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a couple of weeks ago on youtube comments section someone asked about 4A and I wrote a huge text about it and I decided to share it here too because I don't feel like its fully correct. I did a lot of research to understand it correctly but im neither a jump specialist nor a long-time skating follower so if there are any skating-fan/nerd/geek is here and correct me then I would very appreciate it. here is the text's slightly organized version. I'll explain as I understand it, please correct me if I'm wrong. For example, yuzuru's 3A jump is higher than the other skaters (that is, when we consider that we place the vertices of the parabola formed by the jump on the coordinate plane, the apex of yuzu's jump is higher), which means that yuzu needs more height to make 3.5 turns. other skaters can complete these 3.5 turns lower than him.(Yuzuru=70cm, others avg=58-60cm) it means his body rotates a bit slowly in the air than other skaters, so he needs more height and, accordingly, more time to stay in the air to complete the same number of rotations. (airtime varies depending on the speed of the toe pick of the skates blade when it comes out of contact with the ice and the weight of the skater and also of course if the jump is edge or toe but for now we are focusing only on the axel jump which is the edge jump) the reason he needs more height than the other skaters is because other skaters just getting speed and just jump it casually but yuzuru doesnt do that because he find this as a ''regular skate'' he want that beauty that elegance and that recklessness in his skate and this is what we call the skate of only hanyu can do. so sake of the achieve that he does his jumps directly with back counter (as you probably know they call it ''out of nowhere'') and most of the time with difficult transitions on the entrance for exists generally do twizziles or complicated step sequences. and all of this makes harder to jump because he doesnt gain his speed directly. but still this doesn't change the stats. Of course, the same is valid for his 4A jump. Since he couldn't complete the number of turns fast enough in the air (4.5 turns), he tries to go up even more. (the vertex logic of the parabola I just mentioned.) Going higher means doing the jump faster. but this time, even though he completed his turns on the way up and did not have any problem, he would hit the ice faster as he would gain much more acceleration when going down, and he could not fully complete his remaining rotations while coming down (which is why his jumps were never considered full rotation, always a quarter or half turn was considered less). Because of this extreme speed from the acceleration, he cannot control all this speed with one foot and this causing him to either hurt his ankle much more or land the jump with both feet. The speed that he suddenly starts to gain after reaching the highest point already breaks the parallelism of yuzuru's axis when he started to jump. If the angle between your body's axis with the ice when you start and the angle your body makes with the ice during the descent phase is almost the same then you can successfully land the jump. About these two similar angles, I mean the first angle is an acute angle, then if you lose balance or focus while completing rotations, your body will break that curve of axis parallel to the first position. physics only allows you to lower it until the final angle is 90 degrees. If the second angle is a wide angle, you will fall clearly or you will save the situation by making a spread eagle or crossing to other foot, but the GOE you will receive will be minus. however, the jumps of ilia malinin are not like this. Ilia reaches the peak quickly, and when he reaches it, he has already completed most of the rotations. At the same time, since he can rotate his body faster, he does not need more speed than he can control like yuzuru and he can land cleanly. I mean of course his 4A jumps are higher than Yuzuru (someone mentioned its 84cm not quite sure though) but he has more stable body control than Yuzuru and he can make balance. but despite all this, I was amazed at how yuzu could improve the jump so much. He said he did 5T and 5S with harness to simulate that amount of rotation in his head and wanted to experience that feeling. It's amazing that he was able to improve such a difficult jump so much at an age that is considered "old" for figure skating. I'm sure he could have landed the jump much more easily if he had taken this risk when he was younger. Speaking of preparation, contrary to what I mentioned above, yuzu this time put aside the artistic side (what im trying to say is he tried it without difficult transitions etc) and focused only on successfully landing the jump as the first priority, which is a very logical choice. In other words, we can say that the necessary preparations to gain speed are almost the same. As for the technical part, yuzuru didnt do the prerotations (i mean he didnt want to do it, didn’t want to decrease his quality of his jumps and wanted to land it beatufily.) thats why he struggled too much. about the technique they use is of course very different, yuzuru uses the jumping technique of ghishlain briand (which I think is a great technique that allows you to make complete textbook jumps in a long term), and at the same time, he added small differences to the take off when he was training in sendai on his own during the quarantine period. Ilia's take off technique is slighty different, but unfortunately I don't know which coach he is working with. At the same time, ilia can rotate his upper body faster than yuzu, which is the most important difference between them. I attribute the reason for this difference to body condition. and that is the age gap between them. which is 10 years difference and it is a huge diffrence for figure skating. some resources that I used: 3A's height, speed and distance comparisons https://eksiup.com/p/r5509827c64f this includes great images about the axis and body angle that i mentioned

