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Skateboarding Guide for Beginners

Kids and Beginners Skateboards

So you want to get into skateboarding, is that right? Alright good. Let’s get started, and pay attention because you will be tested at the end. A quick rundown of skate-terminology: Skateboard completes refer to a fully assembled, ready to ride board. Skateboard decks translate to just the wood part. If that’s news to you, fear not. Skateboarding for beginners can be an especially daunting subculture to get into but it’s also hugely rewarding and we’re here to make the awkward start as smooth as possible.

For those just looking to sample the skater lifestyle before diving straight in whole hog, CCS offers an array of skateboard decks for cheap so you’ll feel like King Arthur gloriously wielding Excalibur for the first time. If personalization is your thing, we also offer custom skateboards featuring any graphic you desire printed on it, so long as it won’t get us sued for copyright infringement.

Skateboards for Beginners

So you want to get into skateboarding, is that right? Alright good. Let’s get started, and pay attention because you will be tested at the end. A quick rundown of skate-terminology: Skateboard completes refer to a fully assembled, ready to ride board. Skateboard decks translate to just the wood part. If that’s news to you, fear not. Skateboarding for beginners can be an especially daunting subculture to get into but it’s also hugely rewarding and we’re here to make the awkward start as smooth as possible.

For those just looking to sample the skater lifestyle before diving straight in whole hog, CCS offers an array of skateboard decks for cheap so you’ll feel like King Arthur gloriously wielding Excalibur for the first time. If personalization is your thing, we also offer custom skateboards featuring any graphic you desire printed on it, so long as it won’t get us sued for copyright infringement.

Skateboards for Kids and Beginners: Buying Guide - CCS

Setting Up A Skateboard
Setting Up A Skateboard

Setting Up A Skateboard

We know you’re hyped. You’ve waited ages for this thing to arrive and now it’s here and you wanna throw everything together willy-nilly and start working on the 900. Unfortunately, you’ll need to slow down. As you’ve likely heard either of your parents say hundreds of times before, “take your time and do it right” is a motto you’ll benefit greatly from in all things skate-related. Being thorough is mostly just about giving yourself the confidence in your gear so you don’t have to worry about anything going wrong later. We’ll save the deets for our video tutorial but try to remember that your patience right now will save you much hassle in the future. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll break skateboard assembly down into its requisite components.

The long piece of wood you’re going to be riding through the flames of the netherworld is called the deck. The sandy black stuff is your grip tape. In the future, when riding around no longer thrills you, you’ll have to find ever-increasingly dangerous and gravity-defiant ways to get that same elation. The grip tape will provide a sticky, abrasive foundation that the rubber of your shoes will hold onto and make maneuvering your board much easier and more accurate.

The shiny things on the bottom that keep the wheels in line are your skateboard trucks. Trucks were strictly functional in the early years of skateboarding until people started to become complacent with using their board’s wheels to get around and they decided they wanted to propel themselves forward using every single square inch of the board, dammit. Now, trucks are the basis of tons of trick variations that have been giving newbies like you headaches for decades. Welcome to your new life. Trucks are made of Aluminum but sometimes they mix in other fun stuff to make them sparkle. Wheels are pretty self-explanatory. They’re also the oldest invention known to man after the hammer and the fart joke. Skateboard wheels are made of polyurethane, which is basically fake rubber but harder. The durometer is the metric by which we professionals rate how hard or soft the wheel is. Skateboard bearings go in the wheels to make them roll and the quality of the bearings is measured on the Abec scale, which goes from 1-10. There are bearings of the highest quality that cost $4000 a set. That’s a grand-per-wheel. Insane.

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Learning and Doing Skateboard Tricks
Learning and Doing Skateboard Tricks

Learning and Doing Skateboard Tricks

We recently asked followers on Instagram what trick they battled with the hardest. You know what the vast majority said? That’s right. Despite its reputation as a rudimentary maneuver, most people struggle the most with the tricks that are the most basic. Maybe it’s your weak, beginner leg muscles. Maybe it's the awkward learning curve associated with forcing your appendages into actions they were never in literally 1,000,000 years of evolution, intended to do. The fact remains, learning to ollie is the foundation on top of which everything else is built. It’s an essential step and is absolutely worth learning with the care and attention to detail you might exert while carrying a severed limb to the Emergency Room to be reattached.

Pop Shuvs are a great trick to try to incorporate when you’ve been trying to ollie for what seems like years but can’t quite get there. The reason being, a Shuvit can be performed with less complicated physics and it gets you accustomed to popping your tail and jumping up off your board while moving forward, then landing back on it and hopefully still in motion. The mental benefits alone are worth whatever dings you take to the shins.

Once your Ollie is solid, you can think about moving on. A good metric to use for judging whether your ollie is solid is whether or not you can get up a curb. If you can snap and hop up onto an elevated platform and keep cruising, you’re ready for the Brave New World of flip tricks.

