Stopping on Roller Skates - Toe Stops

Yeah! All right, let's go. Hey skaters, I'm Dirty Deborah Harry and I'm with the Dirty School of Skate and Sherbrooke Roller Skates. I'm here at the Fountain Valley Skating Center with one of my most important topics or tutorials. I'm going to teach you guys today how to stop. Yes, stop. All right, I've gotten this so many requests for stopping and I tell people, hey I put out a video on plow stopping. I put out a video on T-stopping. Did you not watch those? Apparently not. People want to know how to stop with their toe stop. So let's go ahead and do it. Now for some of you, you don't even use a toe stop. You're like, why do I need to watch a whole video on how to use a toe stop? Well listen, if you're a full-time skater and you think you're going to skate your whole lifetime, at one point you're going to put some toe stops on and do some crazy stuff. So just hang in with me. Watch the whole video. Let's have some fun. All right skaters, so when we're thinking of using our toe stop, there's a few different things that you're going to remember from previous videos if you've been watching. First thing, body posture. I need your chin up. I need your shoulders straight across the course. I need your snack area nice and tight. Lower down, shift body weight, extend my leg and drag my toe stop. It looks simple. It looks fairly easy, but there is so much going on with it. When I said with your upper body, chin up, shoulders straight across, snack area nice and tight, I need this upper body area to stay nice and still. I like to call it like this is a cake topper. This is just made to look good. This section just sits on the bottom and supports the bottom to work. I can't have your upper body swinging around. So if anything, roll your shoulders back and make sure your arms are out for balance. You're going to bend your knees, shift your body weight, extend and drop your toe. Now when you do that, let me show you from the side. It's very important that you have the body posture correct. You're going to be down. We're going to shift the body. I need you to roll back on your wheels and drop your toe and ultimately point your toe and drag your toe stop. What I can't have you do is skate, put down your toe stop here. I can't have you put it in front. I need you to be down, shift, roll back on your wheels, put your toe stop into the ground and then drag it. Okay, let me come up and show you again how it goes. All right, so I'm going to skate forward, bend, shift up and drag. When I drag my toe stop, there is a very good chance that it's going to bump, bump, bump, bump, bump like that and you don't want that. And that is like the biggest, like most common problem. Is it bouncing? If it's bouncing too much, it means your weight isn't securely on one foot. You're not pointing your toe enough and you don't have enough pressure on that leg. In order to get more pressure on that leg, obviously bend this knee more and arch your back. Okay, let me show you. You're going to skate, down, shift, roll back and drag. All right, let me show you from the side. Maybe that'll help too. Skate, bend, shift and drag. What do you think? Do you think that'll work? Now, I do, but also there's a lot of different other ways we can use our toe stops. Now, you can use your toe stop when you're skating backwards. That's helpful for stopping because if you, like me, like to skate backwards a lot and you like to skate backwards fast, there's going to be times when you absolutely need to stop at a time. You're like, you don't even know what's going on behind you and all of a sudden, wouldn't it be nice to be able to stop with complete control? Let's do it. We're going to use a lot of the same techniques we used when we were going forward. Chin up, shoulders straight across, snacks nice and tight, arms down, palms down. We're going to bend our knees, shift our body weight to one side, extend one foot and drop that toe into the ground. When we do this, we're going to really try to let the toe stop glide. It's much easier to have it glide backwards than to have it glide when you're skating forward. Bend your knees, shift your body weight, roll your wheels back, put that toe stop on the ground nice and easy and just let it glide. Now the super fun part of this is you can use both toe stops at the same time. So let's try that. Again, we're going to be skating along backwards, having a good time and maybe we want to see, oh we see maybe you see someone maybe you're skating around having a good time and there's kids maybe you're skating around and they got those skate maids or someone falls just imagine if you just practiced a lot you said skate backwards i've been both knees i'm gonna lift my body weight up and drop both toes into the ground when i do that if i keep my snacks nice and tight and tuck it in and i arch my back a little bit i could stay right here for a long time okay so i think i've given you a little bit to practice let's just do a little overview chin up shoulders straight across snacks tight arms out when we're skating forward skate skate skate bend shift extend and drag when we're skating backwards bend shift extend and push and when we're using both toe stops skate backwards or bend suck it in pop it up and arch your back all right these are super fun don't shy away from using your toe stop i've had people actually comment and say toe stops are useless you don't really know how to skate if you have to use toe stops and i'm like what kind of nonsense is this toe stops are a blast i totally encourage you to learn how to skate without toe stops because that will make you crazy good with your edges but please learn how to use your toe stops especially when we skate outdoors we use toe stops to actually run uphill we use toe stops in the back like this to scream and kill it downhill backwards toe stops are great we can also use toe stops for fun stuff like this like let's say i wanted to skate around okay let's do spins on that spin right there i'm literally spinning on my toe stop and on my wheels at the same time it's just something fun and cool to try so please don't think about toe stops in a negative manner think about them as another tool in your arsenal to find fun stuff to do now let me give you a little disclaimer though about toe stops listen if you're rocking those toe stops that are not adjustable meaning they've got a screw right through the center of the toe stop and they're fixed in one position you need to get better skates non-adjustable toe stops tend to be made out of a hard plastic that don't really glide so as soon as you can upgrade yourself to something that is adjustable meaning the stem comes out it can be put up and it will be at the right length for you to feel comfortable using it okay so anyway if you've got questions about this stuff feel free to comment feel free to send me messages you can email me whatever i will totally answer now as always i beg i plead i encourage you to practice none of this stuff comes easy it takes lots and lots of time and effort but i'm here with you and every week i'm gonna do my very best if xavier's still willing to film we will get you videos out on all the different topics that you like so please in your comments just write down what it is you want to and i'll do my very best to make a good video about it but and i want to say this one thing i read all your comments i am so grateful so many kind words you guys are cool and i i feel really really grateful to have such a good community and i feel like we're growing and building a good thing together so again let's just do lots of communication i want to see you practice send me videos of you skating i can feature them on future videos that would be super fun all right if you got any other comments questions suggestions things like that i'm super open so you guys now i gotta go i'm going on vacation so excited it's been so long so i'm gonna go on a little vacation but i will have a video out this week and then i'll have a video out next week so no problem at any rate i gotta go so i need you to go practice all right skaters we'll see you later so hey skaters i'm dirty deborah harry with the dirty school of skate and sugar roller skates i'm here fountain valley skating center to talk to you tonight specifically about okay so let's see how that looks maybe we can