Learn New Skateboarding Tricks
The pros make skateboarding tricks look so effortless, but it’s taken them years of practice and studying to get where they are today. There are many places for amateur skaters to pick up the tools of the trade, whether they find a qualified skateboard instructor at a skateboard camp, try to learn from friends, logon to a skateboarding forum or watch skate videos and read magazines. This article discusses the basic types of tricks out there, some of the innovators in modern skateboarding and the best tricks to learn for a skate competition.
Skateboarders can do their tricks on the street or at a skate park. All skaters begin learning with baby steps. They may want to hit the ground running and get that kickflip down right away, but in reality, the most successful skaters are the ones who learn the basics of where to put their feet, how to transfer balance and weight around, how to pop the nose or tail to manipulate the board, how to change from switch back to regular stance, how to balance on different parts of the board and who know how to skateboard on the street very well before they learn tricks. The very first trick any skateboarder learns is the “ollie,” which is basically just jumping up in the air with the board. Once this jump motion is perfected, skaters will then plausibly be able to leap over obstacles, hop up onto rails or curbs, and perform a great variety of other technical tricks.
There are five basic types of tricks that skateboarders do. With “freestyle” tricks (like 50/50s, ollies and shove-its), the technical street skateboarder flips and manipulates the board in some way, while balancing on two wheels, one wheel, the tail or the edges of the board. “Aerials” (like 180s, 360s and 900s) may be done on the street or on ramps and involve floating in the air, while using a hand to hold onto the board. Similarly, “flip” tricks (like nollies, bigspins and kickflips) involve spinning the board around in different rotations while in the air. Rail skaters are famous for “boardslides” or “grinds” (like nosegrinds, crooked grinds or 5-0 grinds), which require the rider to get the board or trucks up onto a railing, ledge, curb or handrail. “Lip” tricks (like axle stalls, blunt-to-fakies and frontside inverts) are done along the rim of an in-ground swimming pool or skate ramp and require balancing along the edge of the highest skate surface.
Many avid skaters wonder where some of these popular skateboarding tricks came from. Jay Adams, one of the original Z-Boys, was the first to pull off a lip trick. Some of the most distinguished aerial skaters include Steve Caballero (who has his own trick called a “Caballerial”), Tony Hawk (who was the first to perform a 900 at the X-Games and invented the varial), Jeff Phillips (one of the first skaters to land a 360 backwards), Mike McGill (who invented the “McTwist”), Rob Sluggo Boyce (the first to do a backflip), Duane Peters (who invented the indy) and Lance Mountain (famous for his 720s). Some of the most legendary freestyle skateboarder icons include Stacy Peralta, Tony Alva and Jay Adams, members of the Zephyr Team, who were interviewed in the documentary “Dogtown & Z-Boys.”
There’s a lot of skateboarding tricks lingo flying around, which can be difficult for beginners to sort out. For instance, an “ollie” — popping up into the air with the feet resting on the skateboard — was first developed by Alan “Ollie” Gelfand and Stacy Peralta. A “frontside” trick occurs when the skateboarder is facing the ramp, compared to a “backside” trick, which occurs when the skater’s back is to the ramp. A “180″ is an ollie that goes into a 180-degree turn while in motion. (Similarly, there are 360s, 540s, 720s, 900s and 1080s, also named after the number of turns.) To ride “fakie” means to read in one’s preferred stance (goofy or regular), but moving backward. “Switch stance” means riding the opposite stance and moving forward. Digging through a skateboarder magazine like Transworld or Thrasher is perhaps the best way to learn about more of these tricks and terms.
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