The Basics:

The six most common jumps in competitive figure skating can be divided into two categories: toe jumps — the toe loop, the flip, and the Lutz — and edge jumps — the Salchow, loop, and the Axel. The cool names like Salchow, Lutz, and Axel came from the skaters who invented them.

"In toe jumps, the skater plants the toe-pick of his free leg and uses it to help launch him into the air. In edge jumps, the skater essentially just uses knee bend to launch," Hacker told The Wire.

The takeaway here is that you can start to tell the jumps apart by looking how the skater is taking off. Are they using a pick or an edge? By determining what they're doing (using the toe-pick vs. the knee bend), you can use the process of elimination to narrow down the kind of jump it might be to three.

Further, the Axel is the only jump that begins with a forward approach. If someone is facing the jump head-on, you're watching the Axel.

Edges?

The toe-pick is pretty easy to explain (easier if you've ever watched The Cutting Edge). You'll see a skater kick the front of their blade into the ice before a toe jump. "Edges" are a bit more difficult to comprehend for a person who's never figure skated before. Thankfully, Hacker has skated before and can explain.

"The skating blade has a hollow and therefore two edges: the inside edge and the outside edge. If you stand with your feet parallel, the inside edges are on the inside facing each other, and the outside edges are on the outside," Hacker said. "A skater uses these edges for everything — the edges are essentially what give the blade traction with the ice," she said explaining that skaters are constantly switching between edges throughout a routine. Shifting between edges is as simple as taking a tiny lean or a bit of pressure to the outside or inside of your foot.

The Jumps

So, right, there are two types of jumps. And we have some idea of what an edge is so we can tell them apart. The final component to the jumps and what differentiates a Salchow from a loop is the take off and landing. All jumps end with a skater landing on a back outside edge (in skating right-handed skaters usually land on their right foot, jump and spin counter-clockwise, while left-handed skaters land on their left and so on). What sets these jumps apart from one another is how they start.

Here are the six jumps in ascending order of difficulty the points they are worth in competition (we hesitate in saying difficulty because some skaters might have an easier time with one type of jump versus another):

The Toe Loop

This toe-pick assisted jump starts from the back outside edge and lands on the back outside edge of the same foot (if you're right handed, this is taking off from the right foot and landing your right foot). The toe loop above belongs to Russian skater Maxim Kovtun.