How to Stop on Inline Skates | T Stop Tutorial

Hello everyone, welcome to another Powerslide tutorial. My name is Nicola Torelli and today we are going to do a T-stop, one of the most fundamental way to stop, probably the common one that will allow you to take off the the heel break. So let's get into it. For beginners, the very first step is just practice the stance. So you're gonna bend your knees as always, you're gonna start to bring your foot 90 degrees behind the other, bounce a little bit, bring it back and of course practice the other. Bring it back, bring it back. So you want to get comfortable with holding this position and not only holding it but also flexing your knees, bending your knees and most important, don't focus just on the knees, focus on the ankle too. You want to make sure the knee gets on top of the toes, both legs. Once you get comfortable with this, we want to start putting it in motion. From this position you're gonna start to push and stop a tiny bit. You don't need to push to try to go too far right away because it's gonna be difficult. So at the beginning you just want to start to push from this foot and bring the weight back to stop. And keep your skate squeezed together. So you push and stop, push and stop, push and stop and then you go back on the other side. Push and stop, push and stop, push and stop. The more you get comfortable with this very small movement, the more you can increase the amplitude so you can go a little bit further. So push a bit further, drag it further and then stop. Drag it further and stop. When you want to stop, you want to bring your weight back into the dragging foot. So you move it here and then bring it back on the dragging foot until you can do this for a longer stride and stop. Things to not do while you practice this exercise are not stopping. So just doing this. This won't build good muscle memory. What you really want to do is make sure you stop, hold it, stop, hold it. When it comes to upper body, a good position to hold will be just keep your arms in a L shape or a Y shape. So you don't want to do this and you don't want your arms to rotate you in other ways. You want to stay open to where your legs are open. Try to do small movements rather than big ones so that you won't find it too hard to control your body and build it up from there. Once you get a bit comfortable with this, we can start with what is more a drag. So I'm building up balance on that foot and I'm just dragging this. So the difference is that this time I will not have my weight on the dragging foot. I will just hold it on the skating one and then if I apply pressure I will still stop but this time I will not stop because I put my weight on it. I will stop because I'm just applying pressure from the hip with the glute and the whole leg. This is a different technique but it's worth being practiced because you want to play with both. You want to play with putting the weight on the back and having this position but you also want to build with keeping the weight on the front and applying pressure on the back. So you can see on this second technique my head stays on top of this foot. On the first technique it goes on top of this. So you want to practice both. A lot of people will find hard balancing on this foot. They'll start turning. It's one of the most common mistakes. So what you need to do is go back first on the exercise where you just build the strength to keep a firm position and second you also want to learn to balance on the front foot in order to maintain balance here and not balance on the other one that will make you turn. So a good exercise for this one I would recommend is first find your balance on the front foot by rolling on the front foot with the toe with the last wheel with the toe in the front. Once you find your balance here what you're going to start doing will be switching from toe a little drag back to the toe a little drag back to the toe. So a little drag back to the toe a little drag back to the toe. So this what will do is will allow you to learn to not put weight the moment that you go into a drag and it's a good exercise to start getting good control because sometimes you may not want to stop right away you may just want to like slow down a little bit you know and keep your weight on the foot that is rolling. So this is a good exercise I recommend. Now let's see how this applies when it comes to actually stopping. For example in a little slope like this one that we got right here let's check it out. Okay so if you want to actually stop and you're down a slope you want to put a lot of weight on the back foot and bring your body weight on top of it because if you're going to try to stop on a slope and keeping your front foot forward it will be very hard and likely it will also affect your balance. So I would suggest using the first technique that we checked out where you put the weight on the dragging foot. Let's see how low we can bring this so I'll show you another one where I try to go lower because some people a lot of times think they are going low they are bending those knees but actually aren't doing it that much so I just want to show you how low it's possible to do this T-stop. See I can like really go low can we go lower than this let's see yes so when you go so low it might come out of the realm from the realm of functional but it still gives you an idea of how low you can take it so this to say that if you're on a slope and you really want to stop this is not functional like it works at slow speed but if you're on a slope and you're trying to go faster and stop like this you can see as much as you can put pressure on this one it will be very hard to stop so instead what you need to do is put the weight on the back and that will allow you to stop very fast and also most important well very important thing this builds up to the position of the magic slide that we're gonna see in a couple of tutorials first we need to do the soul slide it's coming next so stay tuned for it and then after we're gonna put those two together and do the magic slide so thanks for watching guys hope this helped feel free to leave a comment and if you have any questions on it please leave them down in the comments and I appreciate you for watching I'll see you on the next one peace