HOW TO RIDE BACKWARDS ON INLINE SKATES?!

Hey guys, welcome back to another video for the Disassault YouTube. Today I'm going to learn you how to ride backwards. We are here right now on the Olympiaplein skatepark. This is one of my favorite skatepark in Amsterdam. It's pretty close to the Disassault skate shop. So if you're going to get some new skates at our skate shop, you can go try them out here in the skatepark right away. Of course, there's the obstacles, but there's also this nice and smooth ground. So if you want to do some freestyle tricks and just want to practice becoming a better skater, it's perfect here to just flow and learn some new skills. That's what we're going to do today in this video. I'm going to teach you how to ride backwards. Riding backwards on inline skates is called fakie in skate terminology. A common mistake with this is that people immediately start to do like 180s like this or like transitions going from forward to backwards, but you don't need to do all that today. We're going to actually start and just the technique to roll backwards. And from there on, we're going to build it up to the transitions later. We're going to make a new video about the transitions. This one is about the correct way to ride backwards. Before you start practicing riding backwards, you need to have some basic control of your skates. We made a lot of videos already on our YouTube channel. Check those out about basic control. There's one in particular called flow skating and flow skating is like how to like steer and flow on your skates, because that's what you need when you ride backwards as well. So check that one out before you continue this video. In that video that I mentioned with flow skating, we practice the lemon drops. The first thing I want you to do is to do those lemon drops when you go backwards to have some basic skills. And to get to the speed, we're going to use a little obstacle like this. So I'm not going to teach you to skate actually backwards. I'm just going to teach you first to push off and just to roll. So you use this, go stand in the skate position like this, push off like that. And then you'll immediately notice that your feet will probably go point towards each other. And then you'll stop like that. I start off just really slow. And then what you want to do is to avoid your foot touching to make a little lemon and go outside. Again, wide and small, wide and small. So this is called the lemon drop movement. And this is the first exercise. This will probably not be successful the first time you do it. So you need to have a lot of repetition. Just keep on repeating, keep on trying. Spend like, I don't know, maybe an hour just doing this, getting some control. And eventually after you master the lemons and you have some basic control, the goal is to ride backwards for as long as you can and as fast as you can. So after practicing, a lot of times, just push off as hard as you can and just roll like this in a straight line. That's what you want to do. Help, I don't know what to stop. You don't know what to do? Just put one knee on the ground. Boom. So this is also something I would advise you to do before starting with this skating backwards. We have a lot of videos about falling techniques. This one is called the proposal because you're in the same position as if you would propose to somebody. It's a really good falling technique for beginners. You do need to have knee pads on. Obviously, I'm not wearing knee pads right now, but I would advise you to wear knee pads for sure. And before you start practicing with pushing off, off of like an obstacle like this, I would advise you to practice the falling technique as well. So when you stand like this, just go really slow and just put one knee on the ground and that's how you stop before you know any of like the real stopping techniques. This is gonna be your stopping technique for now on and it's also a nice way to ensure that you're safe. So we got the basic going backwards in a skating position. If you do this, make sure the ground is smooth because if you watch one of our previous videos about how to roll over bad surfaces, you know that the way to roll over bad surfaces is in a predator stance or a scissor stance like this. And this is also how you should ride backwards. And that's the next step that we're gonna try right now is to ride backwards in the predator stance. Practice this first when you stand still. So stand like this in a skate position and then just roll your foot in front of each other. And if you ride backwards, your weight should be on your front foot like this. Okay, so now I'm gonna take the fence here. Just push off in defense in the predator position, weight on the front foot and just slowly push off. All right, cool. What you'll notice is that your back foot will start to do this and you'll start to make a turn. Everybody does that in the beginning, no exception. Same goes for you. You're gonna make a turn without you wanting to make a turn. So this is gonna happen. And you can do it like this, push off and then this is gonna happen. Okay, so we need to practice with having control over our back foot. It will go inwards like this. Practice standing on your toe a little bit, weight is on your front foot and push your heel outside. Do it really exaggerated because you want to really get it in your head how it feels to push your heel out. Okay, so you need to start doing this when you're riding to counter the turn that your body by itself wants to make. So I push off and now I try to push my heel out and get like some control with this. Okay, all right. The end goal is to make just a straight line with your foot in a predator stance. So practice this probably for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half hour, maybe even an hour. Just push off, try to go in a straight line and avoid making this turn. Don't make this turn, just go in a straight line. Every time you are successful and go in a straight line, you can push off a little bit harder. And every time you make a turn, you have to go slower and focus more on pushing your heel outside. After you practice pushing yourself off of a wall, you can slowly start to skate without using the wall. And as you've seen in one of the previous videos, the way to start skating forward is having skate position, putting your foot in a V and then just walk. You'll immediately start to skate forward. And if you want a break, put your toes in and then stop like this as well. So we call this like penguin start and penguin stop. Okay, but