Most Common Beginner Skater Problems

today I'm going to be going over some of the most common beginner problems so these are the issues that I see come up in comments and DMS way more than any others and instead of trying to respond to each one with a big mess of text I figured it would be easier to show than to tell first we have why can't I Ollie straight this is probably the question that I hear the most often from beginners it seems that no matter how hard some people try their board always ends up turning frontside preventing them from getting to clean Ollie's that you can roll away from yeah this could be because of a few different reasons the main ones being you're turning your shoulders when you ollie your foot positioning is a bit off or your body's natural reaction to turn when landing is taking over in general your board follows your hips and your hips follow your shoulders so naturally if you accidentally start to open up your shoulders front side as you ollie the board will falter a few ways to try to fix this are practicing Ollie while rolling even if it's pretty slow at first I covered this in my how to ollie well moving video where I explain how doing this can help straighten out your Ollie's you can also try practicing Ollie's parallel to a curb or a wall so that your body is kind of blocked from turning frontside at first you might just Ollie straight into the wall but it's a good way to practice training yourself to not unconsciously turn your body I also mentioned that your foot positioning can play a role a lot of beginners tend to start off with their foot in an incorrect position which is having the center of the arch of your foot on the edge of the tail not only will this prevent you from being able to pop your Ollie's higher but it can cause you to turn while popping to correct this try standing on the edge of the tail with just the front half of your foot with your weight mainly on your toes this will make it easier for you to pop straight down and not give the board any frontside scoop and finally I think a big part of this problem is just the mental game of being uncomfortable on a board still if you jump off of something your body's natural reaction is going to be to turn 90 degrees so you have a more stable landing I think that you may also be doing this and consciously while trying Ollie's as a fear response from your body it feels safer to land with your body turned and this is a feeling that you sort of have to override while you're first learning all these in order to get them straightened out next we have why do my kick flips or heel flips fly away another common problem I hear is that you can get the rotation of a kickflip or a heel flip but the board flies too far away from you to land on so the problems behind this and the solutions for both the kickflip and the heel flip are essentially the same first off the biggest problem is leaning back too far if your center of weight is over your back foot when you go to pop and clip one of these tricks the board will go the opposite direction and fly away since there's no counterbalance keeping it in place a way to start to fix this is to practice flipping and landing on the board with just your back foot some people learn to land with one foot but they're using their front foot and this still allows you to keep your weight too far back practicing landing with just your back foot forces you to put your front foot down first which will help keep the board underneath you another cause of this problem could be your foot positioning while doing a kickflip if you have your front foot too far onto the board it will cause your foot to catch the grip tape more on the way up which will fling it into outer space by moving your foot further off the side of the board it lessens the time that it takes for your foot to come off the edge which allows the board to stay more in place the same is true for ill flips but instead of hanging your heel off the board you'll be hanging more of your toes off as you get better and want to pop flip tricks higher you will eventually do the opposite of this but that's a video for another day for number three we have why can't I level out Ollie's the transition between the first little rocketed Ollie's that you learn to something that actually has a little height and is leveled out there's an amazing feeling but it definitely takes a lot of work several things prevent people from leveling out they're always at first but in the end it mainly comes down to timing first off like I mentioned when talking about ollieing Street you want to make sure that your back foot is in the proper position on the tail now we've all heard the mantra of pushed down on the tail slide your front foot towards the nose and jump over and over again but there's a few little tricks that don't get mentioned as often that can definitely help the first one is understanding how to actually pop the tail on the ground and jump at the same time to get some height the motion of a pop is a little confusing at first but I'll try to break it down the best I can you start by bending your knees and moving as if you're going to be jumping off your back foot on the ground however as your tail gets pushed downward and your front foot lets off the weight you need to make sure that you don't just slam the tail down and pin it under your foot you want to have pressed down hard and already jumped off your back foot before the tail is completely hit the ground so in essence your back foot is jumping off your board not off the ground from here as I mentioned before it's all about timing as you shift your weight and jump towards the nose of your board your front foot should be sliding towards the part of the nose that curves up the faster you slide your front foot towards the nose the quicker the tail will level out I'd suggest going and watching my how to ollie higher and better videos for a more in-depth analysis on this besides that I would say just to practice over and over again and then start to step it up by Alling over progressively taller objects coming up next we have why can't I do a full 180 this is a topic that I've covered a couple of times but it's definitely one of the top three most asked questions for this one you're going to need to take what I said about Alling straight and throw it out the window this time around you do want to turn your shoulders the hips and let your body open up frontside for me the most important parts in getting a full 180 or your shoulders and your foot positioning in order to get enough momentum to do a full rotation you need to first wind up your shoulders in the opposite direction that you're going to spin then as you unwind you will give your body enough torsion to fully rotate your hips and then your board in order to help get the board around you aren't going to pop straight down like you would for an ollie for me it helps to put the ball of my foot in the heel side corner of the back pocket as you push down to pop you also be giving the board a little scoop in front of you as you're turning your shoulders combining these two steps should get you most of the way there the last thing to focus on is practicing with pivots and trying to land on your front wheels to do this after you've popped and started to turn put your front wheels down first with your weight towards the front of your board and do a pivot to complete the rotation you can practice this part slow at first and slowly work at it to make it seem like one fluid motion and once you're more comfortable doing this you can also start to try doing 180s down things so you have more time to rotate in the air and finally we have why do I push regular but do tricks goofy so this one's slightly odd but I've heard it enough times that it seems to be a relatively common problem among newer skaters I'll admit that I don't exactly know why this happens but I do have a few theories the first one has to do with how you push in relation to your stance I think that some new skaters may not understand the difference between regular and switch pushing for instance I know that I feel very comfortable pushing switch but once I actually step up onto the board and I'm riding switch it feels really weird however if I were to jump on the board regular it feels way more natural I think that this may be what's going on and some people just don't realize that they're actually pushing switch my advice would be to try moving the foot that stays on the board while pushing up more towards the center and then pushing and standing on the board in the other stance another way to try to suss out which stance you actually are is to put your board on the ground and run and jump onto it the important thing is to not think too much and just see which way your body wants to naturally turn to land on the board if you do this four or five times in general you should turn the same way each time and that's probably your stance I would tend to think that if you have this problem whichever way you feel more comfortable doing tricks is probably the correct stance for you seeing as how tricks are harder than pushing so these are just a few of the problems that they see people ask about a lot as we progress and get better in skateboarding it becomes harder to remember what it was like to be a new skater and therefore harder to address the problems that may seem simple now but we pretty much all went through I just hope that some of these tips and information were helpful to someone just remember is that the most important thing in skateboarding is having fun with enough practice and a good attitude you can pretty much accomplish anything as always I'd like to thank my beautiful patreon supporters for being the coolest Bunch in town and besides that I'd like to thank you for watching and you can like and subscribe if you want [Music] [Applause]

Channel: VLSkate

Views: 765,161

Rating: 4.9758205 out of 5

Keywords: skateboarding, skateboard, skate, skater, skating, sk8, vilas, left, vlskate, atm, click, bones, ipath, real, world, hardware, tricks, trick, kickflip, heelflip, poway, security, fight, braille, vs, hater, bail

Id: Zstniej7KlQ

Length: 8min 25sec (505 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2019