10 Skateboarding Tips

If you’re just learning how to skateboard, these ten skateboarding tips should come in handy. Before you know it, you will be amazing all your friends with your sick moves.

1. Safety first. Remember that the most important skateboarding tip is to wear your protective gear! If you seriously hurt yourself your first time out, you’ll never get all the moves down. You’ll need, at minimum, a helmet and elbow and knee pads.
2. Get some good skate shoes. Although you can skate in regular tennis shoes, you should consider getting skate shoes if you will be skating often. Skate shoes have larger, flatter bottoms than regular shoes which allows you to get a better grip.
3. Learn how to fall. It may sound strange but it’s important to learn to roll into a fall and find the proper way to brace yourself when it happens, and it will happen.  Many people have ended up in the ER with broken wrists and arms, because they used these parts of their body to try to stop their fall which is a bad idea. Doctors and ER staff consider this a very important skateboarding tip.
4. Break the trick down into steps. If you try to learn the entire trick at once, you might find yourself getting frustrated and stuck on one point of the trick. As you master each step you can then begin to add them together and before you know it, you’ll have the entire trick completed. This skateboarding tip will help ease some frustration.
5. Try something a little different. What works for one person may not work for you so don’t be afraid to move your hips a little differently or place your feet differently than you’ve seen other skateboarders do.
6. Change up the tricks you are working on. A surprising skateboarding tip is to work on one trick for awhile and then, regardless of whether you’ve mastered it or not, switch to a different trick. This makes it feel less like work and allows your body to relax a little.
7. Skate with others. Not only does this add enjoyment to the process, it also allows you to see other maneuvers and stances. It can also help to build your competitive spirit. Just make sure not to try any maneuvers that you are truly not ready for yet.
8. Master the stances first. The five basic stances include normal (which can be either your left or right foot forward), switch, fakie and nollie. These stances have to be the first things you learn before going onto learning tricks.
9. Perfect your ollie. This is an important skating boarding tip because ollies are part of every air trick so you must know how to do this trick without any hesitation.  This trick will help you fly over curbs, holes and cracks in the pavement as well as anything you might put in your path.
10. Read books, magazines and watch videos. Not only will doing this keep you up on the latest trends, they will usually give you good advice on how to do tricks and where you can find someone who can give you lessons, if you so choose.

When you first step on that skateboard, you may think it’s impossible to learn but we’re sure that Rob Dyrdek, Bam Margera and Tony Hawk felt the same way their first time too. Try out these ten skateboarding tips and just go for it dude!