If you're a little bit newer to skateboarding, and you're interested in learning some of these
fundamental tricks as quickly as you possibly can, today we're going to go over how you can land your
first pop shuvit in 9 minutes or less. Alright, so now for the pop shuvit, it's going to be kind of
similar to the ollie, except for, instead of using our front foot and our back foot in conjunction
with each other to make the board move, we're going to be moving the board almost solely with
our back foot, and we're just going to be using the front foot at the later part of the trick to
kind of catch the trick. But before we get into all those juicy details, first I just want to
make sure that you have everything ready to go and that your space is set up so that you can actually
land this pop shuvit. So, real quick, just make sure that you're wearing the right type of shoes.
Skate shoes would be preferred. And secondly, I want to make sure that you can fall down a couple
times while we're doing this without getting hurt, so what that means is put on a helmet,
and then I would recommend wrist guards and elbow pads for this. And then, very importantly,
make sure you've practiced falling down. So if you can just go and find a ledge and kind of
practice jumping off of it and kind of rolling out of it...make sure you're not landing with
your arm fully outstretched or your knees locked or anything like that. Once you're able to fall,
then you're going to be able to commit to trying this trick, and that's one of the very
key components of being able to do this. Now, the third and final thing I want you to do in order to
get set up is I want you to put your skateboard in a situation where you can stand on it and it's not
rolling forward and backwards too much like this. So, the easiest way to do it is to find a thin rug
and I go over this in my ollie video as well, this is a really great way to do it. Find a thin rug,
put it right on top of the concrete, and then we're going to use this a little bit differently
than we did for the ollie. Instead of putting the skateboard on it like this, we're going to
take the back wheels and hang them off of the back of the carpet. That way, we're able to use
the concrete as much as possible to pop this board off of the ground and get it to rotate the way we
want to. Now, for this next minute, we want to get you in the zone of being able to do a pop shuvit,
so this is kind of like a warm up, but while i'm talking to you about what we're going to do next,
I want you to warm up by doing this. Go ahead and stand on your board with it on the carpet,
and then practice bending down; bending your knees and jumping off of the board. Alright,
so now that you're warming up on that, I want to go ahead and explain to you what's going to be
happening during a pop shuvit so that way you can kind of get the hang of being able to do it. So,
whenever you do a pop shuvit, you're going to be jumping off of the board and pulling your front
foot up first, so that way it's getting completely out of the way, and then you're going to use the
back foot to pop the tail off the ground, very similar to the way you pop it off of the ground
to do an ollie, but then at the very last second, kind of almost as an afterthought, you're going to
kind of pull your foot back and 'suggest' that the board is going to do a bit of a rotation.
Now, it's very important that you think of it like that because if you focus on the rotation and not
the pop, You're going to be doing these shuvits, which aren't popping off of the ground and they're
not going to be consistent at all, and you're not going to get any air off of them. Now, to just
kind of get you in the right mindset of being able to do a pop shuvit with your back foot, I want you
to practice just popping and spinning the board with only your back foot and leaving your front
foot on the ground. This is going to be our first real practice step. So just take your front foot,
put it right next to the board, and then put your back foot on the board and get ready, and then go
ahead and pop it off of the ground like that and try to get it to spin in a way that it's
not flipping the board over like a kickflip or a heelflip, but just kind of spinning away from you.
And don't worry if it's going exactly 180 degrees. It can go a little bit less than that, it can go
way more than that, no problem. But i just want you to do something kind of like this...kind
of like that...okay yeah that's perfect if you can do that. Make sure the tail of the board is
popping off of the ground before you worry about spinning it. That's important. It's a 'pop shuvit'
not a 'shuv pop-it.' Remember that. Alright so now, while you're practicing that, I'm going to,
real quick, go over the foot positioning you're going to use for when you're doing a pop shuvit
while you're fully standing on the board. So, it's kind of like an ollie. Whenever you get on
the board, you're going to put your front foot on first and just put it a little bit behind
the front wheels. And then for your back foot, the positioning of it is really really important
here. When you put your back foot on, it's going to be similar, again, to the way you have it for
an ollie, so you're going to have your back foot behind the back wheels on the tail, but
you want to make sure that you have it correctly positioned with regards to how far toe-side and
how far heel-side you have it. And so, the ideal spot is you want the ball of your foot,
which is where you jump off of, if you think about it, whenever you jump,
the last thing that leaves the ground and the thing you press off the ground most with is going
to be the ball of your foot. Not your toes, but a little bit behind that. And what you want to do is
you want to position it so that the ball of your foot is right in the center line of the board.
If you do have it too far toe side, so if i have the ball of my foot right here for instance,
and I do a pop shuvit, the board is going to flip on me kind of like a kickflip motion, and then if
I put it back here, way too far heel side and I try to do a pop shuvit, it's going to flip like
a heelflip for me when I do it. And we don't want either of those. We want it to just spin without
flipping at all. So when you get finally set up, you're going to want your feet to look something
like this. So now that we're set up, we're going to talk about how to get into this position.
