Can I Learn to Skateboard in a Month?
When I decided to take up skateboarding in June , I had the ambition for it to last longer than my month-long Lifehacker Fitness Challenge . However, I mostly kept my goals to myself so as not to jinx my likelihood of successfully passing the month. However, comments came from older skaters sharing their learning or returning experiences, most of whom tried to help me define “success” in the first place.
For me, success would mean one specific goal – to master a new trick and one abstract goal – to have fun, to learn to love skating, regardless of whether I do the tricks or not.
How many skateboarding tricks can you learn in a month?
I spoke with Yuri Cruz , author of Kickflips and Chill: Your Inspirational Guide to Becoming a Great Skater , to get a better understanding of what contributes to a smart set of goals. I’ve already learned how to ollie thanks to a few rogue skaters who took pity on my efforts and advised me to train while holding the fence. This was the most helpful skateboarding tip I found, and I quickly learned to land a few humble, stationary ollies, and I got out of the fence in about a week.
“As a beginner, I discovered that shuv-its is a good thing to do, then pop shuv-it,” said Yuri. “Just hanging out at the board and doing something other than flip tricks can be a lot of fun and helps build control and confidence.” A lot of the advice I heard from skateboarders was about “building confidence” and “just getting used to being on the board,” which I take as a polite way of saying something that most people don’t want to admit: there won’t be any advice. Help me do this for a long time, like all of them.
A skateboarder I met at Cooper Skate Park in Brooklyn, Christopher “Smokey” Jones, echoed this view. “You want to build confidence in yourself,” he said, advising me not to worry about the heavy falls he saw that day. “Everyone gets injured here.”
However, when I asked him to learn a certain order of tricks, he agreed. “First, learn to get rid of all things,” he said. “And then Ollie is on the ledge. Then the front 180, then the back 180. Once you’ve learned all this, start doing shuv-it, and then you can start doing kickflip and all that, later. “
Of course, the number of tricks that someone can learn in a month depends on the person and how often you ride, but I managed to learn two – allies and shuv-its – and I can land reliably enough to declare them victories. within a month. …
How to stay motivated to keep skating
It’s easy to stay motivated when the rewards come quickly, but it got harder when I felt the return on my improvements was diminishing. Initially, I was thrilled to be able to master the ollie, but the transition to the next level – which I define for myself as frontside 180, given Smokey’s advice – was much slower.
“There were times when I just could not go through a difficult place to catch a trick, and I was very upset,” Yuri told me. “I literally came up with a trick and revisited it after a year. But nobody wants to hear that when you have a goal. “
She was right, I didn’t want to hear it, but what she suggested helped:
To help with motivation, if you have an ollie or any other trick, have some fun with this ollie, make it the best ollie you can. Learn to drive an ollie, move a little faster and ollie, learn what an ollie setup is and how to do it. Have fun and develop what you already have, because you can always do something even better or more unique in figure skating. It can bring back the fun of riding.
She also recommends watching skating videos, including your own, where you can learn by watching the mechanics in slow motion. I started watching Betty on HBO for motivation – much easier – but I also went down the rabbit hole of skateboarding content on YouTube and Instagram, where I found countless people of color in the community who I once called suburban and whites. … It was not a mistake that I gravitated to Smokey and Yuri to hear their experiences, or to a show like Betty that features a wide variety of women involved in sports that may be unpleasant for them. Seeing their success was as much a motivating factor as my first shuwa-it, and maybe even more.
How long does it take to learn how to skateboard?
One of the hardest things about “learning” a skill without standard criteria is the impostor syndrome, which arises from not knowing your position. If you want to learn how to solve a Rubik’s cube, you will know when you get to it, but “learning to skateboard” will naturally mean different things to different people.
For Smokey, now 48 and skateboarding since he was twelve, being a “skateboarder” meant going out and doing it in order to get a little better. I found Yuri’s milestones very helpful in assessing my own growth rate as I might try to compare some of my accomplishments to hers: “I don’t remember how long it took me tic-tac-toe or making my first ollie, but I saw that I learned to ollie in four months of skating, and I learned kickflip in six months. “
Have I learned to “love” skateboarding?
Despite how poorly I am at it, going outside with my board was the purest joy of my summer. I have the freedom to be a bad thing and just enjoy it – something unusual for adults, especially motivated, like me, who are proud of the fact that well-doing what we do.
“Enjoy where you are and have fun,” Yuri told me. “If you’re a purposeful person like me, remember to come back to making it fun. I was the type of person who kept telling myself, “Once I learn this trick, I’ll become a real skater,” but after I learn this trick, I want to learn another trick and say the same. “
So my new goal in skateboarding, if I could add another one, is not to put too much pressure on any goals in skateboarding. “Remember, skating should be fun,” Yuri told me. And I love fun.