Help with forward crossovers.

Hi! I'm learning forward crossovers and struggling to say the least. I'm trying hard to keep my body turned and leaning in, but I just keep stomping around in a circle. I actually find it pretty hard to twist my body and look inside the circle while trying to cross my feet. I've tried an exercise where I cross my foot over and then hold that position, but I'm still struggling. Any tips?

Bend your knees. Bend them some more.
(For almost any skill, with very few exceptions, that's good advice.)

Are you practicing crossovers in both directions? One will probably feel more comfortable to you than the other. If you've only been going one direction, maybe the other way will be easier for you.

Are you comfortable gliding on one foot at a time in a straight line? How about on outside edges, and inside edges? As you get more comfortable holding an edge, you won't have to put your foot down so abruptly when you're crossing it. So keep practicing those one-foot glides as well as the crossovers.

Do you have a coach or more advanced friend who would stand in the middle of the circle and let you hold their hand while practicing your crossovers? This will make for very small circles, which you could enlarge a bit by each holding opposite ends of a glove or something like that. But it will probably make you feel a little bit more steady as you pick up your outside foot to cross it.

What are you currently doing with your hands while you do the crossovers? The right balance helps a lot.

Two things:
(1) keep your butt low and knees and ankles deeply bent, so you get a wider stance.
(2) Look into the circle but DO NOT LEAN into the circle! Keep pressing down on the shoulder that faces outside the circle (the right shoulder if you're doing right-over-left crossovers) in order to keep enough weight on your crossing-over foot and keep from falling to the inside of the circle.

I've tried them on both feet. Right over left is better for me. I've been practicing gliding on one food and getting more secure with that. I'll keep doing that. I do have a coach, but I only see him once a week.

I try to keep my palms flat, but that doesn't always happen haha.

Thanks

Sorry, I meant arms. If you prefer to skate counter clockwise, keep your arms at waist level, left hand pointinf to the middle of the circle and right hand in front of you. That is what my coach asked of me. Please forgive me if I am wrong.

Without a video of you trying, it is hard for any of us to guess, but based on watching a lot of people having trouble with cross-overs, I think the most common problem is when people don't have good outside edges. In particular, at all times, both feet, when they are on the ice, should have as deep as possible leans into the center of the circle.

E.g., on Right over left forward cross-overs (done, for example, counter-clockwise around a circle), the sequence is LFO, RFI (crossed in front of the left foot), LFO, RFI. (As the right foot replaces the left foot on the ice, the left foot pushes outwards, then lifts off the ice. As the right foot replaces the left foot on the ice, the left foot replaces outwards, laying underneath the other leg. The left leg stays on the ice the whole time.)

But a lot of people try to use a LFI instead of a LFO, because it is easier to feel safe on inside edges - they may be afraid of falling. Not only is that contrary to the artistic standards of figure skating, it is awkward and clumsy. Or maybe they just don't have a very deep LFO edge.

Another explanation for clumsiness is if your boots and blades aren't well balanced. It should feel just as easy to hold an inside and outside edge. If inside and outside edges aren't equally easy - one of them requires a lot of muscle, you may need to shift the mounting point of the blade on the boot to the left or right - or add tape or adhesive foam underneath your insoles until you have approximately equal pressure underneath all parts of your feet. If there is one part of the bottom of a foot that doesn't touch the insole, or has relatively light pressure, you essentially lose control of what your boot and blade are doing when your weight is over that part of your boot. (An alternative, for a few hundred dollars, is to get a molded orthotic from a podiatrist. The extra money will get you something that works almost as well as doing it yourself with a few pennies worth of tape or adhesive foam. )

Another explanation, more rare, is if you keep your weight so far forwards that one of your toe picks touch. Then you tend to trip over your toe picks. Don't let your toe picks touch in strokes and cross-overs! Remember, 99.9% of the time toe picks are evil. It may help to lean back a tiny bit.

Another explanation is inexperience. Practice, practice, practice.

And then there are the knees. When both feet are on the ice, the knee that is closer to the center of the circle is bent. The other knee straightens as it pushes outwards. A lot of ice dancers like to make it go all the way straight, and the bent knee is so bent it takes you down very close to the ice.

If you could provide a video, we could make better guesses. But I bet it is the first explanation.

It is sort of the first problem! Haha. I was stomping down on the ice after crossing over and I realized it was because I was coming down on either and outside or a flat edge. I tried moving in a lot and that helped.

Also I'm really weak on one of my ankles. I will look into the mounting. Thanks!