Skater exercise is a cardio exercise in which you do a lateral jump. It aims to increase your heart rate, strengthen your legs, improve your stability, and enhance your balance. In addition, you can improve your glutes and quads that way.
However, a significant advantage of this move is to strengthen your medial glute, which is your outer thigh. It will also improve knee strength. Also, the skater exercise provides a constant movement when you alter your feet’ positions back and forth.
How to Perform Skaters Exercise?
You can perform the skater exercise with the following steps:
- Start with your legs around a shoulder distance apart. Your arms must be at your sides.
- Bring a leg behind with a bit of angle in a reverse lunge. Your knee at the front will come to a 90-degree angle.
- Swing your arms with your bent knee and leap your back leg in front to alter sides in skating movement. The arms alternate when you switch your sides.
Muscles It Works
Skater exercise is typically helpful for strengthening your outer thigh, glutes, and core. Also, it improves your cardiovascular health as it increases the heart rate and provides endurance to the whole body. As a result, you can perform strenuous exercises and activities with a more robust cardiovascular system. Also, you don’t run out of breath quickly.
The outer thighs can get weak when you ignore them. These muscles are critical in improving your balance and stability for walking and running. Also, the glutes and the pelvic core can get better strength as you include this exercise in your routine.
Physical Skill It Improves
Skater exercise helps to improve your running skills as it strengthens your glutes and outer thighs. Also, it provides better balancing and stability to the core that allows you to run smoothly for a long time. Professional athletes, football, and basketball players find it helpful, increasing strength and stability in the lower limbs. In addition, people who complain of weak lower limbs can take the help of this exercise to gain more power in their legs.
People who do balancing activities such as rope walking, skiing, skating, and bicycling can include this exercise in their routine. It helps to improve the overall stability of the body. Not only does it engage the core, but also it helps to provide strength to lower limb muscles. People who do swimming can also take the help of this exercise to get a more stable and more robust pelvic core.
Incorrect Ways to Perform
Skater exercise requires the correct form to give excellent benefits. If you don’t perform this activity correctly, it may lead to a delay in results. Some mistakes can also land you in injuries and sprains of your lower limb. Some of the common errors in doing this exercise include:
Taking small jumps from one side to another is an effective way of doing skater exercise. You need to jump as far as you can; that will help you make better momentum for the exercise. Also, it will call for a bigger challenge that helps to build your muscles properly. You need to go as explosive as you can, since this exercise is plyometric. With more rapidness and explosiveness, you will get quicker benefits from the exercise.
You need to use your arms to help you propel from one side to another. This will help to improve your balance and rotational power. In addition, your arms will act as a counterbalancing force to your lower limbs, which will keep the exercise smooth.
One mistake also includes not driving the jumping leg behind the other leg. You will need to make sure that the back leg gets behind the front-facing leg in all exercise variations. This will ensure that you are not taking leaps or shuffling from one side to another.
Modifications to Exercise
Skater exercise also comes with several modifications, some of which include:
1. Globe Jumps
- You need to first stand in a straight position and keep your feet around shoulder-distance apart.
- Keep the arms hanging down at the sides.
- Bend your legs and touch the ground in between them
- Invert your movement as you stretch your legs and push off the ground
- Jump high and far, then land on your feet with bent legs
- Repeat the motion, taking no pause,
- Jump back and forth and follow a fictive type of quad
2. Jumping jacks
- You need to first stand in a straight position and keep your feet around shoulder-distance apart.
- Keep the arms hanging down at the sides
- Tilt your upper body forward and bend your knees
- Move your arms backward
- Push your hips backward and don’t let your knees protrude; your toes,
- Swing the arms to the front as you push yourself and jump on the front side
- Land on your feet, keeping your balls as the base
- Bend your knees as you land, jump again in an invert position
- Do four jumps to complete one round
3. Star Jumps
- You need to first stand in a straight position and keep your feet around shoulder-distance apart.
- Keep the arms hanging down at the sides.
- Make your thighs parallel to the ground as you bend your knees
- Push your hips backward
- Touch the lateral sides of your feet using your hands
- Stretch your legs and push off the ground as much as you can
- Jump to a high point and guide your arms up towards a bow shape, moving your legs to the side
- When coming down, bring down your arms and legs to the initial position
- Land on your feet as you keep your knees bending
- Repeat the motion several times
Last Word on the Skater Exercise
The Skater exercise is excellent for increasing cardiovascular activity and strengthening hip and outer thigh muscles. However, you need to take care of the form of the exercise to get maximum results.
