10 Reasons NOT to Skate Flat

I've been skating flat for roughly the last five years and in that time I've really learned the downsides of skating flat. So if you're looking for an excuse to not skate flat, then you've come to the right video because here are the 10 biggest downsides of skating flat in no particular order. Number one is that the way you approach grinds is very different. And I didn't notice this until I switched back to anti-rocker for a session a few years ago and someone pointed out to me, this is why I found it so much harder to line up tricks. When you skate flat, you have a lot more maneuverability in your foot so you can kind of pivot on the spot and you can really turn as you roll. But when you skate anti-rocker, it's more train tracky, you don't really turn so much. So what you tend to do is line up the grind well before you get to the ledge. And when you skate flat, you do a little kind of micro adjustments all the way up to get you in that right spot. This makes it quite hard to jump between flat and anti-rocker without committing to one significantly. But anti-rocker is definitely easier because you're more stable on the approach and it could be a better decision for a beginner. Number two is that it's still hard on your knees, just not in the same way as anti-rocker. When you skate anti-rocker, you can't turn as easy so it puts a bit more pressure on your knees like Ricardo Lito pointed out. But what I've found is it makes grinds a lot harder on your knees when you skate flat because you have to be in a more particular position. The grind angle is a lot steeper than it is on anti-rocker and this puts a lot more pressure on your knees than you usually would get doing grinds on anti-rocker. And I also argue that you don't get that much strain on your knees turning on an anti-rocker setup because most of the time, you do more of like a step tip-tap to turn around and I don't think it's that often that you really kind of carve turning like you would on a flat setup and an anti-rocker setup. But that's just my opinion. And number three is the most obvious one and probably the whole reason you're considering not skating flat and that is grinds are a lot harder and this comes in many different forms. So like I said earlier, the grind angle you have to go on for royales and front nuggets is a whole lot steeper due to those wheels being there. With those wheels being there, you have to have a shallower groove which makes the angle of royales and boot down stuff a lot steeper which moves a lot of the pressure onto your knees. You have to do grinds a whole lot lower and they are so much less forgiving. That's not just royales and groove tricks. It's soul tricks like porn stars. Every trick, you don't have the same room for error like you do on anti-rocker. You're forced to have a higher ride height skating flat due to the fact that you have more wheels there which does make grinds harder in turn and wheel bite is definitely a thing and I've been skating flat for five years now and still deal with wheel bite. The confidence I had when I skated anti-rockers is jump at a royale on anything. Not being scared of wheel bite at all is not comeback skating flat. I'm always hesitant of wheel bite no matter how long I've been skating a set up and it does hit me even this far into skating flat although significantly less than within the first few sessions of switching to flat. Number four is that it is a lot harder to land anything. Land gaps, land drops, land ears. On flat, you have a lot more maneuverability in your feet which makes them a lot less stable and this is really noticeable on drops and stuff. Instead of your feet kind of being locked in in train tracks like on anti-rocket, you'll land and they'll swivel out from under you. They'll push out away and it makes it a whole lot harder to get away with sketchy landings. You have to be way more onto it when you do a gap. When I skated anti-rocket, it was never hard to kind of do a clean landing off a drop or something but now skating flat, it's something I have to think about in the front of my brain whenever I land to not wiggle out too much. Number five is that you need twice as many bearings and twice as many wheels which not only is annoying to find that amount but is also much more expensive than when you skate flat or freestyle. You also have to put on twice as many wheels and bearings. You have to line up twice as many bearings with spaces and have twice as long of an annoying experience sitting up your skates. Now those wheels and bearings will last a whole lot longer than they would if you're skating anti-rocket but you still have to buy those bearings and wheels up front which means it's more expensive up front. Maybe not so much in the long term but up front, it is way more expensive. Not only is it really annoying to get twice as many wheels and bearings but it also adds a whole lot of weight to your skate and that's what number six is. You'll have a much heavier skate skating flat versus anti-rocker and it's not just because of having twice as many wheels and bearings, it's also because the frame has to be bigger to carry those wheels. If you're a stickler for having a lighter setup then you probably don't want to skate flat. The seventh downside is that it is way harder to find a good flat frame versus a good anti-rocker frame. When you skate anti-rocker, you can pretty much get away with skating any frame and it'll be fine but