prioritise the first three steps, straight-line speed, and the stop-and-start reversal from forecheck to backcheck; a defenceman should prioritise backward skating, backward crossovers and pivots in both directions, plus lateral mobility along the blue line. These are practical coaching priorities, not rules, and they assume the system this corpus takes as its default: a 2-1-2 forecheck, paired with a low zone collapse in your own end. Under a containment structure — a 1-2-2, a 1-3-1 or a 1-4 — the first forechecker steers the carrier instead of hunting the puck, and the two behind hold across the middle and collect what is forced to them. That asks for different skating: less straight-line chasing, more holding a lane and starting hard out of a stop. And because F1, F2 and F3 are roles set by order of arrival rather than by position, a winger plays all three of them over a game, so which of these priorities pays most depends on which role your system puts you in most often. See Forechecking Systems and Neutral Zone Systems. Find out which structure your team plays, and ask your coach which of these they want from you. The full treatment of each position's demands is in Center, Winger and Defender. If you are changing position, the skating is where the switch is won or lost — Switching Positions covers which direction demands a genuine technical rebuild rather than a set of new decisions.

Goaltenders skate a genuinely different discipline — short lateral pushes (shuffles and T-pushes), movement in and out along the angle, post-to-post, and recovery to the feet, almost all inside-edge work over very short distances in a deep stance. Goalies still benefit from ordinary skating work for leg strength and edge feel, but the position-specific movement should be trained with a goalie coach. See Goaltender.

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How to Actually Get Better

Where to spend thirty minutes of ice — a coaching order, not a measured ranking

Convention

The order that follows is a coaching judgement, not a measured ranking — nothing here compares these drills against each other

Convention

Edge work first — C-cuts, inside and outside circles, figure eights forward and backward

Convention

Then weak-side crossovers, forward and backward, two laps weak for every one strong

Convention

Then stops and starts both directions, then transitions, then full-extension stride work

Action

Then edge work, crossovers, stops and starts, transitions and stride work again, with a puck

Convention

Long top-speed sprinting is not among the highest-value skating drills here — a judgement, not a measured finding

If you get thirty minutes of open ice, this is a defensible order to spend it in. It is a coaching judgement and not a measured ranking — nothing this document draws on has compared these drills against each other, and a coach who has watched you skate may reorder it for good reasons.

1. Edge work — C-cuts, inside and outside circles, figure eights forward and backward. Ten to fifteen focused minutes, often, beats an hour occasionally — coaching guidance from a single source rather than a measured optimum, but consistent with what Puck Handling says about hands.
2. Weak-side crossovers — forward and backward, two laps weak for every one strong.
3. Stops and starts both directions — stop, three explosive steps, stop, repeat.
4. Transitions — forward to backward to forward, continuously, down the length of the ice.
5. Full-extension stride work — goal line to goal line, counting strides, trying to reduce the count.
6. All five of the drills above, again with a puck.

Notice that long top-speed sprinting isn't on the list. That is a judgement, not a measured finding, and it follows from the point made under acceleration: game skating comes in bursts of a second or two, so the minutes you spend on edges, starts and transitions buy you more than the minutes you spend on a full-length sprint.

Power skating

Goal

Coached skating technique as a standalone discipline, separate from team practice

Key

You cannot see yourself skate — almost every fault in this document is invisible from the inside

Convention

Roughly one dedicated session a week in season, two to three in the off-season — one provider's guidance, an order of magnitude rather than a prescription

Action

With no coach available, have someone film you skating from the side and from behind

Power skating is coached skating technique as a standalone discipline, separate from team practice. It is worth it, for one reason above all others: you cannot see yourself skate. Almost every fault in this document is invisible from the inside — you genuinely do not know whether you're finishing your push or recovering under your body. A coach (or video of yourself) is the only reliable way to find out.

One provider's guidance suggests roughly one dedicated power-skating session per week in season, or two to three per week in the off-season, for meaningful change. Treat that as a reasonable order of magnitude rather than a proven prescription.

A cheap substitute if there's no coach available: have someone film you skating from the side and from behind. The faults are obvious on video and invisible in the moment.

