Making Your Roller Skating Journey Easier With These 9 Essential Beginner Tips

Have you just bought roller skates or perhaps you want to learn to roller skate? Stick around and I'm going to show you the nine important things you need to know to get you started. When you take your skates out of the box you need to check a couple of things. The most important thing is to check that your wheels roll. So if they don't roll you need to loosen the nut and if they move like this up and down the axle then you need to tighten the nut. You'll need your spanner that fits. The next thing to check is your toe stop. There are three main types. This one is a bolt-on toe stop so it cannot be adjusted. It will just wear down over time and you'll need to replace it. You can get bigger and smaller ones of these but you cannot adjust it up and down. This type of toe stop is the one that you will find on lots of the more popular skates. This is on the moxie skates so the chances are you'll probably have one of these types of toe stops. Now this nut, these are known for coming undone. So once you think the nut's tight, all your body weight and tighten it as hard as you can because the last thing you want to do is to go for a toe stop that's not there. Doesn't end well. If you're going to put a toe guard on here make sure the toe guard goes between the toe stop and the nut, not between the plate and the nut. That's really important. And the last type of toe stop is like mine where you have to put an allen key in there and these can be adjusted in height. You can also adjust these in height as well. One of the biggest questions that gets asked all the time is what wheels do I need? If you've just bought roller skates the chances are you'll be fine to roll on the wheels that you've got but if you go outside it might feel a bit rattly or if you go into a rink it might feel a little bit like your skating is really hard and that's when you need to change. So outside you want nice big squidgy wheels. So big wheels are around 62 millimeters and what makes them squidgy is the softness. So around a 78 to an 85 would be an outdoor wheel. When you come inside you're looking at around a 90 wheel. Now this is still a big wheel at around a 62 mil. 62 will give you lots of speed but it's not as maneuverable as the smaller wheels. So this is a 90 wheel. What I like to skate on are really hard wheels because these are great for spinning and turning because they slide on top of the surface of the rink. But when you're a beginner these can feel like you're ice skating. Just get your feet before you start thinking about going to a really hard wheel. So this is a 57 mil wheel which is great for turns and spinning and it's also really really hard at 101a. Some entry level skates have known issues so as a safety precaution I would always recommend checking your skates before you skate every time. One really good thing to do is to give your skate a shake. If you can hear a metallic rattle it means something is loose. It could be that a wheel is sliding up and down the axle. It could mean that the toe stop is loose. Could mean that something on the kingpin is wobbly. So make sure your trucks aren't wobbly or too loose. Now another known issue is that the upper can separate from this heel. So just check and make sure, give it a tug, make sure nothing's coming apart because the last thing you want is for your skate to fail whilst you're skating. You may notice I have some accessories on. You always need to wear these accessories when you're skating to keep you safe. As a beginner and as an advanced skater I can guarantee you it only takes a couple of heavy falls outside for you to realize how important this all is. So you need a double certified helmet. The S1 helmets are incredibly good. You need wrist guards with metal on both sides and you need elbow pads that are going to stay in the right place and knee pads. The bigger the better. What you'll find is if you straighten up in these big knee pads they're going to dig into your legs but if you bend they won't which is fantastic because this bent knee is what you want for skating. Perfect. So your safety gears on and your skates are on your feet. So the most important thing I need to tell you now is where to put your weight. So when you're skating you want the weight over the front truck which is where the two front wheels are. Basically that will be around the ball of your foot. So if you think of putting the weight on the ball of your foot, 90% of the time that's where it needs to be unless you're doing tricks and things. But when you're a beginner always weight on the ball of your foot whether you're going forwards or backwards that's really important. So let's do it. Let's skate. Weight on the ball of my feet. Now I'm going to bend my knees and you can't bend your knees too much because the more your knees are bent the closer you are to the ground. So should you fall it's going to hurt less because you're lower. So bend your knees as low as you can. If you think you've bent your knees guarantee you could probably bend them a bit more. Okay so you can either do bubbles or you can do marching and I've got videos on both of these but I'm going to do bubbles. You need to learn to skate forwards first. Arms out. Now all my weight is forwards. It's fine to be a little bit too far forwards at first because a forward fall is much nicer than a backwards fall. So I'm going to do my bubbles with my knees really really bent. A quick tip with the knee bend is if you look down and you can see your foot your knee's not bent enough. Your knee should be over your toe. One of the things that I find puts beginners off a lot of the time is the fear of falling which is completely understandable. So your safety gear is going to help. It puts a barrier between you and the floor which is fantastic but if you feel the wobble, if you've got a nice knee bend, you feel a wobble, the best thing to do is to forget the skill you're trying to practice. Your only thing to concentrate on now is controlling your fall. So what you need to do is to get into a cannonball as quickly as you can because this will one, save the fall or two, if you fall from here it's nowhere near as bad as if you're falling from standing up. Another thing you can do if you feel the wobble is you can use these. These are great. So I'm skating along and I'm like oh I'm wobbling. Drop to a knee. That works really well as well. To practice this position you can do this without your skates on to just get the motion of getting down onto one knee. So the next thing to talk about is skill progression. So I know that everybody just wants to be able to skate now but I consider there is a safe way of learning. So the most important thing obviously is to learn forwards and then once you're skating forwards you need to learn to stop and I've got a video on three ways to stop which I shall link for you. And then from there I think the next progression is backwards. And from here the next thing is to learn to turn from forwards to backwards. So a C turn is really good for that. Lots of people go from forwards to then transitioning but I kind of think you need to learn backwards skating first because you learn to skate forwards then you've learned to turn and then all of a sudden you're backwards and you've never done it before which is pretty terrifying. So it's really important for me I think to do forwards, stopping, backwards and then transitions and from there practice, practice, practice and get those fundamentals and then you can start learning tricks and all the sorts of fun stuff. So this video has given you a really brief overview of the nine important things you need to know to learn to roller skate but I've got so many videos with lots and lots more detail on each of the things we've spoken about so at the very end of this video I will link to the beginner playlist which has got all of those in. I'm Katie, you've been watching Skatie and I'll see you next time. Bye!