How to Longboard! Beginner basics: Pushing, Stopping, Carving/Turning

hello good people of the Internet my name is Rory Schneider and I'm gonna show you some of the basics of longboarding today so for my board setup I've got a rain demon seed it's like one of the newer models from like 2017 it's about 44 inches if I remember it it's a drop through drop deck so you can see that the deck itself is dropped about an inch and then the trucks are dropped through it just gives you a little bit lower to the ground I got some new Randell to 180 trucks we're just like classic longboard trucks and some sweet ABEC eleven gumballs and you think they make these anymore these are 76-millimeter 81a so they're on the softer side I think for grip and then I left it ungrouped because unless you're you're getting super gnarly you really don't need grip on your boards which is kind of a new concept to me with a friend of mine who passed away had a board that that wasn't written so I keep it like super simple and clean and chill and it's a lot more comfortable if you end up riding barefoot I typically like to ride and some gnarly shredded vans they're probably the best shoes for this sort of thing but you can ride in whatever I ride in flip-flops a lot and sometimes I write barefoot it just depends what you're into but for starting out you probably want to use like some closed toed shoes with a smooth sole at the very least so the basics of longboarding first of all you're gonna want to figure out what's dance you are that's super important whether you ride regular or goofy regular left foot forward like so goofy right foot forward and then you typically push with your back foot regular so push like so you push this way if you're goofy the first thing that you need to learn when you're longboarding is how to push and so you want to go to a nice flat smooth path like this one so I'm in Rapid City South Dakota and we've got some epic TAV that run along rapid Creek just flowing like crazy right now and those are the girls taking a dip so contrary to your intuition probably you want to ride downhill but when you're learning it's a lot easier to push uphill so since I'm pretending to be a beginner right now for demonstration I'm going to be riding uphill so first thing you're going to do is get your foot planted in the correct position you don't to be perfectly straight right in the center you don't want to be like 45 degrees or 90 for this you want to start out like 30 degrees and you want to be on the front directly in the front half of your board so the halfway mark will be here gonna be right-center in the front turn your foot just like so joke that come on bro so keeping your foot slightly off center like so allows you to push with your heel and with your toe as needed in order to skier because there's gonna be a lot of situations where you want to steer a little bit while you're pushing and so having your foot talked as if that like that it's gonna help you out a lot so one of the reasons you're gonna want it to start by pushing uphill is because you don't want to be going downhill because you'll get too fast too quick and it's just it's it's it's easier to cruise downhill obviously but for the sake of learning you really want to push uphill because the resistance of the hill is gonna continuously slow you down and it's gonna make pushing a little more difficult technically but it'll actually be easier to learn how to put first starting to push again get your foot in the correct spot and just take as smallest steps as you need to you really don't have to stay off the ground for for very long at a time so once you get the hang of pushing you'll be able to balance on your forward foot or your behind to it if you're riding mongrel for a lot longer periods of time so if I pick up a little speed here twice I don't even have to set my top down that's gonna require a whole lot of balance and so just start off by doing really small pushes like this you could do this all day dudes trying to bite me like a healer once you get a little speed just plant your feet on the board you want to maintain this stance right here where your front foot is in the position that I showed you before your back foot is gonna be almost straight across the board like so because your back foot is really gonna give you your turn your front foot is just there to balance you on the board and you can use it a little bit but it's not near as effective as your hind foot because your hind foot is going directly across the board so I lean on my toes I'm going right I lean on my heel I'm going left so your back to it does a lot more of the work for steering once you're going okay the next thing you really need to learn and practice probably it might be the most important thing next to pushing is stopping a lot of people hardly ever learn how to stop and it's a shame because one of the things about long boarding that is always a huge factor is style it's fun we've gone fast you're flowing but you want to look styling you don't want to look like a square because that's just that's just part of like skateboarding 101 like there's style infused in every aspect of it and that's what makes it a great sport for expressing yourself out with your crew today happens to be my two healer dogs but hopefully for you guys if some friends or some good tune first starting out learning how to foot break you want to get just a little bit of speed going coming just crazy basically what you do a little more speed basically what you do is drop your hind foot off the board and you want to drop it nice and flat and gently hey guys okay so one helpful tip when you're first starting the foot brake is you can actually touch your ankle to the side of your board and that's gonna help give you a little support so I'm actually touching my ankle to the side of my board it just gives you a little more bounce so you're not wiggling all over the place now if you want a real gentle break you can use kind of the ball of your foot so you can just go sorta like that crack but generally you'll want to place your foot as flat as possible one reason for that is it gives you a nice smooth steady surface like it's less likely to catch on the crack or anything if you just put your foot nice and flat like that and also for wearing down your shoes if you use just your toe or just your heel it's gonna wear down your shoes way faster but if you brake with a nice flat foot it really I mean you can you can do a lot of foot braking and it really wears down your shoes very little I mean these vans are like completely destroyed you can see the toe is almost about to wear through and so is the heel but that's because I've been riding in these shoes for a couple years so if you got reasonably new shoes and