Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles - Hey friends, Steve here with Surfskate Love, here to tell you five quick and simple ways to get started pumping on your surfskate. This video is for beginners who are really just having a hard time getting your board moving and you feel like your whole body is uncoordinated and you feel like you're kind of just fighting against yourself in the process and nothing's clicking, nothing's flowing. And if you find this little tutorial helpful then I invite you to check out my brand new video course, "Surfskating for Non-Surfers." It's a great crash course for beginners and it covers everything from foot placement to stance and posture, to how to pump out a turn and how to stop. And I go into a lot more depth and detail than what you're going to see here and you can check that out at SurfskatingFornonSurfers.com. So basically how we're gonna go through these five steps is we're gonna start from our feet and go up to our shoulders. So step one is I'm gonna show you what to do with our feet. Step two is we're gonna show you what to do with your ankles. Step three is what we do with our knees. Step four is moving onto our hips and finally step five is what we do with our shoulders. So step one is what do we do with our feet? And this is about our posture and our foot placement. So the first thing we need to know is posture. By posture I mean how we're oriented on our board and how we're facing. So I came from longboarding and my rule to longboard, if I were skating this way, I would be facing this way on my longboard and kind of cruising this way. But on a surfskate, you wanna be facing the way that you're skating and there's a lot of reasons for this but it gives you coordination and balance. But one of the biggest benefits is that it gives you increased flexibility which is one of your biggest friends on a surfskate. So if I were to be skating this way and facing this way and my feet were on the board like so, any knee bends that I did would look like this, okay? But watch what happens to the depth of my knee bend simply by shifting my feet a little bit at an angle to now where I can point my knees, my hips and my shoulders in the direction that I'm skating. Now watch what happens to this flexibility, okay? So it's the difference between this and this. So that adds a lot of range of motion to our knee bends and it adds a lot of balance. The next thing we need to know about our feet is foot placement. Now there's three principles that I want you to remember when it comes to foot placement on a surfskate. Principle number one is you want your front foot to be right behind these front trucks. You will get into trouble on a surfskate if you are too far forward on that truck, if you're too far back what's gonna happen is you might tip your board even but really it means you're just not gonna get as much propulsion out of that truck also not only propulsion but also lean. Second principle is you don't want your toes hanging off the board. You want your toes to be right on the edge of that board both your front foot and your back that like so. The reason that's important is because if my foot is too far back, what happens is when I try to move my board with my ankles I'm gonna be very heavily heel-sided. If my toe is off the front then I'm gonna be very heavily weighted on my toe side. We want that to be equal. So that means, don't put your toes off the edge of the board. The third principle is that you want your feet at an angle because of the reason we just said. We wanna be skating forward. If my feet are like this, I cannot be skating forward. So we wanna turn at an angle. How I look at it is as a goofy-footed rider facing this way. I want to cover that bolt with my foot. Just like so, if you are a regular-footed rider it means you're gonna cover this bolt just like so. Now on your back foot, I've heard a little bit of debate about this and I think that there's a range of personal preference. I've heard some people say you want it clear back as far back as you can get it on the tail like so. I've heard other people like it really clear up here like on these back bolts. Personally for me, it kind of depends on the deck on this Carver Greenroom, we've got this perfect little pocket right here. So I like my back foot to be right here in that pocket. I like it to be at an angle, not like so but at an angle and as I skate, as I do turns, you're gonna see that this toe will get a lot of turns on it like so. If I'm turning this way then I'm gonna turn my knees, my feet, my toes are gonna slide same thing this way. So personally I ride with my back foot about right there. So this is our foot placement on a surfskate just like so. Step two is what we do with our ankles and that's very, very simple. It's the most basic, simple way to get started on the surfskate and really, it just means using your ankles to do a heel-toe wiggles to get your board moving, just like so. You're gonna jump on your board. You're gonna get your proper foot placement and positioning and then we're gonna just do some back and forth using our ankles. That's all I'm doing, I'm isolating in my body nothing else is moving. It's just ankles moving that heel-toe wiggle. And I'm heavily weighted, more heavily weighted on my front foot than my back so that I can really get some propulsion out of that front truck. But now we're moving on a board so instead of up here, like trying to do too much and we're fighting against each other and nothing's working, it's