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Sure, your new skateboard looks great leaning against the wall and under your arm as you walk around, but the real fun starts when you ride that thing. So strap on your safety gear cause the time has come to learn some tricks.
The fastest way to build up a decent bag of tricks is to construct a solid foundation of basics to slowly build upon. Comfort, style, and finesse come with experience and muscle memory, and that comes with repetition. Some tricks will come easier than others, some you won’t ever land at all, but we promise that once you have the fundamentals down the process of learning can be as much fun as the process of landing.
Keep in mind that intentionally standing on a rolling plank is not natural. The human instinct is to keep your feet safely on non-moving ground. A lot of success in skateboarding lies within habituating your mind as well as your body to feel comfortable landing on your moving skateboard. It is also why staying calm and relaxed can be crucial toward your progression.
With all that in mind, get ready for a lot of fun and fulfillment. You also might want to check out our Skate Terminology Guide if you get a little lost in the lingo here. We’ll cover some of the basics.
FRONTSIDE 180: Another building block towards more complicated tricks is the 180. This is ollieing and rotating your body and board a half turn and then landing in the opposite stance. You’ll want to be comfortable with rolling fakie and switch so you’re ready for that landing. For most people, the Frontside 180 is easier than the backside since you can keep your eyes in the direction you are moving the entire trick.
BACKSIDE 180: A Backside 180 will leave you momentarily blind to the direction you are rolling, which can be disorienting and require some confidence. A good tip to remember for 180s (and all spinning tricks) is that your body will follow your shoulders, and your shoulders will follow your head and where you are looking.
MANUAL: This is what skateboarders call a wheelie. Why not just call it a wheelie? Because us skateboarders do things our own way. Anyways, just balance up on your back wheels without scraping your tail and you are doing a manual. Start just by lifting your front two wheels on flat and rolling a manual. See how far you can roll before touching down. Once you have confidence, you can try to ollie and land in a manual. You can try ollieing up a curb into a manual, or off a curb onto a manual.
NOSE MANUAL: Same concept as a regular manual, except on your front wheels. This can be harder since if your nose touches the ground, instead of just scraping, it will stick and your body will fall forwards. Advanced skate tricks can involve combinations of flips and spins into and out of manuals. The combinations are limited only by your skills and imagination.
KICKFLIP: This is the foundational flip trick. While some people can master it quickly, most of us have to practice a lot before we land our first kickflip. It is worth the effort to get this one consistently. A kickflip is an ollie where your front foot flicks the board so it flips on a horizontal axis. Like the ollie, a kickflip involves coordinating your feet to flick both outward and forward so the board stays underneath you as you move forward. Once you have a good flick and flip, you’ll need to concentrate on landing both feet back on the board. With a lot of practice, these movements will become natural so you can then focus on kickflipping up, over, and down obstacles or even into ledge tricks and manuals.
HEELFLIP: If you flip your board the opposite direction of a kickflip, you’ve done a heelflip. This is significantly harder for most folks than a kickflip (although some rare individuals find it easier to learn). Contrary to the name, the trick is still typically flicked with the bottom and outside edge of the front foot, not the heel. You foot will need to kick in an inward and forward motion. Just karate kick that leg out hard and suck your knees up to give that board time to flip over.
SHUVIT: (or Shove It) While still considered a “flip trick”, the board doesn’t actually flip when you do a shuv. Your board will be doing a 180 rotation under your non-rotating body. These are one of the easiest tricks to learn, as they can be executed without much pop from the ground. You can scrape a shuv, although they do look great when done as a “pop shuvit” with some height. Spin the board 360 and you have, you guessed it, a 360 shuvit. A note on naming conventions: When skaters reference a “shuvit” without a directional qualifier, they are referring to a backside rotating spin. You only had a directional prefix when doing a “frontside shuvit”.
BODY VARIAL: How about when your body spins but your board doesn’t? That’s called a body varial. You can even get fancy and mix this move into other tricks, like a kickflip body varial. This trick had a different name in the past, but changed with the times as the newer generation of skaters gained control of the lexicon. That can happen to lots of trick names over time.
360FLIP: Also known as a Treflip, this is one beautiful move and sure to impress. This is a combination of a kickflip and a 360 shuvit done simultaneously. A helpful tip to learning the treflip is to concentrate on the scooping pop of your back foot more than the flick of your front foot. This is all done with one coordinated motion.
