29 Oct Power Skating

Power Skating: Myth or Urban Legend

You really can’t go into a rink now a days without hearing the phrases Power Skating, Professional Power Skater, European Power Skating techniques etc. etc. Are they just smoke and mirrors, so widely abused that they are on their way to becoming cliche or did they once have a specific meaning?
A popular on-line dictionary identifies power as:
1. The ability or capacity to perform or act effectively
2. Forcefulness; effectiveness
3.The energy or motive force by which a physical system or machine is operated
4. The rate at which work is done, expressed as the amount of work per unit time

With this as a starting point, you can answer the question yourself… Power Skating DOES have a meaning…

Power Skating: The ability or capacity of a physical system (the human body) to forcefully and effectively do as much work as possibile in the smallest amount of time.

In english… it all boils down to efficiency! So power skating is really the art and science of fine tuning skills so that a skater uses as little energy as possible while doing them explosively. The problem is not the term Power Skating, the problem is the number of instructors running around using the term, only to make players skate around pylons over and over for a full hour at the same speeds. Although this is skating, it has nothing to do with power or efficiency!

So next time you hear the big phrase, don’t be afraid to ask your Friendly Neighbourhood Power Skater Guy what they mean… don’t be surprised by the silence!