Only 1.83% Of Skaters will do THIS to get Better

Well, well, well, my friends, today I'm going to be going over a few things that only 1% of skaters will ever even consider doing. But you know what? We're trying to be the best we can be, so let's get into it. So number one is the gym, and I know what you're thinking. Don't click off yet. I'm not just going to tell you to go in the gym, start lifting loads of weights, and all of a sudden you're going to be massive and that's going to help you skate. That isn't what I do. I go to the gym almost every single day. And do I look massive? Not really. What you're going to be doing at the gym is you're going to be going over and doing a lot of leg stuff. I used to think to myself that if I'm at the skate park all the time, I don't really need to train legs at the gym because I'm doing it in my off time. So I would just do upper body, but recently I've decided, what have I got to lose? Let's try and do some more leg exercises and see if it benefits us a lot. Now, Holly will vouch for this. I used to struggle a lot with triple flips, and they used to take me a long time to learn. Uh, yeah. Exactly. So basically, what I decided to do was train my legs a bit more in the gym, and now triple flips, they come with total ease. And I never thought that adding that extra muscle definition to my legs would make so much of a difference. But say if you learn kickflips and you want to learn doubles, or if you just want to get good at the scoop for a tre flip, training your leg muscles is going to help so much for that. And not only with just gaining the strength to do the tricks better, you're also going to stop yourself from getting injured as much. Because if you follow me on Instagram, you likely see me post a lot of pictures where my ankle is not quite at a desirable angle. And that is because I train these parts of my body so often. So every day in the gym, right, every time I go to the gym, I do calf raises. I'll do a whole nother video. It's basically standing on the edge of something and then just dipping your ankles like this, just to train that ankle muscle. Now, if you want to see a whole nother video where I go over my complete gym routine and what I eat during the week to try and keep myself in tip-top condition, that's a whole separate video. Let me know if you want it in the comments. So just train those ankles, train those knee joints, and then when you land and it bends in an awkward position, hopefully, it will just ping right back. It doesn't work all the time, but it's best to be the best prepared you can so that when you fall, it hurts the least it possibly could. So number two is get off the drugs. And no, I'm not talking about the ones that my dad used to do. I'm talking about drinking. Try to avoid drinking alcohol and even being any type of intoxicated when learning to skate. Obviously, a lot of skaters smoke that Giggle Bush and drink a few beers when their session. Usually, these are the skaters that are a tad more advanced. For me personally, when I smoked a bit of the Bulbasaur Cabbage, I found it really, really difficult to land tricks. And I just kept finding myself second-guessing if I was going to land something so I would step off and end up slipping out. Basically, moral of the story, don't bother. Just learn sober. You may think that if you're trying a hard trick that you may not be totally ready for, adding a bit of alcohol to the formula might make you feel a bit more confident. But if something goes wrong, you're going to be so much less switched on to recover yourself from an injury. If you're going to fall, if you have a sober brain, you're going to be able to get out, step out, walk out a lot faster, a lot easier. Just stay sober when you're learning. Don't drink and board. Number three is get yourself a good recovery process nailed down. Basically, for this one, I would recommend doing stuff like if you're over 16, going into the sauna and steam room. If you're under 16, you just want to focus on your stretching. Now, doing this before skateboarding is going to be massive. For me, the big one is the ankles. If you do this twisty ankle motion thing here, it's going to help so much with when you do land. If you land like 90 degrees on it, like I often choose to do, then it will ping right back, hopefully. Take that one with a pinch of salt, but just give yourself the best opportunity and train those ankles out like this. The more you do this, the more range of motion you're going to have with them so that you're less likely to hurt yourself. Next, if you do want to really, really take it seriously, you can do things like adding stuff into your diet to help your muscle recovery faster. This is something that I've only recently started to do and I'm in my late 20s now, about to hit 28 in December. It's never too late to get started, really. Even if you're skating in your 30s, 40s, 50s even, I would recommend following these same practices, but the diet is probably the most important one for us older skaters. Put in a lot of protein. Protein is going to help rebuild any broken muscle tissue. If you do have a very hard session or if you've got an injury, eating lots of food that has that in it, it's going to help you recover faster and thus skate a lot more, landing tricks a lot more frequently. On to number four. And number four, my final tip for this video is...