Welcome To The Streets Ep.3 - Learn How To Makio Grind!

Hey skaters! We're back with another episode of Welcome to the Streets with Ghoulie. That's me. And today we are here at Fargo Skatepark. I'd like to thank Fargo for letting us film here today. I love this facility. It's a little bit better than filming in my barn. And they have all the things I need to teach you what I want to teach you today. And on today's episode we're going to be working on macchio grind. What is a macchio grind? A macchio grind is when you're grinding on one foot on your trucks. And again like I've mentioned in other episodes we don't want to get too hung up on terminology or trick names because there will always be a debate about what to call things. But for now I'm going to be calling this a macchio. It's what rollerbladers use to explain or call their trick that is really similar to this. So because the foot placement is so similar that's why I call it a macchio. For this grind there's a couple things that you might need. Wide trucks will definitely help with this. If you're looking for wide trucks you can find them on moxieskates.com. It's not absolutely necessary. I've seen people do it without them but it does make it much easier. And you also might need skate wax if the obstacle isn't waxed or not slick enough to do the grind that you're trying to do. If you're looking for skate wax you can also find some at moxieskates.com. For this trick you don't need slide blocks since you'll be grinding on your trucks and not your blocks. Before I start breaking down this trick there's a couple things to discuss first. So a macchio is typically done on your lead or dominant foot. For me my lead foot is my left but my dominant foot is my right. So there's not really a right or wrong when it comes to finding out which foot feels more comfortable for this trick. The best way to find out is just by doing it on both feet both directions seeing how it feels. So yeah there's not really a right or wrong if it's your right or left but if it's your right foot you're going to be skating with your right foot closest to the ledge and if it's your left foot then you'll be skating with your left foot closest to the ledge. Like all the other grinds that I've gone over a lot of it is going to involve jumping. And as I've already discussed in previous episodes jumping is going to be coming from your legs and a little bit from your arms. So you always want to be making sure that you have good form in your body and your legs having nice alignment so that you have a nice and stable jump when you jump into your grinds and that will just make the grinds and tricks that you do that much more easy for you and it will feel more stable. You want to have a nice squat in your legs you want to flick off the toes as I've mentioned in other videos and really drive the power through your legs to get a jump. And then you can also use your arms for momentum but most of the power is going to be coming from your legs and that's important because if there's anything that I can leave on the skating community it's that I really want to encourage people to try to jump into their grinds and not step into their grinds. I know that it is challenging especially on certain grinds it feels easier to step into them but jumping will create a much more stable grind it will create a much safer and just better foundation for your tricks and most importantly safer. A lot of times stepping into a grind can cause one foot to slide out before the other one gets in the right placement and it can just be kind of dangerous so I really want to encourage everyone with all the grinds that I go over to jump into them. It's okay if you're just figuring out the foot placement and getting muscle memory and figuring out how it feels when you're actually up onto the obstacle into your grind if you're just stepping up into it to get the feel for it but if you're really going for it and you start to just drill it over and over again to try to get the grind consistent and you really want to nail it down please I encourage you to try jumping into it and not doing the step on. All right getting into the trick now you want to find out which foot that you want to do this on so like I said you can try both to figure out which one feels most comfortable but once you figure that out then you're going to start drilling all these steps. If you decide to try a foot that's not as comfortable for you that would be called switch so if I started practicing this on my left foot that would be like doing a switch macchio grind but for today's episode I'm going to be doing regular macchio grind so my dominant foot for this is my right so I'll be doing it on my right. You want to make sure you're nice and warmed up and you got like the good power coming from your legs because there's gonna be a lot of jumping with this one. I remember when I first started learning this years ago that jumping into this was really scary. Sometimes having a friend to hold a hand or lend an arm so that you can kind of brace yourself on them as long as they're comfortable with that of course that can be very helpful when you're first learning to jump into this because it can be a little bit intimidating. The way that I try to imagine it is that I'm just jumping when you think about your jumping and landing on one foot there sometimes is a mental block with that but if you're thinking I'm just jumping and you're just focusing on getting a nice jump sometimes it can kind of like get rid of that fear that you're feeling about landing on one foot and once you start doing it you'll you'll find that it's not as scary as it feels at first. The other thing that I like to really focus on with these is looking exactly where I want my foot to land so a lot of ledges will have angle iron or something on the edge and I really try to focus on the edge if you don't see any markers like angle iron or a paint strip or something that really focuses on the edge of the ledge just look at the very edge of the ledge pretend it's like a tiny tiny rail and you have to jump on that part in order for you to not fall off. It really comes in handy when you're focusing on that because it is such a specific landed trick so really focus on the edge make sure you're getting power through your legs try to clear your mind of any fears about the jumping jump with both feet land on that edge and I'm going to start showing you what that looks like if you want to step up into the grind before you start really going for it that's absolutely okay it's always important to see how it feels on your foot before you start jumping into it just to see what the balance is going to be like see how it feels on your foot so you just get the feeling out of the way and it's usually very helpful when it comes to getting the muscle memory down knowing that it's going to be okay once you start jumping into the trick you also want to be careful not hitting your toe stop if you lean too far forward and hit your toe stop that will definitely put a stop to you and again with the other grinds I've talked about you always want to look where you're going so once you're locked in on the grind it's okay if you're looking at your feet looking where you want your foot to go when you first jump on but once you're locked in you usually want to look at where you want to go so I tend to look at the edge of the obstacle or at the end of the obstacle so I'll usually be looking at the end of the ledge because that's where I want my momentum to carry the rest of your body is going to be pretty much in alignment so your head shoulders knees and toes are all going to be pretty parallel with one another and facing the direction that you're grinding and the dismount is going to be just the same as I've already discussed in previous videos you want to really absorb that landing by having a nice bend in your knees and kind of sitting into it not leaning too far forward or too far back so that way you're not kind of falling all over the place but having a nice stable landing and creating safety for yourself that's always important once you get the hang of locking in on the grind that's starting to feel comfortable for you you're getting the jump and everything is feeling good you can start adding more and more speed to this I usually will skate the ledge pretty parallel before I jump on some of the other grinds I say you come at a 45 degree angle for this one I'm usually rolling up pretty parallel before I jump on so that will help carry your momentum forward and once you start feeling really comfortable with jumping on into the trick speed is going to be your best friend with this one there's so much momentum from the jump going up into one foot that sometimes it kind of slows it down once you get into it so if you feel like you're getting hung up a lot and you're not sliding as easily as some of the other grinds you might have practiced speed is really going to be your best friend here and that's going to help carry you through and again you could always add some skate wax to your own trucks or to the obstacle if you feel like that will help you out the reason why macchios are so important and such a foundational trick is because most other grinds are going to be built off of a macchio so a macchio is done on one foot usually your dominant foot and from there you can start adding variations to your other foot so your foot can be in front in different formations or in back in different formations you can do 50 50s so the macchio is really like the building block of the other grinds so when people are trying to learn different things a lot of times people ask me how do you 50 50 that's like such popular grinds i always say practice your macchios because once you get really comfortable on that dominant foot so many grinds can be built off of that and it'll just feel so much easier to start learning the other grind variations because you have a solid foundation with your macchio foot it is a difficult one to learn or to get really comfortable with at first so please don't be discouraged if it's taking some time it certainly took me some time but i do think that it's really important to feel comfortable with and it'll come in handy down the road i hope these tips were helpful for you and i hope it carries on into the other episodes as we learn more grind variations this whole series will be all about street skating and getting you prepared to skate the street plaza at your skate park or to skate real street out in the wild so stay tuned for the rest of the episodes if you want to learn more i'll see you next time