you're not riding a ton you can pull break a lot before it wears down in fact I'll compare to my other shoe which I never foot brake with so you can see that it's still got quite a bit of tread so it's gonna take a toll on your shoes but it's pretty negligible by the time by the time you longboard and foot break enough to tear through the sole of your right shoe in my case your shoes are gonna be pretty much shredded from use anyway so it's not gonna really take that much of a toll on your shoes but in any case to prevent excessive wear definitely keep your foot nice and flat like so let's get little speed going I'll have a nice cruise here on my right foot it's almost straight across the back but not quite so I got a little speed it felt more comfortable to keep my foot angle just a little bit my back foot a little more balanced front foot it's just like so one stance is really comfy once you get your balance end up keeping your feet pretty close together like this this is kind of a fun drill with standing on your board I don't know if it looks that cool or not but it feels real stylee and it feels real comfortable too and it's kind of your foot will just naturally snap to that position you got like a big stretch of board behind you that you're not really using kind of off like you're surfing on a longboard you know you're like riding the nose you got a soul board behind you but you're just showing up front so another concept about beginner long wedding that you're gonna want to learn early on is I'm gonna call it your maximum speed threshold that's basically like your point of no return so right now I'm riding upstream and so I have to keep pushing to to getting through speed but if you're going downhill you're gonna reach a point where you're going too fast to bail even right now in space I need to and you can hop off your board so your maximum speed threshold is like the maximum speed at which you can still bail so as a beginner what you're never gonna want to do is go down a hill faster than the speed where you can either foot brake to bring yourself down to the safe control the speed or you can bail because once you get past that foot brake speed like the maximum speed at which you feel comfortable taking your foot off the board and braking you're gonna end up either having to commit to the entire stretch of hill that you're on and just ride it out until you can slow down or until you slow down enough naturally to be able to the foot brake music gonna have to do that or you're gonna have to balance and if you're going too fast to jump off and stay on your feet you're gonna end up flying through the air like Superman landing on the smiths and getting all scraped ups which it's probably gonna happen anyway somewhere along your dreams and you really should be afraid of that because you're not a true longboarder until you've had a few scrapes but it's gonna hurt like hell and so want to be careful trying to avoid it as much as possible I can practically count on one hand still the number of wipeouts I've had over the years that were pretty bad like I remember in all me to California I hit an acorn and I was on it just a sidewalk like this that was going pretty good I'm I'll push three baskets and I just flew through the air landed Superman style on my chest and slid my back feet like curled up over my head I just laid there in a pile and another time in Beulah North Dakota when I was growing up I hit a big crack of that like my whole truck and wheels dropped down into and the same thing so you're gonna have some calls like that but if you ride safe and you follow us on my tips we're gonna be few and far between all right so now if you practice going uphill enough that you're pretty comfortable pushing and then right standing on your board then it's time to get a little speed so right now me and the doggies are going downstream and so it's pretty easy to push now when you're pushing watch out for big cracks like that always try and have two feet on the board for a big crack and you can widen your stance like this and you widen your stance it's gonna give you a lot more stability for hitting big cracks so if you see a crack coming up widen your stance like that hit the crack and then get back in your normal pushing position be balanced over your front leg when you push it you're gonna get to a point where you could pretty much ride like this where you're just Alice leaning forward bending down a little bit once you get that balance then you can really develop a lot more speed once you're comfortable getting a little speed going and pushing pretty hard when you're in there kind of you're cruising carving stands for me I want my left foot to be a little bit towards heel side heel sticking off the floor just a little bit and my my right the book my back got my toe sticking off a little bit because when I steers the left I'm gonna use my front foot a lot more when I steer to the right I'm gonna use my hind foot a lot more so here's what's gonna look like here's the fun section to get some speed left heel right toe left heel right toe left heel kick again right toe and you want to try and stay almost perfectly like up and down on your board like balanced in between your trucks and wheels has your carbon you have to lean a little bit forward and a little bit backwards obviously but don't get too crazy all right come on alright so another thing I talk about is getting low on your board there's really only one reason to get low on your board and that's if you're going through a section yet with kind of a tight turn like up here so I'm gonna get a lot of speed on when you're turning getting low like that can offer like a little bit more control here there's a there's a nice tight turn up here I'll demonstrate yep okay so let me go on left backside so you want to get low like that for turning it's fun it's stylish and it's effective you can do the same thing front side so for me that was a backside turn watch it do it real slow this time front side like this once you start picking up speed and like looking for specific turns to hit on purpose just for the purpose of trying to turn really fast and maybe slide a little bit you're gonna want to start sliding for me to my left back side if you're goofy you go to the right but back side is way way way easier it's trust me so here's another turn in here back side is that guy it's easier to go back side just cuz you're I don't know same thing with snowboarding you're on your heels it's just a little more stable and if you're going toe side you can go back and do the same thing the other way but um if you're gonna slide a little bit which is going to start to happen as you ride more and faster and sliding back side is way way easier then sliding front side