Skate Your Personal Best

As a professional coach, I use this book with every one of my students. It is written by a skater, for skaters. Everything from jump and spin technique, to food and sleep charts, to pepping yourself up for competing and testing. A skater who has a hard time with confidence needs this workbook. It contains goal setting and more. Buy this book...it's all you'll ever need!

This book has helped me a lot. Good for any skater, especially competitors.

Skate Your Personal Best is a book I wish I had read when I was training for the National Championships. Dr. Sandra Foster and Tracy Prussack have done an incredible job in a step by step process to making you an Olympic or World Champion Figure Skater. The techniques they provide for having an optimistic approach to yourself and your skating is something that every skater must know in order to achieve greatness. They also provide some psychological techniques that teach you how to really focus and have your goals straight in front of you. This will forever change your perception about how to really and truly focus and have nothing else block your "tunnel vision." This book is an absolute must for all Figure Skaters and Figure Skater's parents. Skate Your Personal Best also will give you a step by step guide to the most difficult skating moves. and how to visualize doing these moves before taking them on the ice. I think that if I read this book before every competition I would have been a much more confident skater and therefore would have eventually become the champion I wanted it to be. I hope that every young and old skater reads this over and over again!

I ordered this book based on it's title, and fortunately the title describes the contents accurately. It is written by a figure skating coach and a performance enhancement psychologist and addresses sport psychology techniques in addition to practical figure skating instruction. It is easy to read and directed at skaters who have already acquired the basic skills and have embarked or considering embarking on a more advanced coaching program. It is good for parents of young skaters (like me) as it covers a wide range of areas of what to expect in the skating life. On the more practical side it devotes a double page to each individual jump and spin. On one page it gives a detailed description of how to execute the element and on the opposite page there is a photograph and series of illustrations taking you through the steps of the jump/ spin. This is great for parents like me who love to get on the ice when the kids are practising but the children are more advanced than me...I can now offer "helpful" advice to my children ( parents like me are probably really annoying). Spins described in detail include scratch spin, back scratch spin, sit spin, camel spin, layback spin, layback variation blade spin, beillmann spin, sit change sit, camel sit change sit combination, camel change camel, camel change camel back sit, camel jump camel, flying camel, flying sit, flying change foot sit and death drop spin. Jumps described in detail include waltz, single salchow, single toe loop, sigle loop jump, single flip , single lutz, single axel, double salchow, double toe loop, double loop, double flip, double lutz,double axel, triple salchow, triple toe loop, triple loop, triple flip and triple lutz. This book does not cover basic skating ie stroking, crossovers,stops, edges, 3-turns, mohawks etc. It is a good follow on from basic books like Steps to Success which do not cover any jumps or spins. It is a comprehensive manual aimed at intermediate and advanced skaters designed to have them perform their personal best (as the title implies). With the help of this book I have now executed my first jump...but I don't think I'll manage the triple lutz, even though their description covers it all!