Most seasoned skaters have their own personal war story about learning skating’s most common flip trick and the reason is almost definitely because most people dig into getting kickflips down a little too early. One thing that’s important to remember is that style and cleanliness will start to become critical once you’ve been skating for a while and if you learn basic stuff lazily and execute them hundreds of times in that sloppy, bare-minimum fashion, your brain is going to think that’s how you want it. So take it slow. Watch the pros you admire do their kickflips. Reynolds. Westgate. Mike Carroll’s got a mean one. Jamie Thomas. The list goes on. One thing you can be sure of is that they didn’t do a horrendous rocketflip in the 80s and go “Good enough.” and then repeat it a million times, stamping that method onto their brain forever.

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Choosing a Deck for a Skateboard
Choosing a Deck for a Skateboard

Choosing a Skateboard Deck

As tempting as it may be to want to emulate those who you look up to or to choose a board based on it’s graphic, getting the right size and shape for your body and the type of skating you plan on focusing on is important. Take the following things into account: If you wear a size 7 or 8, ride a deck that’s also between 7-8 inches wide, which nearly all of them are. There’s really no difference between skateboards for beginners or the ones that pros ride. Ever since wider boards came into fashion, people often say, “Well, there’s more room to land on,” as if that was an impenetrable argument. The truth is that your first board will likely define what your preferences are, later on, meaning that no matter what you ride, you’ll probably dig it.

Anything skateboard under 7.5" is probably for younger kids under 12. While you are getting comfortable zipping around the neighborhood and looking incredibly cool, it’s advisable to stay within 7.5"-8.5" range. Anything over 8” is going to be heavier and therefore harder to pop so until you have yourself a little flatground grab-bag of flip tricks, aim for the middle.

It’s also advisable to think about the shape you’re going to ride. While double kick popsicle-shape skateboards have been the most common shape since the late 1990’s, CCS does offer a pretty wide variety of less conventional shapes. Some companies, like Welcome Skateboards, offer some singular shapes that more experienced riders would get a kick out of, but maybe a little too outside-the-box for a young skater. If you’re intending to pursue street skating and take on the struggle of flip-tricks, grinds and slides, a popsicle shape is without a doubt the shape for you. It provides a nearly identical nose and tail so you can slide any part of the board your heart desires and it also will offer a slight amount of concavity to assist your feet in flipping the board whilst your mind is on other things, like defying the laws of gravity. Check out our video tutorials for more information on these details because a huge majority of people learn better with visual assistance.

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Picking Trucks for Your Skateboard
Picking Trucks for Your Skateboard

Picking Trucks for Your Skateboard

The simplest way to think of it is that your skateboard trucks should be the same measurement as your board. You want your wheels to be directly underneath and not have any part stick out or have your board overlap their reach like the awning of a window or something. Unfortunately, truck companies all use different measurements and hardly any of them use the standard deck measurement of inches (except Krux, thanx!) so get ready to do some conversion in your head. Oh, wait- we already did that right here.

One great thing about trucks is, they last a while. You can ride the same set of trucks for a year or two, sometimes more. They offer the most longevity out of any part of your complete skateboard.

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How to Put Griptape On A Skateboard Deck
How to Put Griptape On A Skateboard Deck

How to Put Griptape On A Skateboard Deck

While there’s an array of doodads and thingamabobs available for getting your grip adhered with perfect accuracy, the true mark of maturity is getting it stuck that way freehand. As with most things, you’ll just have to practice in order to get it right and accept that your first few decks are probably going to look like the grip was applied by a blindfolded elephant eating an ice cream cone. Nearly all griptape is sold as a single 9” piece but MOB offers smaller, more manageable squares that could be your ticket to mastering the art of applying unblemished grip. If you’re the type that isn’t afraid of a challenge, here’s a rundown from one of our builders, a guy who applies griptape to the decks you order all day everyday. We call him Keeton but you should probably refer to him as “Sensei”.

  1. Place the skateboard flat in front of you in a horizontal position. Peel griptape from its backing paper, making sure to save that paper for later as you will need it later.
  2. Hold the sheet of griptape longways, pinching the ends and carefully drop the griptape on the far edge of the skateboard. Lining up one side of the grip tape should result in having to only cut the excess off of the opposite side, the nose and the tail.
  3. Once your griptape is dropped, grab the backing paper that you saved and place that over your griptape as a buffer while using your palms to work out any bubbles. Your goal is to get your tape to adhere fully, working any air pockets out from the underside of the grip and the top of the deck.
  4. Now you will need to file the edge of your deck and the griptape to create an outline around the edge of the deck, where you’ll ultimately trim the excess grip off. Metal tools work well for this and there’s even one made specifically for the job but most of the time, people just use whatever sturdy, preferably metal, thing is lying around.
  5. Use a razor blade to carefully cut along the line made by filing along the edge, removing the extra inch or so of griptape.
  6. Use some of the griptape scraps you cut away as sandpaper to sand off any frays or to clean up any imperfections from your cut job. Tell your ma if the skateboarding thing doesn’t work out, you may have a bright future as a surgeon.

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Build Your Own Custom Skateboard

For those just looking to sample the skater lifestyle before diving straight in whole hog, CCS offers an array of skateboard decks for cheap so you’ll feel like King Arthur gloriously wielding Excalibur for the first time. If personalization is your thing, we also offer custom skateboards featuring any graphic you desire printed on it, so long as it won’t get us sued for copyright infringement.