- 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.