After around five years of skating, I have learned a lot. More importantly, I’ve made many mistakes. Over the course of this time, there are several habits that I wish I had built much earlier. After reading this blog, you’ll have learned about the mistakes I made, the most important things to focus on, and how to ensure you’re always progressing. At the end of the day, skateboarding is all about having fun. However, in my experience, the most fun happens when you’re constantly improving and learning new skills.
Where I Started
When I started skating, I was the only person in my friend group who skated at the time. I was also relatively introverted compared to how I am now, so most of my progress came from watching YouTube videos as a guide. I couldn’t drive yet, which meant I had to practice on my street unless my dad could take me to the park. Luckily, at the time I began, skateboarding was peaking in online popularity. There was a plethora of online tutorials from channels like Braille for me to learn from. This was better than nothing and gave me an idea of what and how I should be practicing.
Focus on Board Comfort
As a beginner skater the most obvious route seems to be learning as many tricks as possible. Learning tricks is usually the end goal of practicing, but you need to build up initial muscle memory first. Having a strong push, a sense of balance, and general comfort while riding is essential before learning more complex movements. It is extremely easy to tell who waited to start learning tricks and who didn’t.
Part of being a well-rounded skater is not just having tricks, but making them look good. If you’re new to skate lingo, this is called steeze (style with ease). You cannot make tricks look good if you don’t already look comfortable riding your board. Practicing small movements like foot adjustments, transitioning from pushing to riding, and how you throw your board down to get speed can help tremendously.
Start With the Fundamentals
Everyone wants to learn their first flip trick. Unfortunately, this can be a deceptively hard task. Learning to kickflip or heelflip requires several precise movements while keeping your body aligned with your board. These are foreign movements that, for non-skaters, are hard to do. By starting with ollies, 180s, and shuv tricks, the process of learning flip tricks can be cut in half. Even if you aren’t flipping your board, you are working your way up to a place where it’s easier to start the process.
Pop shuvs and front shuvs are excellent fundamentals to learn before flip tricks. These tricks don’t require a precise flick with your front foot but still involve catching the board midair. Aside from the fact they are cool in their own right, finding ways to lessen how much you need to learn will have you landing kickflips faster.
Meet Skaters in Your Area
Online tutorials are great, but only learning with them comes with limitations. For one, I began encountering problems that the unchanging videos couldn’t help me with. For example, I couldn’t figure out why my ollies weren’t getting off the ground. If I had a more experienced skater giving me specific advice, I would’ve learned them much quicker.
Although skating is fun by yourself, the communal aspect of the pastime is where I’ve made most memories. Even just being around more experienced skaters can help your development. Watching how they set up for tricks, what their body are doing, and even how they fall is incredibly useful. Making friends in the skate scene will also push you to skate more often. Having people to invite me to sessions has gotten me out of the house when I didn’t feel like skating.
Injury Management
It’s not fun to think about, but falling is inevitable. Learning how to fall properly helps prevent injuries and keeps you skating longer. In my case, I developed a bad habit of landing on my right knee, and over time, it became so bruised that I could barely walk. That experience taught me how important it is to pay attention to how you’re falling.
A good lesson to learn is when to stop. Long sessions exhaust your body and mind before you know it, leading to injuries. Taking breaks to breathe and stretch can prevent injuries before they even happen. When I was skating abroad in Rome during the summer, the heat and humidity tired me out before I realized it. I found myself in an Italian hospital with a broken toe quickly after. I wish I could say I was hitting a rail or jumping down some stairs, but I became injured from a flat-ground trick. If I had the wherewithal to know I had hit my limit, I would’ve never found myself in that situation.
Know Your Limits
Speaking of limits, knowing what to try and what not to try can save you a lot of pain and regret. Skating is already an inherently risky activity. There is no need to jump down a 15 stair when you’ve only ollied a 3 stair, or try to hit a handrail when you can’t boardslide a flat bar. Becoming comfortable with obstacles and tricks that have less injury potential, and only then trying risky spots, is the best approach. This lets you build the needed muscle memory and develop an idea of what to expect.
Failure
Learning to skateboard is much like learning a new language. On paper, you may know exactly what you need to land a certain trick. Everything in skateboarding requires repetition, practice, and experience. All of which requires quite a bit of failure. I have met many people who want to learn to skate but lack the patience it requires. This is what pushes a lot of beginners to quit. Starting with a mindset that transforms your mistakes and failures into knowledge is crucial.
Experiment
An interesting reality of skateboarding is that some skaters have a natural inclination to learn certain tricks. I can’t explain why, but certain tricks just work better than others. An example for me is heelflips vs. kickflips. The vast majority of skaters learn kickflips before the latter. Everyone told me that once I had a solid ollie to learn kickflips. I tried and tried, but I just couldn’t land one. Then one day I attempted heelflips a few times and immediately knew I could learn them. Play around with different tricks and variations, and you’ll find the ones that stick.
The Power of Filming
Your current skate videos probably aren’t getting on Thrasher (neither is mine). But when you’re learning to skate, filming yourself can be a helpful tool in your toolbox. No matter what you are doing self self-reflection is important. Sometimes, only by seeing yourself in a third-person perspective can you identify what you’re messing up on. Certain mistakes, such as where your weight is, what your shoulders are doing, and where your feet are going, can be tough to notice unless you can see your whole body.
At the end of the day, if you want to improve at skating, practice as much as possible, do it with friends, and be patient.
