Sideways Tricks

Getting your hips to turn out properly to do sideways maneuvers requires differing levels of stress depending on your personal anatomy. Some people can do this almost naturally & some will never be able to, no matter how hard they try. It only took me a couple weeks of practice & stretching to work up to a sidesurf; in the meantime, I had a couple of skate sessions which ended with my left knee feeling wrenched because I was twisting it rather than my hip joint. But after a year of skating sideways, I had a famous speedskater ask me for any tips I could give him on sidesurfing because he had been trying to learn it for months & was getting nowhere.

If you had some ballet lessons in your youth, or perhaps were/are very in to ice figure skating, the path to learning a sidesurf may go smoothly. If not, then some stretching exercises may help. One that I thought helped me is this: Lie on your back on the floor or in bed and try to place your legs in a frog-like position. Turn your hips out & bend your knees so that the soles of your feet are up against each other. Now try moving your feet inward (towards your body). The further in you can move them while keeping your knees as close to the floor/bed as possible, the further your hips should be turning out. This can be pretty boring if you keep at it for long, but it is also something you can do while you watch TV or read a book.

Sidesurf (Sideways Monoline)

This is probably the simplest of the sideways slalom tricks (I know of a couple people who seem to think an independent is easier) & almost always the first sideways trick that is learned. I accidentally started working on it back in the days when I was trying to learn how to T-stop & was somehow ending up skating sideways rather than braking. Once I figured how to keep going in a straight line rather than going into a spiral, I was well on my way to learning the trick.

Sidesurfing can be done with grace, or not. For the cleanest looking surf, you need to stand as erect as possible & use your legs & hips to control your direction of travel. However, due to the anatomy problems mentioned above, a posture which looks more like the skater was caught in the middle of sitting down is probably more common. Shifting weight in your upper body (i.e., pumping your arms back & forth) is a standard method for controlling direction of travel when surfing, but it makes the trick look like more work & thus is not quite so pretty. However, this does allow you to put some speed into it & you can actually sidesurf uphill with it after a fair amount of practice.

Wave

The wave is most easily explained as something intermediary between a sidesurf & an independent. The basic motion is like a sidesurf, as the body follows a sine wave path down the course, but skates are slightly offset so that the cones pass between them. Moreover, the legs are in a sense also crossed at every other cone, like an independent.