The reason I skate vert is because I started skating
in empty swimming pools.
And the most popular skaters in the '80s
were vert skaters, ramp skaters because that
seemed like the most exciting way of skating.
Nowadays, vert ramps are about 13 feet tall on average.
You're usually wearing at least kneepads and a helmet,
if not elbow pads.
And you're flying anywhere from 6 to 10 feet above the lip.
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And you are putting yourself at great risk,
and that's why you're wearing all the pads.
So pumping is how you use your legs to generate speed
on transition walls.
You sort of prepare your legs in a half squat.
And as you ride through the transition,
you start to straighten them out.
And you use that force up the wall to generate your speed.
And so the idea is you use your legs,
pump through, stand up, prepare again, half squat,
and then pump through again so you're standing up on the way
down.
Fakie is pretty straightforward.
It means that you go off the wall forward, come down it
backwards.
There's no turning your board.
The whole key is shifting your weight.
So as you come off the wall, you're
obviously leaning forward.
And then as your board comes to a stop,
you have to start to shift your weight
towards your back foot which will now
be your lead foot coming back down.
The biggest mistake people make is going up fakie, staying
in the same position, leaning towards their front foot,
and then they end up falling backwards.
A kick turn is the very first 180 that you will ever
learn on a ramp.
It is a very subtle motion.
You don't have to lift up very much on your front wheels
in order to make it turn.
It kind of does the work for you.
And you're pivoting on your back wheels
and then setting it down quickly.
The whole key is in your shoulder.
And it's almost like you throwing a little punch
with your arm to keep that shoulder moving
and to keep your body in line with the skateboard.
The biggest mistake people make is
when they go to do a kick turn and their shoulder
stays open as if it's still in the position of going down
fakie.
And then their body is twisted as they come down,
and they end up falling backwards.
Knee sliding is the best approach to falling, especially
on a vert ramp.
You can absorb the impact by taking one step.
But then if you go to your knees,
you can just slide down that transition
and you don't have to take the impact on your feet.
You want to lean back a little bit so that you're not
falling forward on your face.
Especially when we do big aerials,
you'll see that when we know something's gone wrong,
we either ditch the board or hold onto it.
Don't let it get tangled up in your feet.
Knee slides have kept me going for 40 years skating.
So a backside air is the same body motion as a kick turn.
It's just a matter of reaching down and grabbing
the board as you lift it up with your front foot.
And you come back down just like a kick turn.
They're very similar motions, just one
actually allows you to fly.
Most people grab a little bit off
to the side just in front of their front foot on the heel
side.
That's probably the standard backside air positioning
because it also allows you to get
some leverage on your back foot to keep it on the board.
I usually choose to do nose grabs,
but only because I know exactly where my nose is
and because I know how to keep my back foot on.
I don't recommend people learning nose grab airs first
because it's hard to keep your back foot
on the board at the same time.
First mistake of backside airs is hanging up and hitting
the coping on the way in.
And the way to remedy that is to keep your legs bent
until you know you're clear of the coping.
And then putting them back down and going down the ramp.
If you're trying to do a trick that
requires a little bit of air time,
you're probably going to do at least one or two
backside airs just to get your speed up into that trick.
A backside ollie is basically a no-handed backside air.
There are a couple of different ways to do it.
I prefer to hit my tail just before the coping
to get myself a little bit more clearance and a little bit
more air time.
And so I snap.
And you'll see that my foot slides forward.
And as you start to come back down,
you continue to straighten your legs
and keep pressure on your board.
I mean, that's the key.
When people say, how do you keep your board on your feet?
That is how you keep your board on your feet.
You keep putting pressure out until it's ready to come in.
If you do it properly, it feels like an invisible wall ride.
Like you're riding just a wall up in the air.
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So a front side rock n' roll-- the trick is in the back toe.
You start to rotate it so that it's just your toe that's
touching the board on the tail.
And you straighten your front leg,
and your back leg is probably the most bent
it's ever been in any kind of rock n' roll trick.
And as you start to come in, you have to lift off just enough
to clear your front wheels.
And then you come in like a front side kick turn.
So the two keys to that trick are pivoting your back toe
and clearing your front wheels on the way in.
A lipslide starts off with a front side ollie.
Basically, you're going with just enough speed
to get to the top of the ramp, maybe a little bit more
because you want it to be more of a an arc, a carve.
As you ollie, you're turning your board in the 180
direction, but not a full 180 so that you're just
landing on the underside of the board
and it is perpendicular to the coping.
As you have moved your front foot forward
towards the nose in the ollie, you
want to keep your front foot there
because as you're sliding, that's
going to allow you to clear your wheels on the way in.
The lipslide entry is very subtle,
but it's probably the most important part.
If you can do a lipslide, I would
see a tailslide is probably one of the next things
to learn because they're both very similar body motions.
Basically, you want to come up the wall at an angle,
and then you ollie below the vertical
because you want to go up to your tail.
So the idea is you're not coming down your tail,
you're actually going up to it.
And that way, you can shift your weight
as it's coming onto the coping, and you
can stand up on the coping as you're sliding.
And the sliding on a tailslide is probably the most crucial
part because that is where your weight
balance is the most important.
It's all on your back foot.
That tailslide is all about your back foot positioning
and weight balance.
And if you are sliding consistently
and your weight is actually over your body in the right balance,
then you can just come in at any time.
And I do tailslides until I feel like it's
starting to slow down, and then I just let my front wheels drop
and just ride back in.
Some people like to control that and they
like to actually ollie out of a tailslide.
But I don't recommend doing that because you
lose a lot of speed that way.
I created the Madonna sometime around 1984, I think.
And I was complaining to my friend Lester Kasai, who was
also a pro skater at the time.
I said, you know, I feel like I've
been creating a lot of tricks and none of them catch on.
Nobody is trying the tricks I'm learning.
Is it because they don't like them?
Is it because they're hard?
And he said, well, maybe you just
have to name them something trendy.
It was 1984, and Madonna was the most trendy thing.
So I named it Madonna.
And I guess it worked.
People are still doing them.
We're talking about it now.
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So Madonna is a one-footed lean to tail.
And what that means is you are going the front side direction,
grabbing the nose as you take off.
You don't have to ollie into it.
You can actually grab the nose just as you lift off
above the coping.
And then as you're doing that, if you take your front foot off
and kick it downward, it actually
keeps your motion going up.
So it's almost like you're leaving your foot behind.
And then as you reach your peak is
when you start to bend your front foot
and start to bring it back on the board,
and it will just come back onto the board
as you're aiming for the tail on the way down.
The Probably.
Most dangerous part of this trick is aiming for the tail
because it's very easy to miss your tail on this
and end up on the deck like a disaster.
We call it a disaster for a reason
because it's going to hang up your trucks
and you're going to fall into the flat.
So on a Madonna, it's better to err
on the side of caution of pulling too far out of the ramp
than not pulling out enough.
If you miss your tail, you're just
going to slide down the ramp.
If you end up with your tail over the deck,
you're going to hang up.
And that's the disaster zone.
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