Besides recreational skates which are always an excellent choice for beginners as they arrive factory sharpened and ready to hit the ice, your two main options are hockey sakes and figure skates. Ice hockey skates are very different from those you’d wear for figure skating. For a start, they're typically constructed from reinforced plastic or nylon as opposed to the more flexible leather designs of figure skates. They’re designed to offer a high level of protection and also to support traveling at great speed across the ice.\r