2. How to stand on your skateboard

Stand on your skateboard – Transcript

Today I’m going to teach you how to stand on your skateboard, and get off it again. We’re not rolling along just yet, we’re covering the absolute basics of skateboarding first so we don’t have any accidents when we start rolling along.

Stand on the bolts

This is our skateboard. Now, the first rule of skate school is to put your feet on the bolts. Foot position is the most important aspect of riding your skateboard safely, and learning tricks.

Find a safe surface to practice on

Find somewhere safe where you can practice the steps I’m about to show you, somewhere the skateboard isn’t going to roll about all over the place, like carpet or grass. We start in our push position, we should have learnt this in the previous video about your stance. There’s four steps you’ll need to learn to safely get on and off your skateboard.

The T stance

The first is to put your back foot on the bolts. Remember the first rule of skate school. Stand on the bolts. This position is an in-between step, I call it the T stance, because your feet make the shape of an upside down capital T. We shouldn’t stay in this position too long, as we are not too stable in it.

The riding stance

The second is to get into the riding stance. To do this we turn our front foot, we lower our centre of gravity and we have our arms out, for balance but also to be prepared for any eventuality. Now, the key movement we need to practice here is the turning of the front foot. The foot needs to pivot on the ball of the foot here. This leaves our foot in the correct position. Don’t pivot on the heel or toe, or our foot ends up in the wrong position. Hanging way over the edge of the skateboard. We’re going to practice turning our foot until it becomes second nature.

Reverse the steps to get back to push stance

OK, when we’re riding along, we may want to do a few things, stop. or push to go faster. How do we do that? We reverse the steps we’ve just learnt. We turn the front foot to face front, our body turns too, and now we are ready to take our back foot off the skateboard.

Lastly off comes the front foot. We are now back in our push stance.

Next we will learn about the function of falling in the learning process.