I have been fascinated by Hanyu-senshu's goal of landing a 4A and when I saw his (translated) comment about the 4A: (x) I went digging into the question a bit and thought I'd share my thoughts here. I'm by nature an analytical type of person, so this post is a little "intense", but if this post/topic is not appropriate, please let me know and I'll change/delete it. My intention is just to discuss interesting aspects around the question and admire the hard work Hanyu-senshu has put in, in no way am I trying to be "critical" or "judgmental" in any way. (Because this post is very long, I put some of the content in "spoilers" so that it isn't a loooooong wall of text.) Why am I thinking about this? So these are my assumptions: => Jump "airtime" is related to the height and distance of a jump and therefore the amount of initial energy put into the jump along both horizontal as well as vertical vectors. (You could, for example, do projectile motion along parabolic trajectory calculations using kinematic equations to see how vertical and horizontal movement affects airtime.) => The higher a skater can jump, the longer airtime he has for rotation (more energy into vertical vector). => The faster a skater enters the jump (more energy into horizontal vector), the further the jump and the longer the airtime. => Rotational energy is achieved through body positioning (for example, upper body movement and position) as well as the entry curve of the jump. (Although I think height is the more important vector of the two.) Hanyu-senshu is an athlete who can JUMP REALLY HIGH! IMPORTANT NOTE: Hanyu-senshu's 4As at Torino: So although these numbers are questionable due to poor technology used to look at it, it is possible to theorize that rotation during phase 1 (first 0.5 rotations) are slower than during phase 2 (rest of rotations) and that Hanyu-senshu is able to dedicate about 0.1 seconds to phase 1, about 0.7 seconds to phase 2 and a total of 0.8 seconds for total airtime. (I think jump C was the best of the three attempts). I was wondering if any special tactics could be used to increase the potential success of the 4A. As mentioned before, I believe increasing the entry-speed to increase airtime is not an option. I also don't think faster rotation during phase 1 would work, because the effort during phase 1 is needed to make sure the jump is high enough for good airtime (the cutoff point (in terms of time or rotations) for phase 1 might be shifted though depending on where/how much effort is needed to achieve height). Therefore, a possible place left for optimization is to increase the rotation speed during phase 2. Looking at the numbers, one could speculate in the following: If a total airtime of 0.8 seconds can be achieved and of that 0.1 seconds is used for phase 1 and 0.7 seconds is used for phase 2, 4.5 rotations can be achieved the following way: Phase 1 (0.1 seconds and 0.5 rotations): 5.000 R/sec 300 R/min Phase 2 (0.7 seconds and 4.0 rotations): 5.714 R/sec 343 R/min The highest R/min achieved (with my flawed and rough data) during phase 2 was 321 R/min (5.342 R/sec) (Jump C), the rest of the parameters has been achieved. Rotation speed speculations: I want to also add though that I think it is frightening to think about spinning so fast (and jumping so high) and then needing to land on ice! So many forces on impact, I think it's crazy (and scary) what elite skaters can do. And sometimes I think it would be better if Hanyu-senshu didn't pursue the 4A dream and rather become a life-long artist on ice, creating his own artwork in ice shows, instead of risking injury in competitive skating. But whatever he decides, I know his fans will support him 100%) But anyway, I then had a look at the rotation speeds of Hanyu-senshu's 3As: Comparing his 3A stats with the 4A attempts this shows how much training and work Hanyu-senshu has been putting into this! 3A average duration 0.721 seconds => 4A duration 0.818 seconds 3A average rotation speed 4.870 R/second (292 R/minute) => 4A rotation speed 5.301 R/second (318 R/minute) And I also did a VERY rough "eyeball" estimate of the height of the jump (the problem is estimating where the ice is under the jump). But a VERY rough estimate gave me this: 3A (NHK SP 2019): 0.758 m 4A (attempt at GPF practice 2019): 0.941 m !!! My conclusion is that Hanyu-senshu has been training for the 4A VERY VERY hard and the 4A attempts we saw were ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE jumps! (We can also see this from how much muscle he has gained! I also suspect that his 4A training has been affecting his other jumps. For me this makes sense because until he has his perfect balance of technique for the 4A and have it "locked in", thus experimenting with different speeds, curves, positions etc, it might affect how he does other jumps as well. But also maybe not I'm just speculating hehe) But what I think IS true is that he is jumping higher, is achieving longer airtime and is rotating faster. In terms of how he might reach 4.5 instead of 4.25 rotations, I think... * he is already jumping very high * airtime is already long * perhaps rotating faster after the initial phase (to get height first) is a possible approach to reach more rotations (With this I don't mean a "delayed" rotation, but rather perhaps a slightly different arm movement which first help pull the body UP then to ROTATE. Yes, I know, we are talking about tiny tiny fractions of seconds!) With this in mind, I decided to look at his rotation speed when doing quads (to get an idea what rotation speed he gets there) and compare it with another skater (I picked Nathan since he is his main rival at the moment, although Boyang might also be a good comparison? Anything to learn from Quad Jumps? Speculations about arm movements: So, anyways, I thought I'd share some of my thoughts. Perhaps people with more skating knowledge than me (which is off course 99.99% of other people around the Planet) could correct me where I was thinking wrong or add some information. But I also wanted to highlight that Hanyu-senshu is an amazing athletic jumper (it seems he jumps so high and has so much airtime he can get away with lower rotation speed relative to other skaters! but he has also been increasing his rotation speed) and that he has put in so much work into the 4A and it might not be appreciated enough... to my liking hehehe. I think he has the ability to land a 4A. I actually also believe he has the ability to land a quint. The question is, is it worth the injury risk?