Ice Skating Guide: Equipment, Maintenance, and Ankle Strength

Strengthening your ankles is essential for stability and preventing pain while ice skating. Learn how to manually sharpen your blades, remove rust, and properly break in new figure skates for a comfortable and high-performance fit on the ice.

Winterlude skaters on Rideau Canal skate-way, Ottawa Canada.

Fun Facts for Kids About Ice Skating

If ice-skating is the latest sporting interest in your household, plenty of history, technical terms, world records and sporting facts can entertain your budding skater when she's not on the ice.

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How to Manually Sharpen Ice Skates With a File

The sharpness of your skates can affect both speed and agility, so you'll need properly sharpened skates for top performance on the ice. You can manually sharpen your skates with the right tools, but doing a good job requires a precise level of skill and technique.

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Goalie Skate Sharpening Guide

The position of goalie in hockey requires a significant amount of skating. Goalies have to make quick movements across the crease so they can stop the puck, recover and then stop the puck again. Goalies also have to leave the crease to retrieve the puck and make passes to teammates to start the attack.

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Trainer working with woman on exercise mat

How to Strengthen Ankles for Skating

Injuries to the foot and ankle are some of the most common injuries among skaters, who make turns and quick stops that can lead to injury. Common ankle injuries include lateral ankle sprains that injure the outer ankle portion, most frequently after landing improperly after a jump or turn.

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Close up of man lacing ice skate

What Equipment Do You Need for Ice Skating?

Ice skating was first explored in the 13th century as a way for Dutch villages to communicate via frozen canals during the winter. Later, when England adopted it as a recreational activity, the first ice skating rinks were built.

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Young couple at ice rink

How to Break in Figure Skates

Figure skaters need plenty of ankle support to perform difficult jumps and spins. To ensure the feet are properly supported, skaters use boots made from multiple layers of leather.

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Back view of woman holding ice skates

How to Remove Rust From an Ice Skate Blade

Rusted ice skate blades prevent you from enjoying your time on the ice and may even make it impossible to skate. Poor maintenance and skate storage causes moisture to corrode the metal coating and even the base metal underneath skates.

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