Off-ice work

Goal

Off-ice work doesn't teach technique — it removes the physical limits that stop you executing it

Key

Ankle stability, single-leg strength and hip mobility are what deep knee bend, outside edges and the mohawk run on

Action

Slide boards for the lateral push and the weight transfer between feet

Action

Single-leg strength — split squats, single-leg deadlifts, step-ups; skating is a single-leg sport and two-legged squats don't cover it

Action

Lateral bounds — push off one leg, land on the other, stick it — plus single-leg balance work

Off-ice training doesn't teach you technique, but it removes the physical limits that stop you executing it — ankle stability, single-leg strength and hip mobility, which is what deep knee bend, outside edges and the mohawk actually run on. The four things that map most directly onto skating are slide boards (the lateral push and the weight transfer between feet), single-leg strength (split squats, single-leg deadlifts, step-ups — skating is a single-leg sport and two-legged squats don't cover it), lateral bounds (push off one leg, land on the other, stick it), and single-leg balance work. Programming and volume live in Conditioning and Recovery.

Skate fit and sharpening

Action

Check for an equipment problem before you conclude you have a technique problem

Risk

Boots too big, too soft or not done up properly make deep knee bend and hard edges physically impossible

Risk

Dull or unevenly ground blades, or an unfamiliar hollow, change everything about how the edges feel

Before you conclude you have a technique problem, check that you don't have an equipment problem. Boots that are too big, too soft, or not done up properly make deep knee bend and hard edges physically impossible — the foot moves inside the boot instead of the blade moving on the ice. Blades that are dull, unevenly ground, or on a hollow you're not used to will change everything about how the edges feel. See Equipment.

How long it takes

Convention

A few months for stopping and turning both ways, and a multi-year process for elite edge control and explosive transitions — one provider's guidance, not measurement

Convention

Weeks for better knee bend and edge feel, a season for a rebuilt stride or a weak side brought up to match — these two are this document's interpolation, and no source is offered for them

Mindset

You will not become fast this month, but you can become noticeably more stable, lower and more balanced this month

Key

Becoming more stable, lower and more balanced alone changes how many battles you win

Honest expectations — and be exact about which of them has a source, because only two do. Athletes Untapped, one coaching provider, gives the outer two: "[l]earning the basics of stopping and turning takes a few months of consistent practice", while the explosive speed, seamless transitions and deep edge control of an elite skater are "a multi-year process that requires dedicated, specialized coaching." That is guidance, not measurement, and the coaching condition attached to the second one is a condition a coaching marketplace has an interest in. The two rungs in between are this document's own interpolation and nothing here sources them: weeks for noticeably better knee bend and edge feel (it is mostly a matter of deciding to stay low), and a season for a genuinely rebuilt stride or a weak side brought up to match the strong.

The realistic framing for an adult player: you will not become fast this month, but you can become noticeably more stable, lower and more balanced this month, and that alone changes how many battles you win.