all uncoordinated. Just stop all that and just start at the most basic level. You gotta get board lean with your ankles because no matter what you do with your upper body, if your board doesn't lean you're not gonna get any propulsion. So that just starts with heel-toe wiggles. Heel-toe wiggles, heel-toe wiggles. Heel-toe wiggles. My board's moving. And from there, once our board is moving, we can move up to step three which is knees. And all you're gonna do is once you've got your board wiggling, now just add some flexibility in the knees, that's it, that's it. Now remember the principle that we're skating forward which means we want our feet and our knees our hips and our shoulders facing the way we're skating. So I'm opening up those knees. We're doing our heel-toe wiggles and now just add a knee flexibility. And you can just play with this, al you doing is just kind of going up and down with your knees while I'm still continuing my board lean with my heel-toe wiggling. We're just moving up our body, very simple from feet to ankles to knees and just get loose with your knees and just play around like this. So you can see how simple that is to move from feet to ankles to knees. Step four is to now integrate our hips into the motion. Now, if you're like me where you haven't done a lot of board sports and you haven't done surfing and a lot of these body movements are kind of counter-intuitive and they're uncoordinated and you're not sure how everything works together. What I like to do is isolate parts of my body simply so that I can feel how that part is interacting with the board. So to teach people, hips, the very first thing I teach, instead of it being coordinated with anything else, I teach to basically isolate your hips. And what that means is to just jump on your board and your proper positioning and posture facing forward. First of all, I'm gonna just get my board moving by wiggling, right? So now I've got some propulsion, I've got some momentum. Now what I'm gonna do is basically keep everything else static. It's kind of hard to see this visually, it's easier to feel than it is to see visually but I'm gonna keep everything static on my body, my feet, my knees and I'm just gonna isolate hips and you can even like put your hands up like this just to isolate. Everything I'm doing on this board is moving it through the hips and I'm just twisting my hips. And again, the point is, once you isolate the hips, you can just kind of feel the impact that they have on the board and once you feel that isolation, now we can just work together. We got our feet right with our posture and our foot placement. We got our ankles right with our heel-toe wiggles. We're getting lean on the board. We're adding some flexibility to our knees. Now let's just add some hip twists to it and you can see how it just is naturally starting to coordinate from our feet up into our upper body. Now we're just adding hip twisting to the movements. And just play with this like you wanna just experiment with twisting your hips. Be exaggerated about it, just so you can feel how do hips influence everything that I'm doing here. And our fifth and final step is to add and integrate our shoulders to the motions. Now I'm not going to get very detailed in this process because right now I'm just talking to beginners and what I would say from my experiences, your number one step is really just to experiment and play around with how different body parts and different body motions affect your board. So what I'm gonna tell you to do on your shoulders is just basically get on your board, work your way up. Heel-toe wiggle, heel-toe wiggle, heel-toe wiggle. So I have my momentum, we work our way up, I got my knees and I'm gonna add some hip twist to this whole motion. And now in the shoulders there's a lot to know about the shoulders but really what I want you to do is just to experiment and play. So just kind of add more shoulders. Well, obviously you're not gonna be skating through town doing this kind of crazy stuff with your shoulders. But the point is to just start feeling into what happens when I start playing around with my upper body and my shoulders, what happens to this board? So same thing with the hips. I can isolate my shoulders and move everything with shoulders and you can see how, if I turn with shoulders, hips follow, followed by my feet. So like this. And once you've got all of these integrated motions, feet, ankles, knees, hips, shoulders. What you're gonna find is that you just naturally do what I call "falling into the flow" of the board. There's a way that these boards want to move and if you're not working against yourself it'll just naturally flow that way. So you might not have the greatest form but your board is gonna be moving and you're gonna start feeling the flow of how it should feel. Now you'll notice that I am deliberately not skating with good form right now because again, another principle for you to add to this is when, especially when you're first starting to learn, just over-exaggerate everything. Just play with how everything affects this board because once you start feeling then it becomes just kind of natural to just skate. And there we have it, five simple steps to get moving and pumping on your surfskate and if you found this helpful, go check out my video course at SurfskatingFornonSurfers.com.
B1 US board heel skating foot placement moving 5 Simple Steps to Start Pumping on a Surfskate 5 1 Wayne posted on 2021/07/01 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary