The Scoliotic Skater

At age 38, after living a fairly sedentary and mostly athletics-free life, I accidentally fell in love with figure skating. My sister and her family were visiting from Colorado at the holidays with my then-4-year-old nephew, so we decided to pay a visit to the skating rink that was 5 minutes around the corner from my house to let him get some energy out. Despite having lived in the area for some time, it had never occurred to me to wander over to the rink to give it a try. I’d skated a handful of times as a child, but it hadn’t grabbed me then, nor did I have any unfulfilled childhood fantasies of becoming a skater as many adults who start later in life have. Skating was simply not a thing for me.

That changed on a crowded public session in a pair of rental hockey skates that were undoubtedly ill-fitting. Although I had the ability to do little more than stay upright, from that first day, I was hooked.

Due to the need to overcome adrenal fatigue and some other health issues, I was only able to practice a couple of times a week for several years. For the past two years, however, I’ve practiced virtually every day. In the process, I’ve had to come to terms with pushing a body that was never challenged very much to try to find another level in a sport that is both physically and mentally very demanding.

Adding to the challenge is a significant scoliosis that was diagnosed in childhood, which would probably have fewer consequences in any other sport I might want to practice. Because skating requires a ¼ inch metal blade to make contact with a sheet of ice, every imbalance and every asymmetry becomes intensified. I’ve found that learning a movement on my right side often feels completely different on the left due to the different jumble of muscular adaptations my body has made in an attempt to accommodate an S-shaped spine. Overcoming a lifetime’s worth of what feels straight or upright or balanced has proved a major challenge in practicing a sport that hinges on fractions of fractions.  

In the two years that skating has been an almost daily part of my life, I’ve made several off-ice attempts to give some support to my efforts on the ice. One of those was to practice yoga in a group class roughly three times per week. After about a year of that, I added a kettle bell workout approximately twice per week to my routine. While any physical training work I put in yielded some insight, after two years of working at it, I still felt that I was missing something important and sensed that my progress was being significantly hampered because of that elusive something. Even with the knowledge that skating is a tremendously precise sport and not easy to learn as an adult in the best of circumstances, I felt I was struggling in the dark trying diligently to put my coach’s advice into practice with less success than I thought I should be having. What’s more, I found that what seemed like the reasonable energy expenditure demanded by a yoga class or quick workout was far more tiring than it should have been. I was fighting a bunch of muscular pulls that are contradictory to efficient movement without any way of knowing how to change them, and my frustration was growing fast.

While I’ve only been working with Michael for several months, it is very clear to me that I would not have been able to progress past a certain point without his input. Despite throwing kettle bells around for six months, I was barely training my core muscles (or, as Michael calls it, “the inner unit”) at all and therefore my gains were superficial and really could not be applied to the fine movements that are required by figure skating. In only a few months, movements that seemed disjointed and without logic are starting to make sense, and I have far greater insight into how my body works as a whole to create the power necessary to meet the demands of skating.

The assessment that Michael did with me in our first session continues to pay dividends both on and off the ice. His ability to bring awareness to the differences between my two sides is proving invaluable. At the start, even the simple exercises he gave me were confusing and took time for my mind to work out due to the incongruity between my two sides. But Michael knows how to make corrections that stick with me, and those lessons are accessible to me on the ice because I am finally training properly off ice.

Michael knows how to start where you are rather than where you might want to be. His goal is not to help you look like the most perfect Instagram athlete, but to locate any obstacles to training your particular body properly and to patiently help you overcome them. Before we started, I was simply not strong enough to properly do the kettle bell workouts I was doing, or to execute many of the yoga poses in the classes with integrity. Repeatedly doing those things improperly was never going to bring the results I wanted—it was only reinforcing the patterns that were creating the problem. As we continue working together, I’m finding that I’m spontaneously doing everyday movements with more awareness and integrity because we are training the right muscles in the right way. It’s slowly becoming more obvious to my body to just do the right things.  

Part of the allure of skating is its precision and the fact that its every lesson seems to have innumerable levels—you are never really finished understanding the intricacies of a particular movement. There is no question in my mind that without Michael’s assistance, I would ultimately have hit a wall with skating that the complexities of my body would not have let me pass. The sport requires both strength and dexterity, and without the assistance of someone who understands how to train the body properly from the inside, my progress was far more limited than it is now, although we’re just a few months in.

With the insight I’m gaining from our sessions, I am confident that I will be able to continue to make progress for decades, and other activities such as yoga or weight training will become far more productive when it is time to resume them. In short, the work that I’ve done with Michael over a few months has given me confidence that I can overcome the physical limitations that seemed overwhelming not long ago, and every practice is much richer than it was armed with the right information about the body’s natural movements that Michael provides and adds to in every session.