you also have like a penguin skate backwards move. If you just stand still in a skate position and you make your foot in an A frame like this and you just start ping winging, left, right, left, right, you immediately start skating. Then just put your foot in a normal position again and you'll skate backwards. So that's how you get speed out of nowhere. And once you master that, don't forget to play as well. So you wanna like learn to like flow a little bit like this and maybe you can put on some cones on the ground and slalom over them like this. Obviously you can do that skating backwards as well. You can go like this. The first little steps, just try to ride over something like this, boom. Just don't forget to play, don't forget to have fun. After working really hard for this and succeeding going pretty fast in a straight line, we can move on to the next step. And the next step is to look where you're going. There's two ways to do this and you have to master them both. The first way is just to turn your head like this. And the second way is to turn also your shoulders like this. And this is where a lot of people really struggle because turning your head is not that hard, but twisting your upper body like this is really difficult for a lot of people. But if you master it, if you do it and you have 90 degree turn with your shoulders and also with your head, then you can actually see everything behind you 100%. So that's really nice to be able to see, of course, where you're going. It's okay to do like 45 degrees first and then 90 degrees later, for example, after you tried it a couple of times. And you're gonna notice that the same thing is gonna happen again. This foot is gonna turn and you have to resist it. So you have to push your heel out, blah, blah, blah. It's the same old thing every time. So focus on going in a straight line and resist having this foot turn. It's really hard at the beginning, but once you get used to it, you don't wanna have it any other way. Next step is fun. This is something a lot of people are afraid of, but there's no real reason to be afraid because it's just fun. You can play with it, play with it at your own level. Everybody can do the first steps for skating in the skate park. And I'm gonna teach you how. So everybody can fall on their spot like this. All right, go like this and then go in a rockstar position. On the spot, no speed, everybody can do it. If you cannot do it, watch our videos about how to do the rockstar. I'll teach you that. Okay, so everybody can do it while riding and then falling on the obstacle like this. Everybody can do this, all right? So now, just go a little bit faster. Go like 5% faster or 10% faster. Just keep it basic. Don't go too fast. The skate, skate position, boom, fall on your knees and then go backwards on your knees like this. All right, just keep on doing it, repeating it. Go higher and higher until eventually you're gonna be halfway up the bank. Go like this, skate position, boom, boom, rockstar. Go fakie, boom. That's easy, right? All right, obviously I'm not wearing knee pads, so I'm not gonna do the rockstar, but you should do the rockstar with this. I'm gonna do the mermaid. The mermaid is the sideways falling technique. The next step is to go up, go really slow and then go backwards and then fall over here. So you go up, go really slow and then I'm gonna do a mermaid. What would you should do is fall on your knees, right? So these first steps, just keep on repeating it, stay within your comfort zone and I would just want you to have the falling technique mastered before we actually start riding backwards. As a first step, you can just go up and keep on having the skate position like this. All right, and then just ride backwards. But I'd rather that you have your foot in a predator stance. I don't even care that much about your shoulders and your head at first, just have your foot in a predator stance. So you go up, predator stance, weight on the front foot and just try to ride. It's actually the same thing as pushing off. Just go really slow, don't go that high, just like five centimeters or 10 centimeters high and go back in a straight line. It's also fun to do it in a half pipe, which we have over here. The start off really slow, predator stance and ride all the way back until you hit the back one over there and then you can skate off again, predator stance, boom. Just keep on repeating this until you get higher and higher and then you get like some nice flowy feeling. Actually, there's one little tip I wanna give you. If you're searching for a half pipe to do this at, pick the biggest half pipe that you can get because big half pipes are actually friendly giants. They're really friendly. And if you just skate them low, like low to the ground, you don't go that high, they're really mellow at the beginning. But a small quarter pipe, like a small low quarter pipe has a really angry transition. It's like those little dogs that bark too much. You don't wanna come close to them because they really pop. And like a big vert, which is like a couple of meters high, they are really slow. So if you don't go that high, it's way more mellow to try it there. So the same thing goes here as it goes on the bank as it went before when you were pushing yourself off is that you just need a lot of repetition. Nobody can skate backwards naturally, okay? Everybody needs repetition, repetition, repetition. And you start off low with one of the techniques. So start off with the predator stance without looking, yeah? And then you go higher and higher until you're like this high, for example. But it takes like at least a hundred tries to get this high probably, okay? So then you're gonna start the next step and that's to look. You evolve like one step further. But if you take it one step further, you need to start at the bottom again. So predator stance and looking, start low again because you're probably gonna move your back foot again. So this is a constant struggle with controlling your back foot and pushing your heel out. All right, then you go repeat again, repeat again, repeat again until you're this high and then you can look like this, all right? Then of course, you're gonna try to move your shoulders, but then again, start off slow and low, boom. So this is the perfect way to ride backwards. This is how you wanna do it. It will take a lot of repetition. Good luck practicing. If you wanna get more tips, check out our YouTube channel. We have a new video every week, of course, so subscribe and I'll see you guys in the next one.