A Beginners Guide to Ice Skates

Hello, I'm Amy from SkateHut. Today we're going to be talking about everything you need to know about buying your first ice skates.

Which Ice Skates should I buy?

So the two main points you need to think about when you're buying Ice skates is what is it for, and what fit do I need. If you find yourself as an adult, you need to buy your shoe size. So if your size six, you want to buy a size six. You want to be able to feel the front of the boot when you're wiggling your toes, you don't want your toes crushed at all because that's going to be really uncomfortable. You want a good flat foot in there, you don't want to be able to roll your ankle at all. you want to be really secure. If you're buying for a child, and they're doing recreational skating, it's always best to size up, you've got a lot of growing room then and you can just put some thick socks on and they'll be absolutely fine. If you're buying for a child and they're doing lessons, it's best to just go for their shoe size. I know in the long run, it's probably going to be quite expensive but you'll be happy that their ankle is all secure and their feet are all perfect at the end of it. 

If you're looking for some recreational skates for under 50 pounds, we've got these lovely brand LMNDE and SFR, which are really popular on our website. These are great for beginners and the occasional ice skater. We have a selection of junior ice skates online as well. These ones are K2, they're really good for your little ones to go on the ice.

These Bauer skates that we've got online are really good for recreational and sports. So if you want to get into hockey, these are perfect. You want to probably size up half a size in these, just because you'll be wearing thick socks and all of the gear but you can also use these as recreational as well if you don't want to go for a sleek figure skate.

If you're looking to do figure skate lessons, you really need to think about the boot that you're wearing. So you need something really, really tough and that's going to hold your ankle really secure because you're going to be doing lots of jumps and different styles. This is the Graf 500. This is really really good for your beginner and your intermediate, doing the lessons and starting off on a budget. These are the Edea Overture. We do have a wide selection of more advanced ice skates on our website but these ones are really lovely, really comfortable. They're going to hold you really, really secure when you're doing jumps and going for your grades.

Now when you’re buying your ice skate, some ice skates come pre-sharpened, so they come factory set, you still need to sharpen them, so you could probably get a few hours of skating out of them, but you will need to sharpen them to be able to skate for a long period of time. So usually it lasts between 30-35 hours. That's continuous skating.

These are ice skate guards. These will protect your blade when they're in your bag or when you're walking around off the ice. So there are two pieces to your skate guard. You've got the guard itself, and then you've got the adjustable latch. So you want to feed this on just before you put your ice skates in. Put your ice skates right in the notch at the front first and you want to move this down. So you've got all the notches on the side there. And you want to stretch it so that it's really secure. If you’ve got loads of excess like this you can always sore off the end but obviously if you want to reuse them all the way through to newer bigger skates eventually, I'd just leave that on.

So after ice skating, to protect your blades from getting rusty, you need to thoroughly dry your blades before you put them inside the guard and inside your bag. If you're not going to go skating for another month, then those blades will go really rusty if they're wet inside your bag.

If you liked the video today, please like and subscribe. I've been Amy from SkateHut and thank you for watching!