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Common Mistakes

• Standing too tall. The root cause of most other faults. If nothing else changes after reading this, bend your knees.
• Skating with your head down. You cannot read what you are not looking at, your weight tips forward off the balls of your feet, and it is the same habit that puts your head down as you arrive at the wall, where the spinal injury from a head-down, head-first collision with the boards can occur at walking speed. Keep your eyes up and the puck in your peripheral vision — pick something at the far end of the rink and stride to it without looking down.
• Getting the start wrong in either direction. Hopping when you start straight ahead spends the energy going upwards; staying on your toes after the first few steps leaves you permanently accelerating and never gliding, for a low top speed. Drive the first three steps out along the ice — short, quick and on the toes, torso forward and eyes up — then get onto the full blade and lengthen into the stride. When the start is sideways or a turn back — beginning a backcheck, say — a quick crossover start is the tool, not a fault.
• Slowing down the moment you get the puck. Your stride switches off at the moment you most needed speed. Keep your feet going through the reception: skate first and handle second, push the puck into space and skate onto it, and do your crossover, transition and tight-turn drills with a puck at least half the time — see Puck Handling → Carrying at Speed.
• Skating at one speed all shift. A defender matches a steady speed easily, and a skater flat out every shift has no gear left to change to and no moment to look up. Glide to read the play, then explode out of it; do the same off the puck — drift, let your check relax, then break.
• Only being able to stop one way — and quietly reorganising your entire game to avoid the other way, turning instead of stopping and arriving at battles decelerating rather than set. Stop at every blue line and goal line, half of them on the side you do not like, and practise each stop as one movement with the three explosive steps back the other way, because a stop is only worth what follows it.
• Living on your inside edges. Outside edges are where turning, deception, escapes and puck protection come from, and they are the ones that go untrained, because inside edges are what you land on naturally when you are upright and nervous. How many players that is true of has never been counted. Treat it as a coaching observation, not a measured finding, and test your own outside edges rather than assume. Train them on purpose — outside-edge circles built up from walking pace on a wide arc, helmet on, then figure eights forward and backward — and if you feel out of control rather than wobbly, slow down instead of pushing through.
• A crossover with no under-push. Half the propulsion, switched off. Skate a few laps of a circle doing nothing but the under-push until you can feel it, and to go faster round a turn, drive that leg back under you faster rather than wider.
• Leaning too far forward when skating backwards. The mirror of standing tall; it puts weight on the toe of the blade and kills speed and control. Sink at the hips as if onto a stool rather than tipping at the waist, and let the blade be the referee: weight over the middle of it, never the front.
• Standing up during pivots. The moment you rise, you're beaten. Keep your knees bent through the whole pivot, and pivot late — hold the direction you are skating in as long as you can.
• Pivoting to the middle rather than the boards by default as a defenceman, so that being beaten costs you the slot rather than the wall. Pivoting to the middle is sometimes the correct read — the mistake is doing it unthinkingly, or because it is your only competent direction. See Which way to pivot.
• Practising only your strong side, because it's more fun to do things you're good at. Weight your circle work toward the weak side — two laps weak for every one strong is a common rule of thumb, not a measured optimum — and give stops, tight turns and pivots the same treatment.
• Leaking power out of the stride. Pushing straight back instead of out to the side, so the blade slides instead of gripping — it feels like running, which is exactly why it's wrong; cutting the push short; and landing the recovering foot in front of you instead of under your hips, which brakes every stride. Push out to the side and slightly back, extend until the leg is done, and bring the foot back under you fast. Whether to finish with a toe flick is contested between the coaching sources here, so ask your coach before you rebuild your stride around it. To check yourself, count your strides goal line to goal line, then try to use fewer.
• An arm swing that turns your shoulders off line. Square shoulders up the ice is what both schools of arm technique want, wherever they say anything about it. Whether the hands should travel front-to-back or side-to-side they flatly do not agree on, and each calls the other's motion a fault — so take your coach's, not a stranger's.
• Ducking your head going into the boards, arriving perpendicular to them, or turning your back to the wall. Go in on an angle, get your skates parallel to the wall, and take it on your forearm and hip, head up and chin off your chest — not on the point of your shoulder, not the whole shoulder if you can help it, not your back, and never head-first. Turning your back is its own hazard and not a milder version of ducking: it makes the contact a hit from behind — at any speed, whether or not your league allows checking — and USA Hockey's warning there is that "[e]ven a light hit from behind could inflict a severe head or neck injury."
• Never having learned to fall or get up. You will do both far more often than you will do a mohawk, and only one of them can hurt you. And getting the chin — or the hands — backwards. Falling backwards to the ice, tuck your chin — it keeps your skull off the surface. Going forwards into the boards, head up and chin off your chest: that is the "Heads Up, Don't Duck" case, where a tucked chin straightens the cervical spine to take an axial load. The hands invert the same way — but only in one of the two cases at the boards. Falling to the ice you keep them in, because a locked arm takes your whole descending weight through one wrist; at the boards, if you are already facing the wall with no time to turn, your stick, gloves and forearms go out and spread wide on the glass. USA Hockey names leaving the stick down as the common error for that case, not as a general position on where your stick belongs at the wall — if you can still get your skates parallel, you take it on forearm and hip instead. And if a fall leaves you sliding toward the boards, you are in the wall case, not the ice case: turn so your skates, legs and side meet them first if you can, arms out if you cannot, and get your head up. Falling flat: chin in, hands in. Hitting a wall: head up — skates parallel if you can, spread on the glass if you cannot. Sliding into it: head up, anything but your head first.
• Bouncing straight back up because the shift is still going. Take the two or three seconds first. A fall is one of the ways a concussion happens, and you do not have to have been knocked out for it to be one — Conditioning and Recovery → Concussion has the red flags and the signs. If you are hurt, stay down and let play be stopped.

Check yourself

Answer each question before you go on — a real attempt, not a guess. Then go and check, because the checking is the part that does the work. Producing an answer and getting it wrong is worth more than recognising a right one, but only when the right answer follows: the section named with each question, and the Key Takeaways after them, are where you get it. Where the answer lives in another document, that is named too.

