Article: Demanding schedule taking a toll on figure skaters

[Violet Bliss]

http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_19801322

Actually, not just schedule that's demanding.

 

[ivy]

Really interesting read. So most elite skaters will skate 2 GPs, Nat'ls, 4cc or Euro, and Worlds with a few adding in GPF. 10 or maybe 12 programs over the season. World Team Challenge adds another for some I guess. Would it be better if the GP season was more stretched out? I like Abbots comment on not trying to go all out at every event.

 

[skateluvr]

3 or 4 quads? Only Tim Goebel pulled off three in an LP, is that right or wrong? Then it's back to the future of men jumping a lot with little footwork? I hope two will be the maximum a man could do in the LP. Balance is what we all want to see, though good jumpers will push it to the limit, I guess.

 

[Tonichelle]

I think, though, that this does not help the sport seem more... sport. Look at the comparison they try to make: skaters injuries vs football... ok well, let's take a look... football runs almost as long as skating - they start teh same... football players have one or two bye weeks in all that time. And they take hit after hit after hit... and yet... they make it through these 2+ hours of action EVERY WEEK... where as skaters MIGHT skate back to back competitions, but then they have a month off in December or January... then again in Feb... they *might* have skated in the late summer early fall...

Hockey is the same thing, they take severe hits from each other and keep going - EVERY WEEK... and they practice these hits ALL WEEK...

In the public's eye the skaters have it easy, and yet they're more injured than the guys in the more aggressive sports... um....?

 

[antmanb]

I don't get some points in the article either - "a season that's been elongated from October to March"? The season's been that length for the whole time i've been a fan since the mid 90s.

Also a pet peeve is the statement Scott Hamilton makes about giving "105%". Really Scott, the skater give more than they actually can?!

I agree Toni I think the rest of the world read things like that and think - really? The skaters have to perform for 3 minutes one day, 5 the next and they can only cope with 5 or 6 competitions a year?

 

[gkelly]

I think, though, that this does not help the sport seem more... sport. Look at the comparison they try to make: skaters injuries vs football... ok well, let's take a look... football runs almost as long as skating - they start teh same... football players have one or two bye weeks in all that time. And they take hit after hit after hit... and yet... they make it through these 2+ hours of action EVERY WEEK...

Do they? What percentage of players actually make it through every game every week? Fortunately they have teammates so if they have to sit out one or more games the whole team doesn't need to withdraw.

You do make a valid point. But I think (and correct me if I'm wrong)
1) most football injuries are traumatic injuries from direct impact with other players and the ground although there are probably some repetitive stress injuries;
2) most skating injuries are repetitive stress injuries although there are certainly some traumatic injuries from falls, blade cuts, etc.;
3) skaters need to train hours a day every day to keep up their skills in between competitions -- they train harder in the week or two before a competition than during the off season -- competitions every couple of weeks mean little down time to taper and rebuild the training intensity

I don't know what football training schedules are like. I'm sure they put in as many hours on and off the field as skaters do on and off the ice. And they travel even more often -- but not overseas.

Repetitive stress injuries will be provoked or exacerbated by training, especially hard training, regardless of whether the skater is competing or just practicing. Traumatic skating injuries from falls etc. are also more likely to occur during training than during a competition performance, because skaters will be practicing new skills many times before mastering them, before they would include them in competition, and they may train for long hours and be attempting difficult skills when they're too tired to execute them successfully.

Are traumatic football injuries less likely to occur in training than in the heat of a game? I.e., football players have a higher risk of injury during competition than skaters do, but perhaps a lower risk between events?

I don't get some points in the article either - "a season that's been elongated from October to March"? The season's been that length for the whole time i've been a fan since the mid 90s.

Probably the people saying this are thinking back further than the mid-90s -- to before the Grand Prix (and final) when fall competitions were more relaxed for the top skaters and they only needed to peak two or three times a year.

Has the injury rate gotten higher in the last 15-20 years? Maybe, but probably not so much in the last 10 years, since there was plenty of talk about injuries then.
If so, if the schedule hasn't gotten more demanding, then perhaps it's because the skills and programs being trained are more difficult.

 

[brightphoton]

I say the skaters toughen up and deal with it. I can't imagine Babe Ruth saying, "the baseball season is so long. You have to play games every week for several months. It's hard to give 105%. I have to conserve my strength. I can't play well all the time. The only time I really go all out is during the World Series play-offs."

 

[ivy]

So it seems it's maybe not the competitions per se, but the training to get ready for the competition that's the problem. Is there much research on the best way to train specifically for figure skating? Once you have a triple axel, how often to you need to practice it to keep it. Can you replace some of the reps with strength training or off ice work? How about going back to the double axel and making sure every part of it is picture perfect technique?

 

[drivingmissdaisy]

So it seems it's maybe not the competitions per se, but the training to get ready for the competition that's the problem. Is there much research on the best way to train specifically for figure skating? Once you have a triple axel, how often to you need to practice it to keep it. Can you replace some of the reps with strength training or off ice work? How about going back to the double axel and making sure every part of it is picture perfect technique?

I think it is pretty easy to lose the most difficult jumps, such as the triple axel, if it isn't practiced enough. I imagine it would be hard to "optimize" practice sessions, where you practice just enough to keep the difficulty but no more. Overall the success rate for the triple axel and quads in competition isn't that great for most men outside the very top group of skaters, so you could say those other men aren't practicing enough to keep those jumps, although they land them occasionally. The off ice training might help a little, but if you think about slamming an ice pick with all your strength on a block of ice, and that's what these skaters are doing with their legs and hips, it's easy to understand that their bodies can only take so much of that punishment before giving out.

 

[claphappy]

I say the skaters toughen up and deal with it. I can't imagine Babe Ruth saying, "the baseball season is so long. You have to play games every week for several months. It's hard to give 105%. I have to conserve my strength. I can't play well all the time. The only time I really go all out is during the World Series play-offs."

Maybe, but Mr. Ruth was also played at a time when a professional athlete could be 6' 2" & 215 lbs.

How about, we all just agree that every person has to go through their own trials & tribulations, & that everyone deserves respect for what he or she does.

 

[Violet Bliss]

Figure skating is so articulate and precise that the athletes have to be so fine tuned with almost constant intense training to be able to have the peak performance essential for the few irreplaceable minutes at competition. And no other sport entails constantly pounding on such hard surface as ice, with steel blades and with forces equal to many times the body weight when landing a jump with fast rotations. There are actually books and articles on the physics of figure skating but here's an easy to understand piece:

No way to spin what figure skaters do

“People said, ‘Oh, it’s an art,’ but the reality is it’s a very taxing sport,” Michelle Provost-Craig, an associate professor of exercise physiology at the University of Delaware, told the New York Times. “Many skaters end up with stress fractures, knee problems and hip problems at a fairly young age.”

Christy Krall, who coaches Canada’s Patrick Chan, told the Canadian Press that skating’s short program is like running an 800-meter race for a figure skater and the long program is like doing a mile.

Then there are those jumps.

“He’s traveling at 12 miles an hour, he’s going to push up four times his body weight on the way up, he’s turning at four-and-a-half turns per second, that’s 200 pounds of centrifugal force per square inch on his body, and he’s going to land with seven times his body weight,” Krall told the Canadian Press. “And he’s going to do that on a little bitty blade.”

That’s where those knee and hip problems can occur.

“A lot of the impacts are really high, 90 to 100 G’s,” Kat Arbour, a graduate researcher at the University of Delaware told the New York Times. “If you hit your head that hard, I don’t think you’d survive.”

As if that’s not enough, many of the skaters will then spin at an unbelievable rate, reaching rotation speeds of more than 200 revolutions per minute.

That was how Lucinda Ruh got her concussions.

 

[sidwich]

I say the skaters toughen up and deal with it. I can't imagine Babe Ruth saying, "the baseball season is so long. You have to play games every week for several months. It's hard to give 105%. I have to conserve my strength. I can't play well all the time. The only time I really go all out is during the World Series play-offs."

Well, baseball and figure skating aren't exactly comparable. Even though the baseball season is long, the game is a notoriously anaerobic one. There are loooonnnngggg stretches of games where most players aren't doing anything. Out of 27 outs, position players are still only coming up to bat 4-5 times in a game. The only player who is playing for long stretches of a game is the starting pitcher, and he only plays one out of every five games and rarely more than 7 innings. And starting pitchers play much less than they did during Ruth's time when they often pitched 9 innings every four days.

That's not to say that baseball players don't work hard. But I don't think that even conscientious players would say that they are 100% on top of it for the full 162 game regular season.

 

[Buttercup]

3 or 4 quads? Only Tim Goebel pulled off three in an LP, is that right or wrong?

Wrong. And Min Zhang managed it, too. But nobody in the past five years, AFAIK.

I say the skaters toughen up and deal with it. I can't imagine Babe Ruth saying, "the baseball season is so long. You have to play games every week for several months. It's hard to give 105%. I have to conserve my strength. I can't play well all the time. The only time I really go all out is during the World Series play-offs."

Well, the Braves and Red Sox apparently decided that baseball season was too long and basically took September off last season.

As others have noted, skating involves a lot of repetitive stress and strain that you do not get in most team sports - other than baseball pitchers with their shoulder issues and Tommy John surgeries, I can't think of any common stress/strain injuries in major team sports. I'm not sure which sports skating should be compared to, but I'm going to guess that gymnastics (artistic and rhythmic) are the most similar, as well as ballet. How often do gymnasts compete, and ballet dancers perform? What kind of medical issues do they deal with?

 

[brightphoton]

For the injury aspect ...

