There is no trick to learning to skateboard. It all comes down to pure dedication and grit. Yes, some people might take to it more easily but ultimately everyone has to do the same thing - practice. Hours and hours of practice… Skateboarding gives you nothing for free and makes you work your ass off for every little gain. And this for me, is part of why I love it so much. The high of achieving something will always be greater the more time and effort you put into learning that thing. Skateboarding is the perfect example of this. You will grind out hours and hours of practice, fall over a hundred times, fail at it a thousand times more, yet you keep trying, knowing that the holy grail of highs might just be around the corner - finally landing that trick!

 

But sometimes the progress can seem slow and you might feel demotivated. It is, after all, hard to keep doing something over and over again when it seems like you might never break through to the other side. But there are ways to speed up the process. Below are my top three tips for improving your skating, and fast.

 

NUMBER 1: SKATE, SKATE, SKATE

This might seem like an obvious one, but it’s the absolute number one way to improve your skating. Skate as much as humanly possible. Rack up those hours on the board. If you want to see steady progress, you should be skating at least 2 - 3 times a week. for some people that obviously isn’t possible, with work and kids and everything that life throws at you, So if you can’t make it down to the skatepark, what can you do? Any time spent on the board helps, whether you are at the skatepark or on the road outside your house. So grab your board, find a quiet road and spend 15 minutes practicing whatever you can; pushing, stopping, kick turning, ollies, shuvs, body varials, hippie jumps etc.

 

Flat ground skate practice, although seemingly basic, is the groundwork for feeling comfortable on your board. And being comfortable on your board is everything - it’s the basis for all the things that come. How can you start to learn to rock to fakie, for example, if you aren't yet comfortable enough to roll up and down a quarter pipe, or roll away fakie? To learn to kick turn, you need to be able to confidently tic tac, to learn to ollie, you need to be able to jump up and land on your board again. 

 

Everything in skating is built on a previous learn, so don’t neglect the basics and get out and skate. Skate on your own, skate with pals, skate in your living room (carpet boarding is brilliant practice!), skate in your head (there is something to be said for visualisation), just spend as much time standing on your board as possible and you will notice the difference.

 

NUMBER 2: CRUISE THE STREETS

Pushing about is a great best way to fast track your skating and general feel on the board. Being a good, strong and comfortable pusher means that everything else will come more easily. When we are at the skatepark, we push about, but we mostly spend time on park specific things and tricks. It’s hard to force yourself to just practise pushing when there are tricks to be learned, so you have to try and find another way of concentrating on this - and it's pretty simple... Start using your skateboard as transport.

 

When I first started skating, I was scared of pushing about on the pavement - there are SO many things that could throw you off, so many different terrains, cracks, curbs, people, bikes and cars. It felt terrifying and was very out of the comfort zone. But I slowly started to push myself to do it. I took my skateboard with me to most places, skating from A - B when the ground looked flat and relatively empty. Gradually, as I got more comfortable, I started to skate more of the journey, attempting the sections that had previously made me nervous. I started going over cracks, started skating faster, started being able to dodge and swerve people and stop quickly at a road if needed. Soon I was skating pretty much the whole way from A - B, even starting to throw some ollies up and down curbs, and I was concentrating less on my skating and more on my surroundings.

 

My overall feeling on the board sky-rocketed and I saw a huge difference in my skating at the park. Give it a go, I promise you you will see the benefits soon enough. And, a massive side advantage of this is that you get everywhere a whole lot quicker as well!

 

NUMBER 3: SKATe SWITCH

Hear me out. I know this sounds wild but learning to skate switch will have a huge long term impact on your skating. Skating switch means to skate in your non regular stance, i.e. if you usually skate regular with your left foot forward, your switch stance would be goofy, and vice versa. We all have a preferred stance and skating the other way feels pretty disgusting. It feels like you are learning to skate from the very beginning all over again - and you are in a way. Even though you might feel really comfortable skating in your normal stance, the muscles we use for our switch stance are not yet trained so in a sense, we have to start back at the basics; learn to push, stop, tic tac, kick turn, and everything that comes after. But, you are not starting completely at the beginning. You should already have a good feel for riding fakie and pumping so that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. But the rest does take time and a lot of perseverance. 

 

So why bother learning to skate switch when you can already skate in your normal stance? It doesn’t seem like a good way to spend your time when you could rather be working on the tricks you are still trying to learn. But this will help with those tricks and here is why...

 

Firstly, learning to ride around and cruise switch will massively increase your general board feel and how dextrous you are able to be when you skate. It will also make you a more versatile skater. Not only will you become completely comfortable riding fakie, it will mean that you can start to add tricks like the nollie (or switch ollie) to your roster. You will also be able to start unlocking transition tricks that require you to use the nose (nose stall for e.g.) and drop back in switch. It also means that you can practise fakie tricks like tail stall or half cab rock on a quarter pipe but pushing up to it switch (in the absence of a mini ramp). So, long story short, it will open up a whole world of things that you didn’t feel comfortable trying before. Switch skating will also make your regular riding feel sooo muuuuch easier and smoother, cheating the system in a way. 

 

Secondly, learning to ride switch will mean that you start to use muscles that don’t usually get put into action. And this is a very good thing. Only ever riding one way means that we use the same muscles over and over again, popping with the same foot, twisting with the same side and this causes an unbalance in our body. Ideally, we want all our muscles on both sides to be strong and flexible and ready for anything and this so often isn’t the case.

 

I have been suffering a long-standing patella tendon injury below my right knee over the past 8 months and only recently has it started to get back to normal. I didn’t do anything in particular to it, I just skated A LOT last summer. due to my right leg being a lot weaker than my left because I skate in the regular stance, my tendon was not supported by all the muscles and other tendons and ligaments around it and unfortunately took the brunt of hours of force and impact. And it said no. I have had to work a huge amount to strengthen my tendon again and my leg as a whole, through months of rehab but one of the things that I started to do was skate switch. And it has definitely contributed to getting my knee back up and running. 

 

So give it a go. Start small. Begin by getting comfortable pushing about (working towards pushing switch when you go from A - B), stopping and doing tic tacs. Then start working on kick turns and reverts and as time goes on, it will start to feel a lot easier.

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If you do these three things on the regular, you will begin to see rapid improvements. They do take time though and you have to want it. You will get as much out as you put in!

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Happy skating!