1. You have been given three cues: knees bent to about 90 degrees, "shoulders, knees and toes in a straight line", and "sit on a stool". Why can you not act on all three at once, and which one belongs to backward skating? (§Knee bend — the one that matters)

2. Why does pushing straight back give you nothing? Say what direction the push actually goes, what share of its power one named power-skating coach puts on the part most players leave out entirely, and why that share is not a measurement. (§The push)

3. A crossover has two pushes. Name both, say which one most players have switched off, and describe the drill that makes you feel it. (§Crossovers: the mechanics)

4. A defenceman either leaves a huge gap and gets walked into the zone, or pivots early and is beaten by the first change of direction. Why does this document call both of those skating failures rather than decision failures? (§Why it's a defenceman's skill specifically)

5. Which way should a defenceman pivot by default, and what is the reasoning — in terms of the failure, not the aesthetics? Give the two caveats that stop it being a law. (§Which way to pivot — a coaching default, not a law)

6. Going into the boards, exactly one part of it is a skating decision. What is it, when do you make it, and which document covers everything after that point? (§Arriving at the boards)

7. You are falling backwards onto the ice; separately, you are heading forwards into the boards. What do you do with your chin in each case, and what single principle underneath both explains why they differ? (§Falling and getting up)

8. You can only stop properly one way. Name two specific things that costs you during a game, and the fix. (§The point most players never fix)

---

Key Takeaways

1. Go into the boards on an angle, head up and chin off your chest — never perpendicular, never head-first, never with your back to the wall. You decide it several strides out, in the route you pick. If contact is coming, get your skates parallel to the wall and take it on your forearm and hip — not the point of your shoulder, and not the whole shoulder if you can help it. A back turned makes the contact a hit from behind at any speed, whether or not your league allows checking, and USA Hockey's warning there is that "[e]ven a light hit from behind could inflict a severe head or neck injury." Going forwards into the boards, never duck — a chin tucked to the chest straightens the cervical spine, which is the posture USA Hockey's Heads Up Hockey guide ties to almost all on-ice cervical spine injuries, and the injury — from a head-first collision with the boards or a goal post — can occur at walking speed. That is the boards case. Falling backwards to the ice is the opposite case and takes the opposite chin — takeaway 10 has it. This outranks everything else on this list. See Arriving at the boards and Body Contact and Battles, which covers the full three-case rule.
2. Bend your knees until they cover your toes — chest up, weight on the balls of your feet, head and hands up. Standing tall is the fault behind most other faults; hard acceleration, where the torso does lean forward, is the one deliberate exception.
3. Skate with your eyes up and scanning the ice, not down at the puck. Looking down tips your weight forward off the balls of your feet, and you cannot read a play you are not looking at. Carry the puck in your peripheral vision, and keep them up out of a start and through a turn, where players reflexively drop them.
4. Train your outside edges — hockey is played on edges, not flat blades. Inside edges make power, outside edges give control — turning, cutting back, escaping a check, protecting the puck — and your outside edges are almost certainly your biggest single skating weakness. That last part is a coaching observation, not a measured finding; what is behind it is the mechanism, that inside edges are what you land on naturally when you are upright and nervous, while outside edges ask you to commit your weight out over the skate and have to be trained deliberately.
5. Win the first three steps. Almost every race you contest — to a loose puck, to a rebound, for the step on a defender — is decided within about three strides: a coaching observation, not a measured finding, and not a claim that you are at full speed by then. Starting is a different technique from striding — short, quick, toe-driven steps on the inside edges, torso leaning about 45 degrees forward, driving along the ice rather than hopping up. The lean is a torso cue and nothing else — the torso goes forward, the eyes do not. Head and eyes up out of the start: the start you use to chase a loose puck into a corner is the one that finishes at the boards, where takeaway 1 applies.
6. Change speed, and keep striding when the puck arrives. A skater at one speed is easy to defend: glide to read the play, then explode out of it, because separation comes from the difference between your speed and a defender's rather than from your top speed — coaching craft, not a measured finding. And do not coast when you receive the puck, which is the moment you most needed speed. Skate first and handle second, push the puck into space and skate onto it, and train your crossovers, transitions and tight turns with a puck at least half the time, because that is how you will use them.
7. Take a crossover when you have room and want speed, and a tight turn when you have none. A crossover has two pushes; if you are just stepping one foot over the other, you have switched off half the propulsion — the under-push of the inside leg. Coming off the wall, escaping a checker or cutting back, turn tight instead: feet parallel, sink lower, and let your whole body go into the turn.
8. Backward skating is the defenceman's skill: you cannot hold a gap you are not fast enough to hold. Pivot late, open the hips before the shoulders, and pivot toward the boards, so that being beaten costs you the wall rather than the slot. That last one is a coaching default, not a law. Ask your coach which they want, and drill both directions.
9. Learn to stop both ways, and train the weak side deliberately. A stop is only worth what follows it: stop and drive back the other way rather than turning in a loop, which carries you further from the puck. Two laps weak for every one strong is the common prescription — a coaching rule of thumb, not a measured optimum. Have someone film you, because you cannot see yourself skate; expect months for the basics and years for the rest, on one coaching provider's guidance rather than on measurement.
10. Learn to fall and learn to get up. Take two or three seconds to check you are not injured before you rise, and stay down if you are hurt. A fall is one of the ways a concussion happens, and you do not have to have been knocked out for it to be one — Conditioning and Recovery → Concussion has the red flags and the signs. Go to the side onto hip and thigh, never onto a locked arm — and that, like the chin below, is the ice case, because at the boards, if you are already facing the wall and cannot turn, your stick, gloves and forearms do go out, spread wide on the glass; if you can still get your skates parallel to the wall, you take it on forearm and hip instead. The chin has two opposite cases too, so take the right one. Falling backwards to the ice, tuck your chin — it keeps your skull off the surface. Going forwards into the boards, head up and chin off your chest: that is the "Heads Up, Don't Duck" case of takeaway 1, where a tucked chin straightens the cervical spine to take an axial load. And if a fall leaves you sliding toward the boards, you are in the wall case, not the ice case: turn so your skates, legs and side meet them first if you can, arms out if you cannot, and get your head up. Falling flat: chin in, hands in. Hitting a wall: head up — skates parallel if you can, spread on the glass if you cannot. Sliding into it: head up, anything but your head first.