You're always going to step with your front foot on first, right behind the front wheels, and then
take your back foot, put it right there with the ball of your foot on the center of the tail, and
then now you're ready to do a pop shuvit. And so, one way you want to practice getting into it is,
you get your feet set up, bend down, jump off of it. Now, while we're doing this, you want to get
to where you're bending down and jumping off of the board and then landing back on the board. That
way, you're kind of getting used to the mindset of, "Hey, we're going to be landing back on the
skateboard." Alright, so now, the next practice step that we're going to do is going to be
trying to get the board to rotate properly. This is really fun because you don't have to worry at
all about landing back on the board right here. We're just going to practice getting the motion
with our back foot right and getting you to pop the pop shuvit in a way that, eventually,
you'll be able to land on it, but you don't have to worry about it for right now. We're just,
kind of, flinging the board in the right way. We're going to set up our feet like you have been:
put your front foot on the board, back foot on the tail, and then we're going to have you bend down,
and then whenever we jump, this time we're going to pick up our front foot first and basically
try to just get it out of the way. So, pick it up really early and then almost at the same time but
just a little bit after it, you're going to take your back foot and try to pop the tail off of the
ground, and whenever you feel it hit the ground, that's when you're going to do a little bit of a
pull back. So, put your front foot on the board, back foot on the tail, bend down, and then try to
jump like that. Now, that is EXACTLY what you want to happen. If you can get it to do that,
you're going to be really in good shape here. If your tail is not hitting the ground,
you're pulling your back foot back too fast, and you need to focus more on doing it like an ollie
where you're just focused mainly on popping the board off of the ground. The shuvit part is an
afterthought. So, once you can do this where you got your feet set up in the correct position for
a pop shuvit, your back foot is in the right spot, you're bending down, you're jumping,
and you're making the board rotate like that, now we're ready to move on to the next step,
which is we're going to practice stopping the board from over-rotating with our front foot.
What you want to do is, we're going to do the same thing as before, but this time we're just going to
land with our back foot on the ground and we're going to land with our front foot on the board
and we're going to practice whenever the board has rotated 180 degrees, we're going to kind of
catch it with our front foot on the way around. So, it's going to look something like this.
Whenever you're jumping off of the board to do a pop shuvit, the board is going to kind of move
itself a little bit forward towards your toes. So whenever you're popping it off of the ground,
maybe it starts here. It's probably going to end up something like right there. It's going
to move a little bit forward. So whenever you're jumping, anticipate that and try to aim to land
in that position. So whenever you're jumping off of the board, jump forward a little bit.
Now while you're doing this, I'm going to go ahead and explain the next step, so keep practicing it
where you're putting your feet on the board, jumping in the air, and stopping it with your
front foot and landing with your back foot on the ground. Alright, so now,
the next step is we're going to have to overcome the part in our brain that's telling us we don't
know what's going on when we fling the board. We actually do because we've been practicing it, but
your brain doesn't really know that yet sometimes. So, what you have to do
is get in a situation where we're flinging the board and you're able to trust that the board's
going to land under your feet in a way that when you step on it, it's not going to cause
you to fall. Two big things to do here. Number one: and one thing I tell people to do all the
time, and this works perfectly for this trick, is to just fall down on purpose. We're going to get
it out of the way. It's not that bad to fall. So I'm going to take my microphone and put it here,
and we're going to do a practice fall. So here we go. I'm going to go ahead and do a pop shuvit,
land on the board with both feet, and then intentionally fall down. It doesn't matter
if the board is on its side or whatever. I'm already expecting it to happen. So
whenever you're practicing falling down, it's going to look something like this.
Now, once you've done that a few times and you feel solid about it, you're not worried about,
"I don't know what's going to happen if I commit to this trick." You
already know what's going to happen. You're going to fall to the ground
this far and you're going to be okay. Alright, so now, this is what I would call the second to last
step to being able to land your first pop shuvit. It's going to be what I call the "pop shuvit step
off." What we're going to do is we're going to do everything the same as before. We're going to
bend down, we're going to jump, and we're going to fling the board. We're going to do the same thing
as before. We're catching it with our front foot, but we're also going to keep our back foot in the
air long enough to land on the board just for an instantaneous split second amount of time and then
step off of it. So that's going to look something like this. We're just going to land on the board
only for a second and then step off. Just like that. So do that a couple times until you get
to the point where you're not that worried about what's going to happen if you stay on the board
for more than a split second. You've got the consistency with rotating your board around,
landing on it with both feet, and then once you get to the point where you've gotten
the pop shuvit step off a couple of times where it actually landed pretty stable, and you landed
with your feet over top of the bolts, you're going to start convincing yourself, "Hey,
maybe here in a second, I could just do it again and stay on." And then that's when you're going to
start landing your first pop shuvits. So, it's going to look like this. We're going to go to
do our step-off, but just stay on. So, the "pop shuvit stay on," it's going to look like this.
Once you do one like that, even if it's sloppy, you are landing your pop shuvits.
Now my suggestions for making this trick a little more pretty once you get to that point is
you want to focus on, with your back foot, not worrying about spinning the board too much,
worrying more about the pop, and you should only focus on pulling your back foot back once you
feel, kind of, your tail hit the ground first. Pop, then shuvit. Now, secondly,
the higher you're jumping, the easier it's going to be to kind of time whenever you want to stop
the board from rotating, so if you don't jump very high, everything has to go right all in a
really short period of time and you've got to get it done, but if you bend down all the way and jump
really high into the air, you can just float in the air for all of the time you want to, waiting
for the board to come to the exact right moment, put your front foot on it, and BAM, land on it,
you're going to be fine. And then, lastly, just make sure if you're having trouble getting your
board to rotate properly, or if it's flipping over, go back to the part where you're making
sure your feet are positioned correctly before you pop the trick, and that's going to solve a lot of
your problems. Alright guys, I hope that helps you out with your pop shuvits. If you need to,
go ahead and go back to any one of those steps and practice it for a little bit longer. Make
sure you're nailing it before you go onto the next one, and that'll allow you to get each next one as
easy as possible and land your pop shuvits super fast, but don't get discouraged. You're going to
be able to do it. And other than that, guys, all I have to say is remember, Never Stop Improving!