Once you have some of these fundamentals down, you can mix and match concepts into new tricks. Frontside kickflips. Fakie heelflips. Nollie nose manuals. And so on. Some will come easier than others, so lean into your strengths but still challenge yourself. You can step things up by taking your flip tricks over things, down stairs and gaps, or even up onto ledges and such. The challenges (and triumphs) are literally limitless. You’ll also find that a lot of specific trick combos have their own names. For example, a frontside shuvit that also kickflips is called a Hardflip. A fakie 360 ollie is called a Caballerial. A 180 ollie with an added 180 shuvit rotation is called a Big Spin. There are endless online trick tutorials that help you identify what tricks are called as well as pointers on how to learn them.
Your flatground tricks are only the beginning. Welcome to the wonderful world of ledge tricks (and their analogous counterparts on curbs and rails). Some quick terminologies to get you started:
50-50 GRIND: About as simple as it gets, this is where you ollie and land with the hanger of both of your trucks on the edge of the ledge (or with the rail in between the wheels). If you don’t have enough forward momentum, you are just doing a 50-50 stall (which is still a trick as long as you can successfully dismount). Grind forward and you are doing… a grind. Once you land a grind or two, make sure to take a moment to appreciate the sound your trucks make when grinding on concrete. Ahhhh.
SLAPPY: Did you know that you can get into a grind without ollieing? By hitting a curb at the right angle and shifting your weight onto the top of the curb at the right time, you can execute one of the best tricks of all: The Slappy. You can even Slappy into all kinds of ledge tricks. These days, the most skilled skaters have even learned to slappy into taller ledges and hubbas.
BOARDSLIDE: In addition to grinding a ledge or rail, you can also slide it. A boardslide (which used to be called a Railslide, not for the handrail but for the protective plastic rails that skaters screwed to their decks in the 80s) is when you slide on a ledge on the center of your board between your two trucks. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. You’ll need the right amount of lean to match your speed, the slickness of the ledge, and any speed you may gain if your obstacle is going downward.
NOSESLIDE: Ollie up onto a ledge and land with most of your weight on your nose. Slide forward and you’re doing a noseslide. You can dismount normal or fakie. Either way, sick noseslide! TAILSLIDE: A bit more challenging than the noseslide is its sibling the tailslide. Getting your back foot up onto the ledge requires enough pop to clear the ledge completely. A simple weight transfer alone won’t work. A backside tailslide has long been considered one of the most stylish intermediate tricks you can do.
TAILSLIDE: A bit more challenging than the noseslide is its sibling the tailslide. Getting your back foot up onto the ledge requires enough pop to clear the ledge completely. A simple weight transfer alone won’t work. A backside tailslide has long been considered one of the most stylish intermediate tricks you can do.
Tricks on (or above) the coping of a ramp, be it concrete bowl or wooden mini ramp or naturally occurring street quarterpipe, are their own genre or skateboarding. A lot of skaters specialize in either bowl skating or street skating, but then a lot of skaters do both. The good news is that you can do whatever you want. It’s all skateboarding.
DROPPING IN: Nearly anybody can drop into a ramp on a skateboard. If you can roll and do kickturns on a ramp, you can drop in. The challenge (and it can be a huge challenge) is to overcome the fear of dropping in. It is just not something your brain will want your body to do. When a human stands at the edge of a precipice, the brain does not want you to go over the edge. The trick is to build confidence. You can begin by pushing and pumping the transition starting from the flat bottom. Or, if different sized bowls are available, start small and work up. The trick to a drop in is to commit. Lean all the way forward and stay on your board. Almost all drop ins that don’t work involve a skater stepping off their board or not leaning forward. You won’t fall forward. Now, it is easy to tell your mind this, but much harder to get your body to understand it. Especially on ramps that go vertical.
STALLS and LIP TRICKS: The good news is that while there is a big difference between how you execute a ledge trick on street and how you would on a ramp, at least the more or less have the same names. You normally won’t be ollieing into your lip tricks on a ramp, but more just transferring your weight from the side wall onto the top of the coping. Unlike street skating, with transition you already have upward momentum toward the lip. You just need to harness that momentum. Once again, practice and more practice. Also, wear knee pads, as you can knee slide out of most bailed bowl tricks.
AIRS and GRABS: The explanations and names of the different types of airs and grabs in vertical and bowl skateboarding (and there a lot of random ridiculous names happening here) is another list entirely. And we’re not even going to acknowledge freestyle here. The key to every skateboarding trick, be it flatground, handrail, ledge, or bowl, is practice and repetition. Some involve more confidence and guts, while others involve muscle memory and balance. You aren’t only learning skate tricks, you’re also learning perseverance, overcoming adversity, accepting temporary defeat, and even the deep meditation and flow of focusing intently on movement. There may be some frustrations and setbacks, but we promise that if you stick with it and have a good attitude, you will have a good time nearly all the time on your skateboard. Skate safe out there and make sure to tag CCS in any clips of your tricks on social media.