Sources — retrieved 27 July 2026

Stance, stride and mechanics: Prodigy Hockey – Hockey Skating Mechanics: Stance, Extension, Recovery, Arm Swing · NTC Hockey – Skating Stride Mechanics: Glide, Recovery and Extension · Hockey Institute – Characteristics of High-Performance Skating — Dr. Mike Bracko's own site, so it and the Bracko (1998) study cited below are one author rather than two independent sources

Power skating technique: Laura Stamm Power Skating – The Toe Flick · Robby Glantz Power Skating – Backward Skating · Robby Glantz Power Skating – Forward Crossunder

Edges: Better Hockey – Hockey Edge-Work Drills · Cutting Edge Ice Academy – Inside Edges vs. Outside Edges — the organisation's own name, from its own footer; the domain reads edgeiceacademy.com

Backward skating and transitions: How To Hockey – How to Perform Backwards Crossovers · RinkHive Training – Elite Backwards Skating for Defensemen

Stops: Hockey Monkey – The Ice Hockey Stop — a retailer's guide, no byline; refetched 2 September 2026, HTTP 200 (a nonsense path on the same host returns a hard 404). It gives the edge assignment in its own terms, naming a "Two-Foot, Inside/Outside Edge Stop" that "uses both feet, with one foot applying pressure on the inside edge and the other applying pressure on the outside edge", and instructs "[w]hile keeping pressure on the inside edge of your front skate, start turning your back foot so the outside edge also digs into the ice." ⚠️ It does not say "shoulder-width", and it makes no claim about time, energy or edge wear — a search of its rendered text returns neither · Wikipedia – Hockey stop — refetched 2 September 2026, HTTP 200. ⚠️ Read the direction of dependence here rather than assuming it, because it runs the other way from what it looks like. This article, not the Hockey Monkey page, is the source of §The two-foot hockey stop's phrasing — "[t]he outside skate uses the inside edge to stop while the inside skate uses the outside edge", "about shoulder width apart, and shoulders parallel to the ice", "rapidly pivot their hips 90 degrees" — and it is the sole source anywhere in this document for the slower/more-energy/edge-wear sentence, quoted at the point of use. It is not a strong one: as of the refetch it carries Wikipedia's own banner "This article relies on a single source" (August 2026), and that single source is a 1989 Washington Post feature (Henry Allen, "DARDO, KING OF THE RINK RATS", 28 January 1989) cited for one sentence — "In a hockey stop you turn your skates sideways and dig the blades into the ice" — which supports nothing about energy or wear. It also carries, uncited, the observation §The point most players never fix declines to state as a proportion: "It takes practice to effectively stop facing both ways, most skaters are stronger stopping one direction over another." That is a direction, not a count, and no count was found

