As a beginning skater, there's no level
you need to reach before going to the park.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
If you want to go to a skate park for the first time,
it's best to go early-ish in the morning.
That's usually when either people are in school or not
awake yet, and you'll have a chance to experience it
when it's empty.
If it's really crowded, it can be intimidating,
and maybe you're not sure where to stand or how to start.
That's just more of an issue of watching
the nuances of whose turn it is and what order
and where you can start from where you will be seen.
And if you drop in, there could be someone else coming
around the corner full speed.
Some people do like to be selfish.
[LAUGHS] And there are a lot of snakes,
which means they go probably more times than what
their turn should be.
And just watch out for them.
That's it.
Just stay out of the way if you see someone coming around.
Pumping and carving at a skate park
is the primary way to generate speed.
Carving is a different type of pump,
because it's actually sort of a sideways pump.
You're going through corners and through little bull sections.
Pumping on a vert amp is possibly
more pronounced than park skating,
because the transitions are smaller in park.
But the technique is the same.
It's the same use of your legs.
It's just that you're doing it on a sideways plane.
Basically, if you are coming towards a corner,
you do a small pump in through the transition that
goes up and use your legs more so through the corner,
through the carve, and that will allow
you to zoom through a section and actually come out with way
more speed on the next wall.
You see the more experienced park skaters generate speed
from seemingly nothing.
And what they're doing it's using
every single tiny transition to their advantage.
It's harder to generate speed from a very long corner,
because to try to stay on the wall sideways
through a transition that big, it
is hard to get your speed up.
The corners that are better utilized for speed
are the ones that are tighter.
That allows you to just zoom right through it.
That is the way that you see the more experienced skaters
getting speed all through the park.
Dropping in is a foundation of any skate park
of almost any ramp.
And that's the act of starting from the top of the ramp
and going in.
Usually you would do it from the tail drop.
So that means you stick all your wheels
out from the coping with your tail still
on the top with your back foot holding it in position.
And once you put your front foot down, the key is commitment.
And when I say commitment, I mean
dropping that front foot down, hitting your front wheels
on the wall, and then shifting your weight forward
to your front foot.
The biggest mistake people make is
setting the front wheels down and immediately
leaning back again.
And so people will set it down and then
end up just falling backwards.
My best advice is that once your front wheels are on the wall,
you shift your weight evenly across your board
leaning forward but not putting all
your weight on the front foot.
It's hard.
It's hard to commit.
It looks frightening from up there.
But if you're able to pump your way up to the top of the ramp,
you're able to drop in.
I believe that.