It doesn't matter which sports person you ask, gymnast, soccer player, sprinter, basketball player, discus thrower, tennis player, golfer. Every sport consists of repetitive motions, resulting in strain and injury. That's why tendinitis is associated with sports. To say, figure skating is different, it's much more straining because of x, y, and z, that's silly. You ask any sports person if their sport is hard, all of them are going to say yes and will list famous athletes of their sport that have injuries, and probably quite a few will have a few arguments for why their sport is the hardest.

Most of the x, y, z reasons are not really reasons, they're quirks that are incidental to the sport. You've got ice and a blade. Tennis players have to hurl their arms to hit balls with a netted stick, powerlifters have to move large amounts of weigh very quickly. All can cause strain and injury, but in different ways. Apples and oranges.

For the season aspect ...

The top, most elite level skaters do 6 high profile events a year. 2 Grand Prix events, 1 Grand Prix Final, 1 Nationals, 1 4CC, 1 Worlds. And most don't make it to all 6! Why not reduce it to one big competition a year? It's not silly, Kwan and Kim have done it before. Certainly a season can get too long, but I don't think we're at that point yet.

 

[Violet Bliss]

^^^^ Yes all sports take hard repetitive training to reach a high level, but which other sport requires such pounding against such a hard surface on a daily basis? Boxing, gymnastic, wrestling, high and long jumping, etc, provide shock absorbing landing pads even when they don't hit the floor purposely everyday with such tremendous force on thin blades. And which other sport gets regarded as being easy and its extreme difficulty and high risks dismissed? Such attitude does not contribute to quicker technological remedies such as better shock absorbing equipments and ice even.

 

[brightphoton]

Any sport that requires jumping or explosiveness from the feet will fit that description, basketball, sprinting, running, pole vaulting, just off the top of my head. Ankle injuries are common. Like I said, the environment and equipment are incidental. Besides, I could make the opposite argument, figure skaters only pound with their legs. Their arms are mostly injury free. What about other sports that require pounding from the upper parts of their bodies?

For the other sport's credit, competitors are not encouraged to wear pretty, sequinned costumes. It seems to me the more costume-y the sport is, the less serious it looks like to the casual onlooker. Cheer-leading, for example, is very difficult, but it features young women wearing mini skirts doing erotic moves, so it's not taken seriously.

That being said, it's the coach's duty to make sure that the skaters he trains are wearing proper protection and are training safely. You've only got one set of hips and one back, gotta take care of it.

 

[Violet Bliss]

All the sports you mentioned utilize shock absorbing footwear and landing surfaces other than basketball in which the landing force can't compare to high level jumping in figure skating. And, aren't you aware of frequent shoulder injuries of female Pairs skaters? Death spirals look easy but the pull on the arm and shoulder of the girl (as commonly called in Pairs) is tremendous, not to mention falls from lifts and throws. On to hard ice. Add the danger of being sliced by the partner's blade, how can you ignore and discount the severe figure skating injuries that have already happened?

 

[brightphoton]

I would argue that the constant jumping and force generated from explosive movements in your legs in basketball and sprinting is comparable to the jumps in figure skating. Each individual jump or sprint may not be as stressful as a triple jump, but the accumulation of them puts a lot of stress on the ankles and legs. Yao Ming has metal things in his ankles from the constant strain, runners are always getting one sort of general leg or foot injury.

As for pairs skating, X-Games sports, and gymnastics, I tend to not watch that, except maybe at the Olympics or the equivalent. The pushing of young girls to do those aerial trick borders on child abuse, imo. Their tricks are way too dangerous for my liking. I always feel that if done wrong, someone could literally die.

 

[Violet Bliss]

I would argue that the constant jumping and force generated from explosive movements in your legs in basketball and sprinting is comparable to the jumps in figure skating. Each individual jump or sprint may not be as stressful as a triple jump, but the accumulation of them puts a lot of stress on the ankles and legs. Yao Ming has metal things in his ankles from the constant strain, runners are always getting one sort of general leg or foot injury.

They don't have to land on one foot, concentrated on probably 2 sq in of steel blade, on hard ice. This one unique aspect alone constitute a serious injury risk not to be ignored or dismissed.

I am not diminishing the risk factors of other sports but am against the diminishing of the severity of the taxing and the jury risks of figure skating like what you are doing. Longevity is rare in this sport, even if there are opportunities to continue after a competitive career. Look what happened to the best of them like Yagudin and Plushenko, who by any measure should be a young man in his physical prime, but instead he has to be constantly in pain and be repaired over and over. Who knows what the comparable physiological age he really is at?

 

[brightphoton]

All elite sports are for the young people. Everyone is pushing their body to the limits. I think you're over-estimating figure skating's unique sources of strain and under-valuing the sources of strain in other sports. Pick any top Olympic athlete for any serious sport (not curling or canoe ballet), and they're bound to be college age or younger. In fact, whenever someone is "old," like 30 or 35, it's a curiosity.