The Roller Skate Buyers Guide - What To look For, How To Measure Your Feet And What You MUST AVOID!

There are so many skates to choose from, how do I know what to get? If you're thinking about buying skates, I would 100% recommend that you hit your local rink first and give it a try. Hire some skates and see if it's for you before you invest. Perhaps you've signed up for classes or you're going to try out for Derby. Anything like this, it's a really good idea to wait before you buy your skates and ask the coach what they recommend because they may have a preferred skate for you to wear. When selecting a skate, you need to have a think about what heel height you want. A lot of the skates come with a heel and there is a really good reason for this. When you skate, you have your weight on the ball of your foot and being on a high heel pushes the weight into the right place so it makes it easy to balance. For beginners, I would always recommend to go for a heel but obviously if you're going to go into something like Derby or Speed, they tend to wear a flatter boot. If that is what you're thinking of doing, you can start on a flat boot but just know it's going to be slightly harder to get your balance. I have decided to buy a pair of heeled beginner skates so come on the journey with me to choose some. If you have a local skate shop, definitely pay them a visit. They will have a wealth of knowledge and you are more likely to leave there with something that's safe, suitable, a good price and fits you. If you can't get to your local skate shop, lots of them do sell on Amazon. I am going to search for roller skates. What we've got first here is a lot of children's skates. These are plastic and adjustable. Don't touch those as an adult. For a start, these have a plastic plate and more importantly they have a plastic truck which are often prone to failure and you'll probably find as we scroll down this listing, it will have a weight limit. If you're buying skates for your children, these would be acceptable for a smaller child but definitely not for an adult. Okay, so these skates are ones I see lots of beginners with because they're pushed really heavily on Amazon. Anytime you see a listing that says double row roller skates, massive, massive alarm bells. Do not go anywhere near that. It won't be from a legacy brand. It will be a cheap brand that's cheaply made. The proper name is quad skates. So I have finally come across a good skate and I will show you why it's a good skate and it's really reasonably priced. It's a Candy Girl Karlin. If you look here, it's got a metal alloy plate. It's got metal trucks but it has got a non-adjustable toe stop so it's a bolt-on toe stop. So ideally you want an adjustable one but for the price of this skate, it's a really good quality and we can live with a bolt-on whilst we're learning. It's not a massive issue. Looking at the description, it tells us a lot more information so let's have a look at why this is a better skate than the others we've looked at so far. It has suede uppers which are a really nice way to learn. Nice and soft, much better than vinyl. Quality aluminium frame. So they're actually mentioning the technical parts of the skate. They're mentioning the cushions, they're mentioning the trucks and they've also listed the wheels, bearings and they said toe stop is non-adjustable. So you know straight away that the people that have written this specification know they're talking about roller skates and they know what they're talking about. One thing I will say about wheels is if you have one pair of skates and an indoor set and an outdoor set of wheels, definitely get an extra set of bearings that you can leave in both wheels. That way it's so much quicker to change the wheels if all you've got to do is undo the nut and pop the wheel on rather than having to change the bearings over each time. So if we scroll now and look for something that's slightly improved with an adjustable toe stop. So what I've come across here in quite a good price range are the Moxi Rainbow Riders. Now bear in mind that Moxi are made by Rydell and sometimes you can get a very similar boot from Rydell but it'll be slightly cheaper because you're not paying for the Moxi name. This should tick all our boxes for a good spec skate so let's have a look. Straight away we've got a metal truck, we've got a metal plate and we've got an adjustable toe stop. Let's have a look at their writer and see what they say. It is a vinyl upper. Now the downside of a vinyl upper is it never really breaks in. People say there's a break in time for roller skates and I agree when you're talking about leather or suede but with a vinyl boot it never really softens up because it's it's a plastic. So bear in mind that the Candy Girl Carlins that we looked at even though they had a bolt-on toe stop they were suede so they might be a better option. Okay here we go so it's got die cast, aluminium plate, great. It says it's got soft wheels so you could wear those outside without having to buy extra wheels for outside and it says about the bearings, adjustable toe stop so yeah it's got everything in there that we're looking for. I get that this is actually quite a complex thing to do because I know what I'm looking for and I'm scrolling for ages going no no no. There's quite a lot of skates in there that I could see that someone who's not quite as experienced would be like well that looks kind of okay. On my website skatey.co.uk I've actually got a list of recommended skate and it tells you if they're for a wide foot, for a narrow foot and that is a much much easier place for you to find recommended skates that will hopefully help you to learn. Once you've decided which skates you're going to buy the next thing to do is to get the right size and to do that you're going to need a piece of paper and something to write with. Skate size doesn't necessarily tally to shoe size so it's really important to measure your foot and then compare that to the manufacturer's size guide but make sure you compare it to the manufacturer's size guide for the model that you're buying because helpfully the sizes can change between models as well. Make sure you do this on a hard surface. I'm going to put my weight on this foot because you'll see my foot spreads more once I put my weight on it so I'm going to do knee over toe and then I'm going to draw around my foot. It's best if you can get someone to draw around for you that way your weight won't be shifting about and you'll get a more accurate sizing. As you do this make sure to keep the pen upright if you lean it in or out you won't get an accurate reading. It tickles. Oh it's beautiful! So what's left to do now is to measure from the longest points so this foot's quite easy to see the longest points but on this one I've got a longer toe so I need to just check which is the longest point so I'm just going to bring a ruler down so then I'm just going to measure between the two points to get my size. As well as length make sure to measure the widest part of your foot and check to see if the brand of skate that you're looking at comes in a wider fit if you need it. So now I know my size I'm ready to buy my skates but what am I going to get? Am I going to get vinyl, suede, bolt-on toe stop, adjustable toe stop? Watch out for a future video to find out. I'm Katie, you've been watching Skaty and I'll see you next time.