How to practice a cantilever off ice part 1

Lecture video on Cantilevers


• How to determine if you are capable of doing a cantilever

• How to practice a cantilever off ice
o Foot alignment
o Entrance stance
o Squat stance
o Hand placement

Determining if you can do a cantilever

So the first thing we need to do is determine if you are even physically capable of doing a cantilever.
You can determine this very quickly by placing your feet infront of you at ~ shoulder width apart. Then rotate your left foot counter clockwise and your right foot clockwise Then Look down at your feet and if your feet form a straight line then you can probably do a cantilever.
 

How to practice a cantilever off ice!

Now that we have that established. Let’s being practicing proper foot placement.
For the next Example What I want you to do is to stand up and look to your right. Next Rotate your left foot counter clockwise. Then Pick up your right foot and rotate it clockwise then place it down facing your direction of travel. Do this till you can place your feet in a straight Line with ease.
This is what I will refer to as the entrance stance.
It is very important that you master this. The reasoning behind this is that it will allow your blades to become tangent to the circle which you will be following.

 
Prep
The next thing I want to talk about is the prep. For this this process find a chair and stand next so that you can sit down into it. While standing go into your entrance stance; then gradually sit down, watch your feet and make sure they don’t being to rotate forward. If they do being to rotate forward try staggering your feet more to the sides. It is important that your feet stay in a straight line so that you can maintain your trajected path. Once you have gotten comfortable with the whole sitting down into a chair concept, I want you to remove the chair. And proceed to the next step
 


• Secondary Prep.

I want you start from the entrance stance, then sit as far down as you can without any assistance. This will be what I call the squat position. Hopefully you can achieve this without having your feet rotate forward. The goal for now is to get into the squat position within 1or 2seconds.you should be able to go from starting stance to squatting position with in 3or 4 seconds.
 

• Edge transition / final stance. ( now comes the hard point )
It is at this point that we want to being transitioning from Flat edges, to the inside edge. You want to be in your squat position and then push your knees forward, allowing your feet to role to the inside. At the same time I want you to being to lean backwards.
Now it will be very difficult to do a cantilever off ice because you will lack centriple force. Even with the help of centriple force it is unlikely that you will be able to do a cantilever without having to place a hand on the ice.
So I would practice leaning backwards and placing your hand somewhere that will allow you to gain stability, and also give you the ability to push off from it so that you can exit the cantilever.

Personally this is how I would go about determining where I would place my hand. I would start from the entrance stance. Then rotate my body a quarter turn to the right. Extend my right arm to match were my ribs are pointing, then proceeding into the squat position without moving my arm to much in either direction,but allowing some flex to occur while placing it directly behind me and directly in-between my feet. This is in my opinion an optimal spot to be in because it allows for 2 hands on the ice or one. It also allows the ability to push yourself off the ice and helps with balance.
Final step!

Now that you have A the basics down, try to do all steps together, being standing , go into your entrance stance, then squat stance, into the back bending stance.
Once you become good at doing it off ice then you should proceed to try it on the ice.

Видео How to practice a cantilever off ice part 1 канала Wild child