In-line skates provide an instant fix if you're a speed addict. Within seconds of coming off the shelf, these wheeled-wonders can have your smiling face cleaving through the wind. However, to maximize your speed on skates for a sustained period of time - like a 10K or a marathon - it takes more than just pointing them downhill or tooling down the bike path a few times a week. It requires quality down time.

Get Down
Down time means maintaining a deep crouch position while you skate. The lower you go, the longer and more powerful your stroke. This heavily taxes the major muscles recruited by speedskating, namely the glutes, hams and quads.

Get With the Program
It's entirely possible to embark on a muscle building program that'll improve your times substantially without ever having to hit the gym. Just hop onto your in-lines three times a week and devote at least 20 minutes to skate-specific strengthening exercises. Isolating your skating muscles and making them burn is the quickest way to achieve speedy results.

Short on Time? Try Wooders!
Even skeletal practice time is no excuse not to fly. Consider Mike Woods' example. A former medical student, Woods won the U.S. Speedskating Nationals one year on just 20 minutes a day of one-legged squats in a hospital broom closet. He'd stand up on a chair and lower himself with one leg sticking straight out. When his butt touched the back of the chair, he'd slowly raise himself up again, repeating the process until his muscles were screaming bloody murder. Then he'd switch legs. In speedskating circles, these one-legged squats became known as a "wooders."

Wooders work. I did them almost exclusively in the spring of 1990 because my academic load was too strenuous to permit much training. Oddly, my race cane was notched with many victories that year, thanks in no small part to wooders.

Wooders on Skates
Wooders can be done while rolling in a balanced position on one leg. Bend the support leg until your rib cage rests upon your thigh, then come back up. Start with five per leg and work up to more. Ouch! The slower you go, the better. Super-advanced skaters can try wooders with an explosive jump. Try to draw your knee to your chest in the air! Ensure a stable landing by positioning your skate directly under the center of your falling body mass. This is commonly referred to as nose-knees-toes alignment. Exertion level: high. Soreness potential: high.

A more difficult variation of the wooder is to "shoot the duck." Hold one leg out parallel with the ground while doing multiple deep knee bends with the other. Repeat as many times as possible while gliding on one skate before switching to the other leg. Watch out! As your muscles fatigue, the potential to literally scrape bottom skyrockets! Exertion level: off-the-chart. Soreness potential: high.

Slap Skating
The object of this exercise is to skate with your upper body so low that your hands hit the ground when you swing them. Slap the pavement in front of you after each push with the palm of your hand. Hit with the right hand just after pushing with the right skate, and vice-versa. It's more easily done in the glide phase after the push, when the recovering leg is circling around behind you. Keep your upper body low and level (don't bob). Keep your focus up. Exertion level: high. Soreness potential: extreme.

Wall Sits
Used by moto-cross riders as a training technique to develop strength for the constant compressions of riding, wall sits are also done by ice skaters in the off-season. Wall-sits will tire your quads out in a hurry. Put your back flat against the wall and pretend you're sitting in a chair with your knees bent to 90 degrees. Press as hard as you want against the wall, but don't sag! Hold until cooked, usually a minute or two. Exertion level: extreme. Soreness potential: medium.

Seated Extensions
Seated extensions are excellent for strengthening the knee and surrounding muscles. Sit somewhere and hang your skates over the edge. Do one leg extension after another. Raise the leg straight out in front of you with a 10 count, then lower back down again just as slowly. Seated extensions may seem easy at first, but beware, they get hard in a hurry. For extra weight, cross one skate over the other. You can do these on a wall or at your desk. Exertion level: medium-hard. Soreness potential: medium.

Skate Uphill
Gravity is ultimate for upping the intensity of your workout. I got my start chasing cyclists up into the Berkeley hills, learning to work hard to stay with the pack. Climbing teaches you about gears. When skating up a hill, I adjust my tempo and power output to correspond with the steepness of the grade. Quick turnover and not much application of power each stroke will get you up the hill faster and with less effort than slower, more powerful pushes. To maximize your workload, however, try staying low and skating with slower tempo and harder pushes. I recently skated over the Pali Highway from Honolulu to Kailua. Although a literal pain in the butt on the way up, the reward coming down was ample. Exertion level: variable. Soreness potential: variable.

Skate into the Wind
You don't need gravity to get a killer workout. Look at the Dutch. They are phenomenal mountain climbers even though about the most relief you'll find in Holland is an occasional freeway overpass. Dutch skaters don't need hills because the north wind puts up mountains of resistance. Like swimming upstream, skating into the wind is bound to make you strong. Start your workout heading into the wind. That way, after driving the wedge for a grueling 15 minutes or so, the five-minute return trip will be a breeze! Exertion level: variable. Soreness potential: variable.

All of these skate-specific strengthening exercises are guaranteed to work you over in a short period of time. The horrible truth, though, is that there are very few shortcuts to optimum performance. Reaching top speed is a lot like doing homework. If you just bite the bullet a bit now, then later you'll be able to laugh up a storm as you go flying by the competition!

Eddy Matzger gains his access to speed by using TWINCAM bearings, Salomon skates, Explore wheels, PowerBar energy products, and Transpack. Hundreds of Eddy's students can also taste speed through his personal instruction and the generous support of his sponsors. To learn more about the Access to Speed program, visit the web at www.skatecentral.com.