Vitality Skating: Welcome to a New World

My whole life on skates has been spent trying to get used to being on blades - literally - to find my feet and to feel them through the prosthetics we call skates is still my main task after 35 years. In perfect irony, Vitality In Action has asked me to devise programs on ice for people who may very likely have no feet at all, or just one foot. And I am all at once humbled in a way I can’t even express. We wear shoes – those can be considered prosthetics. We have to learn to walk in them and to use them. I get that. By logical extension, skates are no different. But after all these years on the ice, as a scientist, I’m still studying and experiencing how we learn to skate.

As Managing Director of Vitality In Action’s Adaptive Skating Program, I put together the foundational skills curriculum, both on-ice and off-ice for people who could have an artificial foot or leg, people who are aging or are recovering from injury or habilitating from surgery. A Vitality Skater could even be someone who’s been too scared to ever get on the ice…but always wanted to. Something I’ve dreamed of my whole life– my own skating school – has literally been handed to me through Vitality In Action. Vitality Skating is the US Figure Skating Association-registered house of the Adaptive Skating Program. As the director, I develop, formalize and solidify the learning bases that will be individualized for each and every skater based upon his/her own special needs. Vitality Skating programs offer the creative modifications to help those who never thought they’d be able to skate to do so.



Reaching out further for professional expertise than any other skating program, Vitality Skating engages the quality of resources that are required off-ice, just as much as on it. Connecting skaters with physiotherapists, neuromuscular therapists, pilates, yoga and personal training specialists etc… is important, instructive and invaluable. Managing pain, preventing injury and mitigating risk succeeds from skaters being educated, strengthened and prepared in many ways that most skating programs do not address. This includes body alignment, core strength, neuromuscular issues, reaction response, and kinesthetic mapping at the foundational level. What Vitality Skaters learn, experience and master in the Adaptive Skating programs and Vitality In Action’s Mobility Laboratory will provide information toward ground-breaking research in kinesthetic-encouraged neuroplasticity (the ability for the brain to change, to neurally fire in new paths according to new stimulus, the ultimate form of adaptation).

When coaching, I teach all my skating students (new or experienced) according to the principles of “hydroblading”, a technique that incorporates a solid knowledge of blade use in conjunction with body alignment. I have found that basic skating skills are strengthened right from the onset if these techniques are integrated from the moment that skaters step on the ice. Creative moves demonstrating the power and stability of this technique were well-demonstrated in the early 1990’s to the world by 2003 Ice Dance Champions, Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz. International Elite level coach Uschi Keszler, who runs her Hydroblading Academy in Aston, PA, coined the term, and was the one to develop and teach her unique method of training these techniques. Today we see applications of “hydroblading” in the form of deep-edge drape positions and lifts and low-to-the-ice highlight moves. The foundational fineries of these techniques teach skaters a universal deep knee action, powerfully strong edges, liquid-like ankles of steel and a kind of bladework ‘butterinesse’ that makes both skaters and viewers melt to watch it. Students of hydroblading-based stroking and edge technique skate in the safest, the cleanest, the deepest and the quietest way. There’s a structural safety not just in their glide, but in their true connection with the ice.

What’s so special about what we do at Vitality Skating? In this brave New World of metal on frozen water, confidence and self-empowerment grow. It’s that intangible connection, the synergy, the co-learning between coach and skater that creates the setting for blade to caress ice. And this is where I come in with my experience: Ms. Keszler told me that a hydroblading-based program for adult or new skaters simply does not exist. At a foundational level, the world needs it… and with the Adaptive Skating Program, we’ve got it.