Tenacity is one of the most important factors of skating.
The idea that you will continue to try something over and over
and not give up until you get it is key to success and key
to success in your life in general.
There are skills and things you want
to accomplish that are going to take years, if not decades,
to develop.
And if you're willing to stay the course
and you're willing to learn every aspect of it
and little by little chip away at that success,
you'll finally earn it.
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Vert ramps were actually made to emulate
pools but to give you better walls and better transitions
to do these tricks.
And now we're seeing the top skateboarders doing things
I never imagined possible.
So backside Smith grind.
What it means is you're grinding your back truck and the middle
of your board or the rail of your board at the same time.
And so that requires a very delicate weight distribution.
Your heel can stick to the top of the ramp
and stop you from grinding.
And so you'll see some of the most accomplished people that
can do back Smiths.
They actually point their front foot forward
and angle as to keep the heel away from the rail
and away from the deck as they're grinding.
So the idea is that you get your back truck in the grinding
position.
Keep your front foot so that it stays on the board.
It's not hanging off at all.
And you just grind along until you
feel like you're slowing down, and then you can just sort of
drop it back in.
Backside Smith grinds, I like them a lot
because I think they look cool, and I like them
because I can grind as far as I want to or as little as I want
to, and really it's just a matter of how much speed I have
and when I feel like it can come in.
A bluntslide to backside 180 in is
you're coming up the wall at an angle,
and then you're sort of shifting your board back
the other direction in order to get it in position to slide.
And the key to the trick is how you slide on your tail
and how much weight you put on it.
And that is a function of keeping
your weight a little bit back and hang your front heel,
if not your back heel as well, off the board.
As you slide along, your feet might be moving.
And as you start to come in, your feet
will probably even move further towards the toes.
And so if you come up into the trick in a position
that you normally skate in, by the time you leave it,
you probably have your feet hanging off too far.
Your toes will be hanging off too far.
So what I like to do is compensate for it
in the beginning.
And so I approach the wall with my front heels off the board.
And as I slide it, I feel my heel moving again.
And as I come in, it moves back into the regular position.
The movement to come in doesn't take a lot of effort,
because your body is already moving
that direction and your momentum is heading backside.
So lifting up your board makes it come in easily.
It's more about moving your shoulder
and turning it in the backside direction
while lifting up your board, which makes your whole body
do a 180 and you're coming in forward.
An invert or a hand plant is basically the way
that you stand on one hand off a ramp.
I recommend grabbing the board on the toe side
in between your legs, because that
will give you the most leverage and the best grip on it.
And the key to inverts and probably the first mistake
people make is that they want to do an aerial
and then plant their hand after the fact.
If you do it that way, that makes you actually overturn.
So the idea is that you're putting your hand ahead of you
and you're pivoting around your hand.
And as you get more comfortable with that,
then you start to learn the balance
point and the pivot point of your hand,
and that allows you to stall it and allows you to tweak it.
That takes a lot of practice.
It takes a lot of experience.
And learning to land.
The key is learning how to put the weight back to your feet
from your hand, because a lot of people put their hand down,
and they don't realize that they need to shift it back
into their feet.
So as you put your hand down, you pivot around your hand.
And then as it's coming back down,
you start to shift that weight.
Bring your hand up.
Put your weight back on your feet,
and you ride back down like you come in like a backslide.
Inverts are daunting.
They seem super scary, because you are literally upside down.
But as you get more and more comfortable with it,
you find that there are so many different ways to tweak
and invert, and everyone has their own technique,
their own grab.
And just the way that you stall it becomes your signature.
A caballerial as a no handed 360 aerial
where you come up riding backwards and do an ollie.
This is called a fakie ollie.
Then you do a full 360 with your board
without grabbing it in the backside direction
and come down forward.
It's all on your shoulders.
You wind up your body, and then as your wheels bonk off
the coping or your tail hits, you let your body unwind.
And if you bonked it enough, you're
going to get off the wall enough to complete that full 360.
Key to Caballerials, as far as I'm concerned,
is that you hit those two wheels at the same exact time.
Your back wheels should be hitting the coping
at the same time.
And that means you're going straight up and down.
If you are going at an angle, you're
going to hit one wheel sooner than the other,
and that's going to make your board flap under your foot,
and you're probably not going to get
enough leverage or control of your board
as it's spinning around.
Caballerials can open up a whole new world of tricks.
So a 540, more commonly known as a McTwist.
The key is in the snap.
As I approach the coping, I reach down for my board
and I turn my head, immediately snapping it,
because that way you're already spotting your landing
zone before your body has made that entire motion.
When you snap the board off the top of the ramp
and grab it quickly, you want to do that
more forcefully than you would usually do a backside air.
Because you need a little more air, a little more room
to make that spin happen.
It's very common to not snap hard enough
and end up over the deck when you're in the middle of the 540
and realizing you might hang up on the coping.
So to remedy that, it's just a matter
of snapping it a little bit harder than you're used to.
So you grab your board and tuck your head.
That makes you spin by default.
The biggest challenge of a 540 is the landing,
because you don't see the landing.
You don't get a lot of time to see it.
A lot of times you're not off the wall
in the perfect position.
And so there's a little bit of using the force.
Like a sixth sense, where you just
feel like it's the right time, it's the right place,
and you let your board go and you stand up.
And that first 540 is probably one
of the most frightening things in skateboarding,
especially for vert skaters, because you just don't know.
And it doesn't usually work out perfectly on the first attempt.
I'm not going to say that you won't fall.
You'll probably fall learning 540s.
But you see people try 540s for years before they ever
commit to landing.
And if you do have 540s, if you have the snap,
you have the grab, you have the spin, you can do it,
because you know how to ride down the wall from an aerial.
And this is just coming down the wall from another aerial.
It's just one that you didn't get to see the landing
zone the whole time.
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