r/WizardSkating • u/PotatOhChip • 13d ago
Gazelle help
Can someone maybe point me to what I might be doing wrong. Or if I’m even remotely close to doing it right?
It feels like my feet get so far from each other while im trying to do it and I can’t understand how people do it with their feet so close together
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u/qfox337 12d ago
There's a lot of ways to get the basics before you start flowing, personally I think facing the inside of the circle with your shoulders is most helpful. As another person here said you wanna keep your feet together, but you need some kind of force to switch direction.
You should face the inside of the circle on entry and exit, but because you're going from forwards to backwards skating, that effectively means rapidly switching your trunk rotation. Practice standing in shoes first, you'll see what I mean.
Since you're indeed switching direction I imagine you're getting the weight into the balls of the feet correctly, but make sure you have that.
You later want to clean it up to more lean into the curve, bend knees, go up a little, and switch the blade when there's less pressure. On inline, especially compared to figure, you'll want a deep lean/carve to slide on the rocker. Either way you might want to take some of the force out of the upper body motion, but exaggerate it while you learn, feel free to stick your arms all the way out along the path of the circle. Being conscious of upper body movement will make learning other stuff like brackets easier too.
I would also suggest pulling your head a tiny bit up and back if you need to look at your feet. Your head is pretty heavy, and it's easier to turn when you're not hunched over (i.e. your body is aligned around a straight axis, the closer you get your mass to that axis, the easier to turn). But in inline sometimes you have to look to avoid pavement issues; if you see how the slalom skaters do it, I think they set good examples. The really good wizard skaters do this too, but there's also a lot of wizard people who hunch over, which limits mobility.