Falling, getting up, and boards safety: USA Hockey – Introduction To Body Contact (Coaching Education Program, PDF) — "Contact Confidence" (Checked Into / Along / Away From The Boards) and the Heads Up Hockey appendix ("Angling In", "Hitting the Boards", "Taking a Check"); this is the source for the "Angling In" quotation above and for the full three-case boards rule, which is owned by and quoted verbatim in Body Contact and Battles · USA Hockey – Heads Up Hockey Program Guide (PDF) · Look Up Line – Heads Up, Don't Duck · Hockey Equipment Certification Council – Heads Up, Don't Duck! · Minnesota Hockey – Heads Up Don't Duck · Adults Skate Too – How to Fall Safely and Get Back Up on Ice

Starts: IIHF Coach Development Program, Level I (Tactical) (PDF) — "Four Corner Skating Skills", the crossover start and V-start through sticks · USA Hockey's Introduction To Body Contact (listed above) — the "J" Cross-Over Start to Sprint drill

Development and timeframes: Athletes Untapped – How Skating Technique Impacts Overall Hockey Performance

Skating biomechanics (primary research): Pagé P — Biomechanics of Forward Skating in Ice Hockey, MSc thesis, Dalhousie University, 1975 — the source behind the Hockey Institute's "Page (1975)"; recovery-time and knee-angle figures · Bracko MR, Fellingham GW, Hall LT, Fisher AG, Cryer W — "Performance skating characteristics of professional ice hockey forwards", Sports Medicine, Training and Rehabilitation, 1998;8(3):251–263 — twelve NHL forwards; paywalled, cited from the published abstract and from Bracko's own 2004 restatement of its tables — Bracko MR, "Biomechanics powers ice hockey performance", Biomechanics, September 2004, pp. 47-53, which credits the 27 characteristics and its Tables 1 and 2 to the 1998 paper as its reference 3, prints two-foot glide at 39 in prose and in Table 1 with no decimal in either, and closes the other citation chain in this section by listing Pagé's thesis as its reference 6 ("Page P. Biomechanics of forward skating in ice hockey. Unpublished master's thesis, Dalhousie University, 1975"). The 2004 article is not held in this repository, and the "1.5 seconds" figure is in neither it nor the 1998 abstract · Budarick AR, Shell JR, Robbins SMK, Wu T, Renaud PJ, Pearsall DJ — "Ice hockey skating sprints: run to glide mechanics of high calibre male and female athletes", Sports Biomechanics, 2020;19(5):601–617 · Buckeridge E, LeVangie MC, Stetter B, Nigg SR, Nigg BM — "An on-ice measurement approach to analyse the biomechanics of ice hockey skating", PLoS ONE, 2015;10(5):e0127324 (PMID 25973775) — note that the third-stride run-to-glide sentence quoted in the text is Buckeridge's summary of reference [2], Lafontaine D (2007), "Three-dimensional kinematics of the knee and ankle joints for three consecutive push-offs during ice hockey skating starts", Sports Biomechanics 6:391–406 (PMID 17933200); the underlying measurement is Lafontaine's, not Buckeridge's · Marino GW — "Biomechanics of Power Skating: Past Research, Future Trends", ISBS Conference Proceedings, 1995 · Chou PH, Chou YL, Lin CJ, et al. — "Effect of elbow flexion on upper extremity impact forces during a fall", Clinical Biomechanics, 2001;16(10):888–894 (PMID 11733126) — fall biomechanics, not hockey; cited only to show what the locked-arm warning does and does not rest on

Goaltender skating movement: USA Hockey Goaltending – T-Push · USA Hockey Goaltending – Shuffle · IIHF – T-push with stops · IIHF – Continuous shuffle · IIHF – Positioning behind the net · Hockey Alberta – Goaltender Guide (PDF) — "Progressions of Skating" (T-push, shuffle, knee shuffle, sliding into posts, post-to-post play)

