Turning on Roller Skates Feels Hard… Until You Learn This

Turning on roller skates feels hard until you realise you might be leading with the wrong skate. One of the biggest things I see beginner adults struggle with is corners. They tense up, they lean, they try harder and assume they just need more confidence to get around the corner. And what makes this tricky is that it feels like a confidence problem. So a lot of skaters think, I just need to be braver around corners, but confidence usually comes after your body understands the movement. If the movement itself feels awkward, trying harder often just makes you feel more tense. So before you blame yourself, it's worth checking whether your technique is actually helping you around the corner in the first place. But sometimes corners feel awkward simply because the wrong skate is trying to guide the turn. So in this video, I'm going to show you the small adjustment that can suddenly make corners feel way smoother and why turning has probably been feeling way harder than it needs to be for you. Hey, I'm Tracey from Suns Out Skates Out and I teach adults how to roller skate through my in-person classes and my online course Roller Skate by Sunday. Just for a second, I want you to think about walking around a corner while you're holding somebody's hand or linking arms with them. Usually the person on the inside naturally starts changing direction first, right? And then the other person follows. But if the person on the outside suddenly starts dragging the turn instead, everything gets awkward. You sort of end up fighting each other instead of moving together. Corners on skates feel really similar because what I see a lot of beginners accidentally do is trying to turn from the outside skate or they keep all their weight completely centered between both feet through the corner. And once you start noticing this, you'll probably see it everywhere. Watch people walking around a corner or moving around a bend. There's usually a natural flow in the direction they're traveling. The movement isn't being forced. The body is gradually organizing itself into the turn. And that's really what we're trying to recreate on skates. So if I'm trying to turn a left corner, instead of trying to force the turn from the outside skate, I'm thinking more about allowing this inside skate to start to guide the direction of the corner with my weight softening slightly that way as well. While the outside skate, this one here, that supports the curve behind. Now you can see my inside foot is clearly leading here and my outside foot, which is my back foot, is supporting the corner. And then you can see here that that outside foot is trying to lead. So that will make turning a corner and pressing on an edge extremely difficult. And then this is what skating around a corner with parallel skates will look like because your skates are not in a staggered stance, so you have no stability and there's a way higher chance of slipping out backwards. And that tiny adjustment is often why corners stop suddenly feeling so forced. And for a lot of students, this is the moment they suddenly go, oh, that actually feels way easier. Not because they magically became more confident, but because their skates finally had somewhere natural to go and the movement felt way more comfortable for them. Now, the other thing that can help this click even faster is letting your eyes and your chest open softly into the direction that you want to go, because if your feet are trying to turn and your upper body stays facing completely forward, your body and skates end up fighting each other. So if I'm turning left, my eyes are going to go first and then my shoulders are going to follow. So we're going to start to slowly look in that direction that we're going, turning your shoulders slightly in, having the arms come slightly in towards that circle. So if my head is leading, my shoulders are open, I'm looking in the direction, everything else from my head down to my shoulders, down to my waist is turned inwards. My skates are naturally going to want to turn that corner and you're going to be able to put more pressure on that outside edge of the forward skate, a lot more comfortably versus trying to turn a corner and you're looking straight ahead, your shoulders are slightly twisted or not turned in. You can see here by me doing that, my skate, the weight can't get into that outside edge because my upper body is twisted. So it's really hard for me to put weight on that outside edge. I can, but it's really hard, whereas if I turn it, everything feels more natural to be able to flow around that corner. And this is often another moment where my students suddenly feel like the corners are way more comfortable and they can feel that difference. Something I notice a lot in classes is that students will feel this once or twice and then immediately think they've lost it again. They'll get one really nice corner and then the next one feels awkward and they assume they're doing it wrong, but that's actually a really normal part of learning. Your brain is collecting information every time you try it out, so don't judge the skill based on one corner. Look for small moments where the turn feels a little smoother, a little lighter or a little easier than before. And if this still feels awkward at first, I really want you to know that this is a normal stage because turning is one of those skills where your brain is trying to work it all out. It's trying to figure out which skate leads, where does my weight go and what should my shoulders be doing? There's a lot happening, so instead of trying to aggressively throw yourself around a corner and hope that it works, slow it right down while you're learning, set the corner up early, look where you want to go and allow the inside skate to guide the direction. Let your weight soften slightly that way, open up the upper body and this gives your skates time to set yourself up to go around the curve because smoother turns usually come from smaller, softer movements, not forcing your skates harder into the corner. And once this clicks, corners often stop feeling like something that you're bracing for and they just start feeling like a part of skating, which is what you want. And this is when skating usually starts to feel a whole lot more fun because you have confidence in getting around a corner. So if corners have been feeling awkward or frustrating, hopefully now you can see it's probably not that you're bad at skating, you might just have been asking the wrong skate to do all of the work. And if you're newer to skating and not really sure what to practice first, I do have a free five day learn to roller skate series, which is linked down below, where I guide you through the beginner foundations step by step. And if you want to keep improving your skating, watch this video next because balance and turning really do go hand in hand. And if you're enjoying these skating tutorials and want more help with your skating, feel free to like and subscribe. I've got plenty more lessons coming your way. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video. Unless you want to put some skates on.