Have you ever called your answering machine and been embarrassed by the sound of your own voice? "That's not me!" you might say. Well, do I have news for you. Just wait until you see yourself skate. Have yourself filmed and look at it later: you'll be broadsided by reality. "That's not the way I skate!" you'll exclaim.

The camera does not lie.
Especially one that captures moving pictures and sound. I remind my skating students of this all the time. After recording them doing various maneuvers such as crossovers or straightaways, I tap the camera and chuckle out loud "I have the evidence right here! There's no place to hide now!" My camera is small enough to fit in my pocket yet mighty enough to move mountains. It seems to have a magic force field associated with it. When my students perform their exercises - all of which require copious amounts of balance and concentration - they start swimming through the air or conducting their own symphonic variations. Sometimes the camera even causes the earth to come up and hit them.
With many short takes, a solid day of skating can be condensed into 30 minutes of action-packed, often hilarious footage. Full exposure happens in a group setting and requires only a hookup to the big screen and a remote control.
First comes the preview. Cheeks redden in anticipation of bloopers. Sore poopers squirm at the thought of later sitting in the hot seat and being subjected to frame-by-frame analysis of their signature skating style.
With digital video as opposed to regular video, there isn't the usual distortion with stop-action or slow motion viewing. That's why my Sony is painfully honest, showing exactly what needs work and where. Advance your push to maximum extension, for example, and you'll see how well you've used your wheelbase. If you've pushed evenly, your wheels will cast a long, dark, continuous shadow on the pavement. If not, usually just your toe wheel will throw a shadow. Your heel wheels will have lifted up and show bright light underneath. Don't worry, the camera does not bite. Ultimately, video footage is very democratic. Not only does it capture every sweet stroke and each happy wag of the tongue, but it also preserves every grimace, every bumble, every sworn statement.
No matter how embarassed you are at the way you skate, it's useful to establish a benchmark so you'll have something to compare yourself to down the road. After much practice and painstaking review, you will transform yourself into a better skater. The cumulative effect will open your eyes. Pretty soon you'll look so good you'll not even recognize your own skating self.
"Is that really the way I look?" you'll ask.
So go ahead, get in the crosshairs of the camera viewfinder. Film away now, and give yourself a pleasant surprise later!

How to use a video camera to enhance your training and improve your skating:

Filming Turns
Chalk a circle of any radius and have the cameraperson stand in the middle, so that when you skate you are always equidistant from the video apparatus (you'll remain the same size on screen).

What to look for:
o Knee bend angle - If you are turning to the right, stop the image at maximum extension of the right leg push, just as you commit all your weight to the left skate. Take a protracter or a goniometer and put it up to the screen. Measure the angle formed by your thigh bone and your shin bone with the knee as the hinge point. An acute angle yields a longer push. The optimum knee bend angle for a sprinter is 90 degrees, while the desirable range for a longer distance skater is 105 to 115 degrees.

o Full underpush extension - Again, if turning to the right, stop the image at maximum extension of the left leg push (the skate that crosses under). Check to see that the leg is fully extended before the skate leaves the ground. If not, you're cheating yourself out of extra inches of push. Make sure to snap that leg straight each time!

o Small gap - From profile view at maximum extension of the left skate, there should not be a large gap between the skate that's crossed over (right skate) and the skate that's pushing out from under (left skate). A large gap yields a short push, and vice-versa. Ideally, one skate hides behind the other when the underpush is well directed laterally. If your pushing skate (left) ends up in front of the support skate (right one), you've "popped the balloon." This is one of the most difficult things to accomplish in skating, but well worth striving for. Give it a shot!

o Focus up - Check that you are not looking down at the ground as you skate, as this would mean that your weight is pitched too far forward, which leads to instability at speed. Take a straight edge and hold it over your body's center of mass, extending it straight downward to ascertain whether the bulk of your weight is positioned over the rear of your skate.

Filming Straightaways
Find a strip of asphalt long and wide enough to accommodate two skaters or a skater and a vehicle. Move the camera at the same speed as the skater and get footage from the side view as well from straight-on (be careful if you're skating backwards to get this angle).

What to look for from the side:
o Direction of push - Advance the footage to maximum extension of either leg and check for a gap between your skates. The farther back you've pushed, the greater the space between your legs will be. Mimimize this space by directing your pushes ahead of your body. That way you will spend more time pushing, leave longer tracks on the ground, and go faster. If you can see the toe wheel of your pushing skate peeking out in front of the toe wheel of your support skate from profile view, you will have mastered the elusive forward push

o Even push - You get more power if you concentrate your push with all your wheels, not just a single one. At maximum extension (fully straightened leg), check that all your wheels are still on the ground, and that no light is showing through from behind.

o Recovery - After pushing laterally with your heel, your leg should relax completely and trace a semi-circle in preparation for the next set-down. The toe wheel of the recovering skate droops downward - without touching the ground - and circles back underneath the body before being thrust forward again to give momentum in the direction of travel. Make sure you don't just pull your skate sideways back underneath your body, but rather that you prolong your glide while circling your recovering skate back and around.

o Arm swing - Examine your arm swing in slow motion. Check to see that you are reaching well forward and backward in a smooth, pendular manner, not "eating the ice-cream cone" as my coach Dianne Holum warns against. Imagine that you are pulling back and forth on a rope, and never crossing your body past your opposite shoulder with your swinging arm. At most, your arms should finish parallel with the ground on the upswing.

What to look for head-on:
o Nose/knees/toes alignment - Take a straightedge and hold it up to the screen to make sure these body parts form a straight line. If you can connect the dots, it means that your center of mass is evenly distributed over your support skate. Good alignment means maximum rolling efficiency, guaranteed to save you a ton of energy in the long run. Furthermore, being balanced like this ensures that the vector of your push will be strongest, right through the long axis of your leg.

o Fall angle - Measure the angle between vertical and your pushing skate's leg. This is the fall angle, an indication of how well you use your hips when you skate. Let gravity be your engine; lead with your hips and fall sideways with your body before adding the push, and you will generate much more speed. Try keeping your knees together as you fall sideways, delaying your set-down until the last possible second. In fact, just when you want to land that skate, lift it up a bit more to increase your fall angle. An angle of 11 degrees is quite good.

o Smoothness - Try skating in super slow motion and then view it later at double speed or while pressing play and fast-forward simultaneously. Any unnecessary movements will become magnified, so the trick is to excise all extraneous motions and make it look smooth and continuous. If you can skate like the bionic man in slow motion, your real-life sprinting will hold together better.

Eddy Matzger is rarely seen on skates without his Sony digital video camera, which he totes around to races and weekend workshops around the country. Images captured with his camera can be viewed at www.skatecentral.com. Eddy is fully equipped for videography, thanks to the support of his sponosors, TWINCAM bearings, Explore wheels, Salomon skates, PowerBar, Transpack, and Wigwam socks.