I can longboard pretty well and I still struggle when I'm going on a right-hand turn and there's the chance to slide a little bit it's not cool they get sketchy because it's harder to keep your balance when you're on your toes for some reason whereby if you're going back side I'll try and slide this turn up here and I'll show you how that works I get a little speed let's go get messy hey you hear my wheels breaking loose this is a tiny bit so that was it's just a little bit of a sliding backside but to do that front side is a lot more difficult so when you're practicing taking turns and you're building speed definitely want to go back side if you think you might slide a little bit sometimes when people are riding and they're just cruising pretty fast they'll have a tendency to get low like this and they think it gives them more balance so like oh man I'm almost going too fast so I got to get low that's like super counterintuitive when you get low like this you're it lowers your center of gravity and you're actually a lot more likely to wobble especially if you're going quick you're more likely to get speed wobbles and have a wipeout so if you get to a point where you're cruising along and you're starting to reach that maximum speed like like for instance if you're a noob longboarder and you're going this fast right here you're gonna be like oh man this is almost too fast for me to be able to like step off my board and foot brake and you got a hill coming up you either bail or you commit and if you commit and you start going uncomfortably fast you're gonna want to just kind of get in your bomber stance which you'll turn your right foot a little more perpendicular to the board same thing with here your hind foot spread out and bend your knees and just try and stay about like so and just ride it out until you slow down enough to be able to bail or when you slow down enough to where you feel comfortable stepping off your board and foot braking to a stop so another important reason why you really need to practice your foot braking a lot is because like right now I'm on a path with me and the doggies and there's not very many people around but a lot of times you find yourself skateboarding on a street somewhere and there's like hella people walking around rather than have to like stop like that to get off your board or whatever it's so much cooler if you can just either slide like that and kind of slow down to a pace where you're just almost at a walking pace next everybody else so you're not gonna run into someone if they move in front of you you could stop really quick you're not gonna hit anyone because it's kind of uncool to go too fast down the path where there's people because people are crazy someone will step in front of you have a bad reaction I've had a couple close calls where I've like almost hit little kids and stuff back when I was more of a punker and I just thought the world was mine and I could just shred like crazy but it's it's a little more kinder just slow down it needs up when there's a lot of people are but so another way to foot break in this scenario like that if you're going through a crowd there like it'll kind of open up to be able to go a little faster and there's like all those people who's got your toe like that and they lay down and then you can just creep along in between the people and then when it opens up being speed up a little yeah that's just the tow brain but that's definitely nowhere she's done one even then if you're breaking myself so that's it guys that's that's your basics those tips I gave you it'll take you a super long way and boarding so I'll get yourself a decent board or a busted-ass board that you're borrowing or just get aboard get on it start pushing if the wheels are hard your custody and the bearings suck it's all good sometimes it's easier to push if your bearings and wheels aren't that great just go right to try out the activity good for your brain good for your body it's good to get your animal friends out if you got them so yeah just remember biggest thing figure out which way you which way is most comfortable to stand on the board regular goofy yeah I just remember those basics get your stance find out which way you like to push find a good path even if you have to drive somewhere like if your neighborhood sidewalk is not that good or it's a little bit too steep or whatever just go drive somewhere or take the bus or whatever you got to do get a ride to a place where the path is really suitable for starting out as a beginner you're just gonna have a lot more fun it'll probably be safer if the trip the path is you know nice and smooth and went on this path has some cracks on it but they're really not that bad I don't special II with these big wheels so go somewhere that has the right steepness like this path along the creek is practically flat and so it's a great spot to learn because we can go upstream and there's a little bit of resistance and go downstream you can cruise a little more blow it on find a good place to ride get your stance down like this and then you start pushing just push all day when I was early on when I was riding all the time I used to live in the Bay Area in California and I would take the train into San Francisco and I'd get off on like Market Street it's like you know eastern side of the peninsula downtown and I'd skate all the way as its and then like take a bus back or something and so my fondest memories are just getting out cruising on my board checking out the sights and sounds and taking pictures and it's just a healthy activity but make sure you ride safe you know if you're just practicing basics just learn it you really don't need like elbow pads and slider gloves and I mean you really don't need a helmet if you're not going very fast now I'm all about using protection when you start to get a little better and you're going a little faster and stuff this is definitely a dangerous sport there can be if you push hard but for now just have fun man get out there 9:00 all right that's it for me data so if you guys want more videos like this make sure you like the video and subscribe post in the comments below let me know what you liked what you didn't like and what you want to see I can show you a lot more stuff about longboarding for beginners or if you're gonna kick it up a notch I can show you some more tricks and tips for a little bit more advanced riders I'm certainly not a pro by any means but I can get down the path pretty good so until next time [Music]

Channel: Rory Dean Schneider

Views: 43,402

Keywords: longboarding, skateboarding, how to longboard, longboarding for beginners, how to skateboard

Id: _JsZbLmtZ24

Length: 24min 52sec (1492 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 29 2019