Try a Switchstance: Boy on the Skateboard

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His stance has been regular since day one, meaning he leads with his left foot. Joyner mainly does street skating, with a little transition mixed in, and he occasionally rides longboards for transportation. Joyner pushes regular, with his back foot. Joyner said riders looking to switch to pushing regular from mongo have to work on riding that way. Nitro Circus Live flips its way into Tucson.

If riders encounter a rock or crack and fall while pushing mongo, their board is likely to shoot out in front of them and take out the ankles of the unfortunate pedestrian walking in front of them. If riders take a spill while pushing regular, they may be able to just hop off, or at least not have to witness the maiming of the ankles belonging to the pedestrian walking behind them.

Anna Aloma, a sophomore studying chemical engineering, has been skating for about a year; she uses a longboard to commute to class. Aloma pushes regular, and her stance is goofy, meaning when she rides forward, her right foot is in the front of the board. Aloma said if she pushed with her right front leg she would feel like she was going to fall off. If you push mongo and you are a skilled rider, keep doing you. However, style is a very important part of skateboarding. The Street League Skateboarding competition accounts style points into scoring of their Run Section competition.

When snowboarders finish a run they unclip their back foot from their bindings and use that foot to push themselves over to the next lift. The same goes for longboarding or penny boarding. If you gain momentum by pushing with your back foot, once you step on the board you will only need to correct your back foot for maneuverability or balance correction.

UA student Albert Kline said he has been skateboarding for about six years, on and off. When riders push mongo, they have to step their front foot back on the board, and then reset their back foot into a better position. Why add the extra step when you can set your front foot, push, step your back foot on the board and maybe add minor adjustments to your front foot.

Wild west meets steampunk at Tucson convention. The concept of weight distribution is similar to towing a trailer behind a truck. The weight and power should be in the front, pulling the trailer along. You wouldn't put the trailer in front of your truck and push it along that way, would you? Most load-bearing motor vehicles, such as trucks and SUVs, operate with rear wheel drive and front wheel steering, although many have four-wheel-drive or all-wheel-drive functions.

Skateboarding should work the same way. Pushing with your back foot powers the boards movement, while the front foot maneuvers the front truck and wheels for turning during a push. From children rolling down hills on homemade boards with metal wheels to people making professional careers out of it, skateboarding and skaters alike have evolved over time. Below are 46 radical facts about skateboarding.

Although the history of the skateboard is a little uncertain, the first skateboards were made by literally hammering skates onto boards of wood.

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The precursor to the skateboard included a box that the rider could hold onto so they could balance and steer. But overtime, the box was eventually discarded and the skateboard was born. In the beginning, skateboards were mostly used by children to ride down small hills but eventually made their way to surfers who wanted to practice their skills when the waves were too small. Skateboards are composed of several parts. The most obvious being the board, which is called a deck. In order to help to the rider stick to the board, griptape a sandpaper-like material is applied to the top of the deck.

The next components are the trucks, which the rider uses to steer the board by leaning in the direction they want to travel. The trucks are mounted onto the board by a series of nuts and bolts called the hardware. Wheels are attached to the trucks and hold the bearings, which help to minimize friction and increase the speed of the rider. The higher the quality of bearings, the faster the rider goes! The first decks where literally planks of wood i. Overtime, the board began to have raised tails to allow the rider to more easily maneuver the board while riding.

As skateboarding transitioned from pool-riding to street skating, the skateboard began to appear much more uniform with a raised tail and nose with a slightly-convex center that allowed the rider to perform a wide variety of tricks much more easily. Almost certainly the most significant change to the skateboard was the introduction of polyurethane wheels.

Before its introduction, skateboard wheels were often made of metal or clay. Polyurethane is a soft rubber-like plastic that provided the ideal traction for riding on pavement and allowed skaters to roll smoothly over cracks which allowed skaters to traverse new territories that were virtually impossible to ride before due to the limited range of the metal and clay wheels. With the introduction of polyurethane wheels came a massive surge of interest and the birth of street skateboarding.

