Skateboarding – How to not look like a beginner

Great, so you’ve got your skateboard and you are starting your journey to be a skateboarder. Even though everyone starts out as a beginner, well, nobody likes to be one.

Here is a list of things that you can master so you look don’t look like a beginner when you are going down the street. Practice these well in some open area like parking lot with no cars or some skatepark. Don’t skate it on road until you’re fully confident for the safety of yours and others!

Look out for 💡  These are must learns!!

➡ Basic Cruising Skills: 

Push 

The very first step is to figure out whether you are regular or goofy. Practice standing on your board to push around with your back foot. Don’t push mongo! You will want to be at a point where you are super comfortable standing only on your front foot on the board. You need to be solid on your front foot. Move your back foot around (front-back, up-down, left-right) while moving and make sure you are still in complete balance and no wiggly-wobs. B-)

Turn 

For this one, you would want to practice it to the point where you can make 90-degree sharp turns both left and right in order to dodge objects or just make it in for some sidewalk. To achieve this, you have the following options:

• Carve 💡
• Kick turns 💡

Both are fun and cool to learn. So yeah, keep on turning!

Stop 

Unfortunately, there will always be hills while doing street skating and you have to learn how to slow down and stop. While foot-brake is easy and stylish, I think hand brake will be valuable to learn as well since it’s more for high speed. Sometimes, you just don’t know how steep the hill will be when you encounter it. Keep a bag of trick in hand is always good as backups. 😉

• Foot brake 💡
• Carving 💡
• Powerslide (optional: don’t try on penny; you’ll fall hard)
• Hand brake (longboarders use this often; you’ll need gloves) 💡
• Stay calm, observe surrounding, and jump into the safest place possible (emergency!) Call out and make people aware that you can’t control your board to avoid collisions and hurting others. 💡

➡ Taking a break from Cruising  

Now you have master the traveling around with your awesome skateboard, you will want to get on and off your skateboard like a pro. So you need to practice these:

• Running Start 💡
• Nose / Tail pickups 💡

These should be relatively safe and easy. Ok, getting back to cruising around.

Curbs (optional) 

This is optional. In my opinion, if you can pick up and get back on your board like a pro, then you can step off in style. But if you wanna be more advanced, curbs definitely take some time and practice to master it.

• Dropping off curbs:
  This one is definitely not as easy as it looks. Took me several tries and fails to get this correct even though i was following some tutorials. Quite challenging for me on my mini cruiser.

For getting up curbs, you have two options:

• Ollie:
  Take hard work and practice. You need to be sure that at least your front wheels is high enough for the curb.
  .
• Pop:
  For this one, when you approach the curb, you pop and make the front wheel up on the curb, shift the weight on your front foot and two-wheel’in your whole board up. Looks weaker but it works