Rules — read 3 September 2026: NHL Official Rules 2025-2026 (PDF) — Rule 1.2 Dimensions alone, "The official size of the rink shall be two hundred feet (200') long and eighty-five feet (85') wide", a single width and not a range · IIHF Official Rule Book 2025/26 (PDF) — Rule 1.2 Dimensions alone, "The official size of the rink shall be 60m long and 26m to 30m wide", with "[a]ny deviations from these dimensions for any IIHF competition requir[ing] IIHF approval". 26 m is 85.30 ft and 30 m is 98.43 ft, which is where "roughly 85 ft to 98 ft" and "about thirteen feet wider" above come from. Two more books state a width range as well, and both reach wider than the IIHF's — read 4 September 2026 — which is why the text says a range is not an international peculiarity: the USA Hockey Official Playing Rules 2025-29, Rule 102(a) — "The recommended dimensions of the 'RINK' shall be one hundred eighty-five (185') to two hundred feet (200') long, and eighty-five (85') to one hundred feet (100') wide" — and the Hockey Canada Playing Rules 2026-2028, Rule 1.2(a) — "The dimensions of a new rink are recommended to be a maximum of 60.96m (200 ft.) long and 30.48m(100 ft.) wide or a minimum of 60.96m (200 ft) long and 25.91m (85 ft) wide". Both word it as a recommendation; the IIHF's Rule 1.2 states its range as the official size and makes a deviation subject to approval.

Rink Lines infographic, read 4 September 2026 — whether the slot widens with the sheet: it does not, and the IIHF book does settle it. IIHF Rule 1.9 fixes the neutral-zone spots at "14.0m apart and each shall be a uniform distance from the adjacent Boards": the spacing is a constant and the placement is symmetrical, and what varies with width is only the residual gap out to the boards, because the boards move. ⚠️ That clause is not evidence of a width-dependent placement, and reading it as one gets the rule backwards — the NHL prints the identical construction in a book with a single legal width, at Rule 1.9: "The spots shall be forty-four feet (44') apart and each shall be a uniform distance from the adjacent boards." The genuine asymmetry between the two books is a different one: NHL 1.9 goes on to place the end-zone spots in prose — "Along a line twenty feet (20') from each goal line and parallel to it, mark two points twenty-two feet (22') on both sides of the straight line joining the center of the two goals" — and IIHF 1.9 carries no equivalent sentence, sending the reader to "Appendix VI – Infographics" instead. The appendix supplies it. Its "RINK LINES" drawing — page 222 of the 2025/26 book, keyed "➔ RULE 1.5, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9", all measurements in centimetres — carries a lateral dimension chain reading (800) · 700 · 700 · (800), split down the middle at the rink's long axis, against "Width = 2600 to 3000", the two 700s running from the rink's long axis out to the "End Zone Faceoff Spot & Circle". So the end-zone spots sit 7.00 m either side of the long axis, 14.0 m apart, on every legal IIHF width, and only the parenthesised residual out to the boards changes. Taken with the 4.50 m circle radius of Rule 1.9, the ice between the two circles — which is how the slot is defined in the text above — is the same width on a 26 m sheet as on a 30 m one: a wider rink adds its width outside the circles, not inside them. The drawing is the same in the 2026/27 edition, so this is not an artefact of one printing. ⚠️ One figure on that drawing does not reconcile, and it is not resolved here: the half-width pair reads "1250 to 1500" where half of "2600 to 3000" is 1300 to 1500, and twice 1250 is 2500, not 2600. Whether that dimension is drawn to the boards or to a line outside them could not be determined from the drawing, and nothing above depends on it, because the 700 / 700 chain is measured independently of it. Rink Map owns rink dimensions and what they change; this document cites them only to scope the pivot instruction.

James Bloom, "Skating", Learning to Play the Game. https://learn-ice-hockey.com/technique/skating/ — licensed CC BY-NC 4.0.

<a href="https://learn-ice-hockey.com/technique/skating/">Skating</a> by <a href="https://github.com/jamesdbloom">James Bloom</a>, licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC 4.0</a>.

@misc{technique-skating,
  author  = {James Bloom},
  title   = {Skating},
  howpublished = {Learning to Play the Game},
  url     = {https://learn-ice-hockey.com/technique/skating/},
  note    = {Licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}