There are two stances when riding a skateboard. Both depend on which foot is on the front and which is on the back of the board when moving forward. Most people automatically feel more comfortable with one stance over the other and will usually choose the stance permanently. The names for stances go back to the old surfing terms.

These include Switch stance where you ride in the exact opposite of your natural stance , Fakie stance where you essentially ride backwards while moving forward , and Nollie stance where your front foot is on the nose of the board and your back foot is in the middle. All three stances add to the incredible variety of technical tricks one may perform. Most professional skateboarders are ambidextrous, or more specifically ambipedal.

46 Radical Facts about Skateboarding

This is a result of skaters constantly pushing themselves to learn how to new perform tricks in every stance, both natural and unnatural. As a result, most homeowners drained their pools as a means to conserve precious water. Skateboarders soon learned that skating in the transition the bowl-shaped part of pools was similar to surfing large waves and better than any hill or embankment.

Modern skate parks are often designed to have sections that mimic the pools of yore where skateboarding was born. This article could not be completed without mentioning the Dogtown and Z-Boys! Early skateboarding focused more on style and performance than on pushing limits. However, after the invention of the polyurethane wheel all of that changed.

A group of Southern California skaters known as the Dogtown and Z-Boys were the pioneers in pool skating. By forgoing style, they focused instead on extreme maneuvers. Before long, they soon became legendary in their abilities. The Z-Boys blew away all their competitors in every competition they entered. Soon, others began to mimic their styles and tricks and before anyone realized, the Dogtown and Z-Boys changed skateboarding forever.

As skateboarding became more and more popular, it became evident that skateboarders needed a place to ride and practice their skills, away from the public. After skateboarding in them, they realized that they had found something special.

46 Radical Facts about Skateboarding

Since it was literally half of a pipe, it became known as a halfpipe. Wanting to skate one closer to home, one skater by the name of Tom Stewart decided to make his own halfpipe out of wood in his front yard.

It was instantly a hit amongst local skateboarders, and soon Stewart sold the plans to other people to build their own halfpipes. Now, it is virtually unheard of to find a skatepark without some type of halfpipe. This trick is performed by slamming the back foot down while sliding the front foot upwards and simultaneously jumping, thereby leaving the ground with the board attached to the feet. This trick would go on to become the most important trick in skateboarding history as it became incorporated into nearly every other trick.

Skateboarding tricks are broken down into several categories. Many modern tricks are combinations of several trick categories. Rodney Mullen is a living legend! As a young flatland skateboarder from Florida, he invented nearly every flip and spin trick in the skateboarding catalogue. Rodney was the first person to perform an Ollie flatland, which he soon used as the method to flip and spin the board while airborne.

To put that into perspective, that is a height over Skateboarding can be categorized into several groups. The first category is simply just riding around.

Remember those frat boys riding to class back in college? The second category is flatland skateboarding, where the skater focuses on highly technical tricks while either remaining relatively stationary or while moving in small circles on flatground. The third category is street skating where skaters perform tricks on various obstacles ranging from stairs and gaps, to handrails and ledges. Many skaters enjoy all categories but usually prefer one over the others. Skateparks often offer great combinations of the 4 categories. The world record for the longest unassisted flatground ollie goes to professional skateboarder Jordan Hoffart at 16 feet, 6 inches.

That is longer than the average adult Green Anaconda!

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Although many people consider skateboarding to be a sport, both skaters and non-skaters alike disagree. Some argue that in order for skateboarding to be considered a sport, there must be goals and rules to govern it. Others argue that competitions prove that skateboarding is a sport as there are rules and goals. Most compromise by calling it an action sport.

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Despite what many believe, Vans did not make the first skateboarding shoe. In one of its employees, Paul Van Doren along with his brother Jim, started their own shoe company dedicated strictly to skateboarding. They named the company Vans, and the rest was history. In May , Canadian Erik Lundberg set the world record for the fastest speed ever recorded on a skateboard at For perspective, he was traveling almost 15 mph over the speed limit of most freeways in the US.