Learning New
Skateboard Tricks
When you go to skateboard with your crew it is not hard to figure out who is going to learn a new trick the fastest and who probably never will. I call it the commit and pain factors. The people who will not commit to doing the trick no matter what happens are going to be much slower to learn the trick. No fear really does mean something in skating.
So you have to commit!
What that means is that if you go into learning a trick afraid of falling or getting hurt you are not going to learn the trick. I see people bail when they are just about to finally do the trick all the time. Because they are afraid of getting hurt they either never get it or just give up.
So to learn a new trick you have to commit to it. That means you have to accept that yeah, to be good on skateboard, sometimes it is gonna hurt. But this is true of a lot of sports. No one becomes a great running back by running out of bounds. If you do not like pain, then maybe you should be playing golf or join the swim team.
Have a plan!
Almost nobody ever rolls out there and pulls a trick the first time they try it. You have to work your way up to doing the trick you want to learn by steps. This really means learning the basics. It means practicing the basic things like ollies and kickturns. You are not going to land a 360 when you can not even ollie up a curb.
Keep focused!
Do not keep changing the trick you are working on. When you do that all you end up with is a set of things you can almost do. Part of being committed and having a plan is staying focused on what you are doing.
What I have done is actually make a short list of things to work on. I even started planning how long I would work on each thing. It ended up that I would break an hour up into 6 different basic things to work on. I started out with ten minutes for each but that changed as I focused on weaknesses. In the end I would spend 5 minutes working on things I was good at just to stay in practice and as much as 20 minutes working on what I sucked at. It ended up being a very intense hour of skating practice. It also worked.
