No Practice = No Progress?

It seems the Universe is conspiring against me these days!  I'm still trying to get ready to take my first tests in June, and am just now coming off of almost two weeks of being sick and not skating.  That's definitely a prescription for progress, huh?  :)

I finally got back to the rink on Wednesday for my partnering lesson with Anna - at that point I decided I was done sitting on my butt and had to get out and DO something - as if just "deciding not to be sick anymore" would just magically solve the problem, right?  The funny thing is, even with not having skated since my last lesson with her, we still made some progress.  The same thing happened at my lesson with Will two days later.  This seems to run counter to logic, but not necessarily.

One thing I learned as a dancer was that sleeping on a new move from a class, or some new choreography for a show, nearly always made a difference to both my retention and performance.  It's as if the body needed a day to digest the new stuff and incorporate it before it was ever going to be permanent.  Invariably, the day after a hard class or really long rehearsal, things were somehow easier.  I've found that happening in skating as well - I can spend a whole practice session on something and really struggle, just to come to the rink the next morning and toss it off like it was nothing.

Interesting thing, the brain.  Turns out, "digestion" is essentially just what's going on here.  The same thing happens with academic learning as well.  That sleep time allows the brain a chance to solidify new memories.  Many athletes do "mental practices", running through visualizations of their movements, as well, and there's some research to suggest that these visualizations trigger the same areas of the brain that would actually perform the movements in the real world.  These also seem to 'work' - I do them myself with both dance and skating.

So bottom line, even though I didn't make it to the rink much while I've been down with the flu, I did make some progress.  You can't make a habit of that, of course :)