Writer Ellyn Kestnbaum noted that skaters who were adept at performing compulsory figures had to practice for hours to have precise body control and to become "intimately familiar with how subtle shifts in the body's balance over the blade affected the tracings left on the ice". She added that many skaters found figures and their visible results calming and rewarding. Sports writer Christie Sausa insisted that training in figures "helps create better skaters and instills discipline, and can be practiced over a lifetime by skaters of all ages and abilities". The German magazine "Der Spiegel" declared in 1983 that compulsory figures stifled skaters' creativity because not much about figures had changed in 100 years of competitions.