How to Stop on Roller Skates - T Stops

Hey, it's Dirty Debra Harry here at the Fountain Valley Skating Center in beautiful Southern California and I'm with the Dirty School of Skate and Sure Grip Skate Company. Today we're here to talk about T-stopping. Sure there's tons of ways to stop but I like T-stopping in particular because it works for people who are wearing toe stops or not wearing toe stops like me. So today I got fiberglass wheels on so if you hear a bunch of noise don't worry about it it's just coming from the wheels. All righty so when we talk about T-stopping, T-stopping is just a matter of placing your weight down shifting your body weight over to one foot and then opening up your hip and turning your foot. All right it's going to look like this. You're going to skate forward and you're going to shift your body weight from side to side. You're going to be down shift up a little bit and turn it out sideways. Now when I say turn it out sideways what I really mean is we shift our body weight down then we rock our body weight over we have our arms out to help us balance and then we lift up just a little bit we turn our foot and our hip out so that this foot is right behind your primary skating foot here. Okay so it's going to be down shift your body weight or rock your body weight over and then we're going to turn out our hip and our foot. When we do that it's super important that your shoulder upper body area stays straight don't let your shoulder pull out that way. If it does this is what's going to happen you're going to go to turn open up your shoulder you're going to turn around if that's not what you want to do don't do it. Okay so again you're going to skate forward be down rock your body weight over lift up a little bit and turn out keep this shoulder forward as this foot turns out. So a lot of times people have trouble turning their foot out this is a little trick I used to like to use all the time. Take your big toe and pop it up to the top of your boot if you take your big toe and boing and it's up at the top of the boot it can help lift your skate so that you can turn it. All right now again we're going to be down shift your body weight take your little toe boom your big toe and then start turning your foot so that it makes a little T. Hence that's why it's called the T stop. All right so I'm skating side to side rock my body weight over lift and turn just a bit if you want to stay really stable keep both knees bent. So we're skating side to side side to side down rock your body weight over keep both knees bent and turn it sideways. Now doing a good T stop some of it is just going to be dependent on the wheels that you use and how they interact with the surface that you're skating on. So let's say you're indoors but you're wearing big gigantic outdoor wheels T stops are going to be hard because T stops reliant on you being able to slide your wheels across the floor. So if you're skating indoors and you're wearing outdoor wheels understand that this might be a problem you might want to use your toe stop to stop but if you're wearing harder indoor wheels this should be no problem and all those big orange wheels you wear in your rental skates no problem they should be able to do this just fine because they are nice and hard. So one last time let's go through it again. Now put your arms out this is just going to just going to ensure balance all right we're going to skate side to side we are down shift up a little bit and turn it sideways when we go and turn sideways take a big toe boing turn it sideways open up our hip and make sure that our shoulder is forward so this little box area is nice and forward. Another thing for god's sakes look ahead do not look down if you look down it just looks a little bit crazy you look a little bit like this and also anytime that you take your chin and you let it rest on your chest right here you're going to start pulling your body weight down and you're going to lose balance so make sure your chin is up shoulders straight across snack area nice and tight and it's down shift your body weight keep your knees bent pull up just a little bit and drag your foot sideways all right so hopefully this was helpful if it wasn't hey let me know put something in the comments i'll take a bad comment any day but i love the good ones too please subscribe to my channel tell me also what you want to see in a video because the only reason i'm making this one is someone asked for it okay so anyway i need you to practice your t-stops a ton all right this is a little bit of a finesse thing you got to do it a ton it's not going to come right away all right so i need you to practice practice practice all right see you next time hey