when you skate flat, this is not the case. If you have a bad frame for skating flat, you're going to have a terrible time. So if you can't specifically choose the frames you want to ride, like you're getting hand-me-downs or something like that, you only have access to secondhand stuff then it's going to be much harder to skate flat versus anti-rocker. Anti-rocker, you can get away with any frame. Flat, you cannot. Number eight is that you'll have a much harder time changing setup, so changing the frames you skate and this is for the exact same reason as the previous one where the frame you skate is so much more important and it makes such a big difference to how you skate compared to skating anti-rocker. The Royale angle on one flat frame could be very different to the Royale angle on another flat frame and unlike with anti-rocker, the downsides of not landing in this right angle is you get wheel bite and get smoked and this is even the case if you don't change the frame you skate. If you just wear it out enough, it will start sticking and I've had that happen a bunch of times. It feels like this horrible loop that I get in where I start to get used to a groove, then it wears out too much and I have nothing but wheel bite. Have to get a new frame and then have to learn that new frame and just go through the circle again and when I skated anti-rocker, I could skate that frame until there was no groove left and have no downsides and when I got a new frame, I could do Royales day one. They felt weird, but they worked. I never got wheel bite to death when I was skating anti-rocker and number nine, when you're changing frames, it is so much more annoying on flat because you do not have access to the frame bolts most of the time and I'd argue that it's actually a good test for whether the frame is good to skate flat if you can't access the bolts. If you can access the bolts, it's probably not a good frame for flat. The wheels really need to be over the UFS bolts to be a really good flat frame. That's my opinion, but yeah, just be prepared that whenever you wanna change frames, you're gonna have to take some wheels out most of the time, which means you're gonna have to have the annoyance of lining up spaces, trying to get bolts through and that dream you have about changing from anti-rocker to flat with just changing the UFS bolts, it's a dream, it can't happen. I tried to live that dream myself. I never changed frames because you always have to take a wheel out and that amount of effort is never worth it. And the final downside to skating flat is the fact that you gotta expect that no one's gonna give you extra credit for how much harder it is to do certain tricks for you. Even though some grinds and some tricks are arguably twice as hard for someone to skate flat to do than someone skating anti-rocker, in a game of skate or in a competition, no one's gonna care about that. And then when you spend all day trying to land a front talk on a ledge just for the anti-rocker homie to come up and do a front talk that pretty much looks like a Machio first try, almost no one's gonna give you extra credit for that. And the same with a gap. When someone sees you jump a gap and they don't realize how hard it was for you to stay straight and not wobble out after landing that gap, no one's gonna come up to you and be like, yo, you did that flat, that's crazy. So am I, but most people won't. And that's why I think it's really important that if you're gonna skate flat, you just do it for you. Don't do it to impress anyone. But that's how you should treat skating in every way anyways. So despite all these downsides, I still skate flat and have no regrets and do not wanna skate anti-rocker because there are far more pros than cons in my opinion. And a lot of these downsides can be flipped into pros. Like the last one, for example, it's easy to flip that back. Say your anti-rocker homie lands something that you can't land. You can always just tell yourself, oh, if I skated anti-rocker, I could do that, which is a good cop-out for yourself to not kill your confidence too hard. Skating anti-rocker significantly worsens just skating around as an experience. And that's what you're doing most of the time. Even if you're just grinding a box, you're doing a lot more skating around than grinding. So to prioritize grinding so much to me doesn't make sense. But if that's all you care about and you just wanna do grinds, you don't wanna have to struggle of having to land grinds perfectly, then anti-rocker will be a good choice for you. And if you wanna try and mitigate the whole train track experience of skating anti-rocker, you should just try find a round profile wheel to skate and also lean into the fact that you can have quite a big wheel skating anti-rocker to kind of counter the slower skating experience. If you have any questions about skating flat or anti-rocker, feel free to ask them below and I'll try to help you out. I wanna give a massive thank you to my patrons for helping me make videos like this. It would not be possible without fan funding support like this. And I can only continue to make videos like this if I get a hundred patrons by the end of the year. We're almost halfway. So if you can spare a few dollars every month and wanna help my dreams come true, consider checking out my patron. It would mean the world to me. But anyway, thank you so much for watching. I hope you get to go for a skate today. And yeah, you're the best.