Getting back into skating consistently has definitely been awesome so far! I love breaking a sweat riding around, and trying to land new tricks. This week in particular, I decided to master a pretty simple flatground trick called an ollie.
Now, before elaborating on my experience mastering the ollie, it’s worthy sharing the set up I have for my board. I use a 7 inch wide deck, with bullet trucks, red bearings, and santa cruz wheels. Truly the set up is all up to the rider’s preference. However, I would recommend when mastering flat ground tricks (which is what this blog is about), to use a skinnier board width, approximately between 7-8 inches. This is because skinnier boards have better pop to get off the ground, and they flip faster.
Alrighty. Now that we’ve gone over the set up, let’s jump right into my experience landing the ollie. Firstly, it only took about half an hour before I was consistently landing the trick. Personally, once I got my foot placement correct and generated enough pop into the back of the board, landing the trick became easier and easier. I am a goofy rider (left foot at back of board and right foot at front), and found that my sweet spot was when my back left foot was at the tail of the board, and my right foot was right behind screws at the front of the board. Once getting comfortable with my footing, my next challenge was committing to popping the back of the board, and kicking up. This is a challenging part for not only myself, but many other beginners as well. If you half commit on a trick, you can risk messing up and hurt yourself. I made sure I was stationary at all times, and practiced popping and kicking out a few times before actually trying to land the trick. In a short time I was ready to complete the trick by focusing on the next challenge; the landing. It was easiest for me to focus on ending with my left foot on the back screws of the board, and my right foot on the screws at the front of the board. Once again, I practiced a number of times on the landing and found it super difficult. Therefore, I decided to hold onto a rail, make sure the board was stationary, then try landing again. I found this was much simpler, and once I was comfortable landing this way, I tried letting go of the rail, then trying while the skateboard was in emotion. As mentioned above it took about half an hour before I was consistently landing an ollie, and man it feels great now knowing I can land this dope trick!
Overall, the ollie is a super dope trick! Now that I feel pretty confident about it, I’ll go ahead and try to get some cool clips of me clearing staircases, or jumping over my friends. I’ll see you guys next week! This time focusing on kickflips :).
Skateboard Tricks for Dummies 