If you’re a beginner skater, you’ll hear some words, phrases, and terminology being thrown around that can be quite confusing. Since the birth of skateboarding in the late 20th century, numerous unique words and phrases have popped up. Some were amalgamated from surfing, and some are completely unique to skateboarding. In this blog I will dive into some of the most common phrases and what they mean. Understanding these terms is essential to understanding what other skaters are referencing, as well as comprehending what you’re watching when you study footage.
The Stances
Let’s start with stances, which form the foundation of how you ride. Regular stance means your left foot is forward on the board, while goofy stance means your right foot leads. Neither is better than the other—it’s just what feels natural to you. When you ride with your opposite foot forward, that’s called switch stance, and it’s considered one of the more difficult aspects of skateboarding to master. Then there’s fakie, which means you’re rolling backwards in your normal stance. A lot of beginners confuse fakie with switch, but the key difference is the direction you’re rolling versus which foot is forward. Nollie is another stance variation where you pop off the nose of the board while keeping your normal foot position. These stance variations multiply the difficulty and creativity of any trick you attempt, but you may pick up certain stances quicker than others.
Grinds and Slides
Now let’s talk about grinds and slides, which are some of the most visually impressive aspects of street skating. A grind involves your trucks making contact with a rail, ledge, or coping, while a slide uses the deck itself. The 50-50 grind is the most basic—both trucks grinding straight along an obstacle. From there, you’ve got the 5-0 grind, where only your back truck is grinding while your front wheels are lifted off. The nosegrind is the opposite, balancing on just your front truck. Things get more technical with crooked grinds and overcrooks, where you’re grinding on one truck, but the board is angled in specific ways. A crooked grind has your front truck grinding with the nose angled over the obstacle, while an overcrook has your back truck grinding with the tail hanging over. The difference might seem subtle, but they require completely different weight distribution and body positioning. There’s also the salad grind, which is basically a crooked grind but done on the back truck instead of the front.
Categories of Tricks: Gaps, Manuals, Transition,
There are many categories of skating, and I will write an expanded blog on the various types. For this blog I’ll cover gaps, manuals, and transition skating. Every category requires specific focus and practice and will rarely roll over to different types.
Gap skating is all about launching yourself and your board over or down obstacles. This includes stair sets, gaps between ledges, and any scenario where you’re clearing distance through the air. Most skaters do common tricks involve ollies, kickflips, heelflips, and their variations, and 360s are usually seen as more difficult. When you’re hitting a gap, commitment is everything. Hesitation midair will almost always result in a sketchy landing or a slam. The bigger the gap, the more pop you need and the more precise your timing has to be.
Manual tricks represent a completely different category that focuses on balance and control. In its most basic form, you’re you’re rolling on either your back wheels or front wheels while keeping the other set elevated. Scraping your tail or touching your other wheels ends the manual. The difficulty comes from maintaining that perfect balance point while rolling forward. Nose manuals, where you’re balanced on your front wheels, are generally considered more difficult because you have less control over your direction. The real challenge comes with combining manuals with other tricks such as a manual to kickflip out, nollie into a nose manual, or doing a 180 into a manual. Manual tricks require extreme focus and body awareness, since even a slight shift in weight will end the manual instantly.
Transition skating is the third major category and involves any curved surface like halfpipes, quarterpipes, bowls, pools, and ditches. This style has its roots in the earliest days of skateboarding when riders mimicked surfing on empty swimming pools. Transition tricks include airs, where you launch off the coping and grab your board in various ways, grinds on the coping itself, and lip tricks where you stall or balance on the edge of the ramp. The physics of transition skating are completely different from street skating. You’re using momentum to “pump” up and down the transitions, generating speed without pushing. Pumping means to bend and extend your legs in accordance with the curves of what you’re skating to generate speed.
I hope you learned something about the everyday language of what you’ll hear while skating. The more you’re out there, the more you’ll be able to understand what each of these actually implies.