The Bunny Hop Ice Skating Jump

Series Summary

Ice skates made of flattened animal bone were first used in prehistoric times to cross frozen bodies of water efficiently and conveniently. Today, skating is a great leisure activity and competitive sport. The animal bone has been traded in for metal blades and boots have been added instead of straps or thongs that were previously used to strap the skater to the skates. The metal blade allows the skater to glide on the ice easily, and if more friction is needed, the skater can dig in one of the blade’s edges as a sort of brake. By leaning and pushing, the skater can gracefully glide on the ice.

In this series of videos, you can learn more advanced ice skating techniques and jumps. Advanced ice skating is usually reserved for the competitive arena, as is demonstrated by our expert. Warm-up with skating exercises such as bunny hops and half flips and move into more difficult jumps such as the double Salchow and double toe leap. Get tips on stopping on the ice and learn about the basic edge in advanced figure skating. Watch as our expert teaches you how to spin on the ice. Try the more advanced spins when you are ready. Learn these and many more advanced ice skating exercises!

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Simone Fisher and I'm here at Clearwater Ice Arena in sunny Clearwater, Florida. On behalf of Expert Village, we're going to introduce to you some advanced figure skating jumps. Now I'm going to demonstrate the bunny hop. For the bunny hop, we start out by doing stroking, nice forward stroking. We usually do a couple of hops at a time, but I'm going to just show you one for now so you can see what I'm doing. I'm going to start off by taking a couple of strokes and pick up our feet. We stop. I'll so it one more time. We want to make sure we kick our leg out straight and we spring off our back leg. That is the bunny hop. "