Your Problem Could Be Mental
The Practice Session
V ary your skating speedUse speed to help you, part 2
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Skateboarders tend to stick to one speed in their practice. This is not to say that they don't skate fast enough. Some are pedal to the metal, crash and burn. Others are very slow and technical. What is lacking is a steady increase in speed to try to build up a trick so it looks big and effortless.
Muscle speed vs. momentum speed
I have made the observation that in surface motion sports there are two basic speeds; I call them muscle speed and momentum speed. Muscle speed means that it's slow enough that all maneuvers must be initiated with muscle. Momentum speed means that maneuvers can be initiated with speed and very little muscle. In fact, muscle is mostly used to control these maneuvers and connect them, and not to initiate them. Muscle speed looks like there's a lot of effort involved, but it can still look good if control is shown. Momentum speed looks effortless. There may be effort involved, but it's usually not obvious to the spectator.
Momentum speed confuses spectators and other skaters learning tricks. Skaters watch other skaters going momentum speed because it's eyecatching. You can get totally screwed up by trying to imitate what you think a skater is doing, because the speed changes everything. For instance, at high speed it may look like a longboard skater is putting a lot of effort in getting his board into a slide, when really the muscle effort is in controlling the follow through of the slide, so his body is literally going the opposite way than he would in a slow slide. When the beginning skater tries to imitate what he sees at a slow speed, he comes up with a slow, screwed up version of a high speed trick.
Speed makes it easier, uh, harder, uh. . . aw heck
Momentum speed maneuvers are usually technically and emotionally more difficult, but physically easier. This is such an important concept that I'll try to put it a different way. It's harder in a way to do a maneuver going slow, because it takes muscle effort and there's not much speed to carry the board through any more than a small range. It's easier to do a maneuver while going fast in the sense that it won't take much effort to get the board going where you want to to (around, up, into a slide, etc), and it will go through a big range (all the way around, way up, sliding like mad, etc), but it will be much harder to keep in control, and the level of fear or intimidation will be high.
Skaters often suffer from going either too slow or too fast. There is the type of skater who won't push the speed up and so will never be able to do a trick with much flow, range, or ease. Then there's the type of skater who always goes fast and overshoots or misses many maneuvers, having a very low percentage of made tricks.
Vary the speed in a logical way: progress and regress your speed
There is a simple pattern for practicing every trick. Your speed should progresses up to a point, then regress a bit. Here's the order at which you practice each trick; 1) slow and in control, with high percentage of success. 2) faster and still successful, or "at speed". 3) pushing the envelope, and missing, perhaps close to falling or even falling, with good falling technique. 4) backing off into the old comfort zone, or slowing down slightly into a new comfort zone. 5) slowing way down to practice what was wrong with the high speed attempts.
This pattern will take twenty minutes to a half hour to get through. You can imagine what will be accomplished. You will end up being more in control when going slow, and you will add confidence when going fast. There is only one dangerous period, and it's in the middle, which corresponds to the pyramid method of practice.What's more, this pattern will be much easier on the eyes of anyone watching. There should be a high number of successes in the time you spend on this trick, and there will be one short period of thrills and spills.
Now I will break down each of the speeds and give additional explanation of what to do and how to prepare mentally for each speed.
Slow and in control
At slow speeds you use your brain a lot to figure out the trick. You break down the trick into the beginning, middle, and end and practice all the parts, slowly. Then you put them together, still keeping the speed down. Realize that you're going to have to use your muscle, so don't strain yourself. Stretch out your limbs on a hand rail and try not to pull any muscles. Any trick you do slowly is not going to have much range. If it's a turn, practice at 90 degrees instead of 180. Then apply more muscle and take it all the way around. Try to get a sense of that speed as your "control" speed, where your goal is 100% makeability and a high degree of function, if not showmanship.
For slow basics, I like to practice switch stance and try to get functional with every trick I can do well regular stance. I also work with cross stance, so there's switch cross stance to deal with. I also have a couple of backwards stances and a front cross stance. So there's tons of slow speed work to do.
At speed
At speed. When you do a trick "at speed" that's the fastest comfortable speed that you can do a trick and pull it off most of the time. You should be totally confident at speed, and have something in reserve. This reserve means that you could probably do it faster, but you're sacrificing a little speed to gain consistency. Your body styling should be a little different than at the slow speed. Your arms should be held wider for stability at speed, and your center of gravity should be lower.
Jumping at speed mixes smoothly slow and explosively quick timing
This applies to jumping on skis, ice or in line skates, skateboards, surfboards, not to mention basketball, all sports I've done a lot of, and probably a bunch of sports that I don't do. If you are going to do a jump, the very start of the jump must be slow, smooth, and very in control, and at the point where you take off there should be an instantaneous explosive effort. The theory behind this is that you must not do any violent jerky motion in initiating a jump at speed. You don't want to throw yourself off and crash. However, once the motion upwards is underway smoothly, at speed you are very stable. Thus the sudden violence of your spring off your foot will not shake up the flow of the movement through the air. After you are aloft, you go back to slow and in control on the follow through. This slow and suddenly fast and slow again timing is very hard to accomplish, and only the best jumpers can do it. Having it explained to you may make it possible for you to take the steps to perfect it. Note that this timing doesn't include the landing, which further complicates it! In some other article I'll cover jumping technique fully.
How fast is at speed?
At speed is a flexible concept. My "at speed" for a jump on skis is quite fast and on ice skates is very fast. For a jump on roller blades it's a little slower, and for an ollie on a skateboard it's slower still. It makes sense, because ice is an extremly fast surface that holds the edge of a sharp blade until the very end, and a spring off it can be very explosive. Roller blades are attached to your feet, but the rubber doesn't grip concrete flawlessly, so I have to slow down. Skateboarding is fast, but the board isn't attached, so I have to sacrifice a little more speed to keep my feet on the board. Whatever your sport and whatever the trick, you must experiment to find what "at speed" is.
Pushing the envelope
The idea of this pattern of varying the speed over a segment of your practice is that you will try to increase your "at speed" by going faster, messing up but gaining confidence, and afterwards backing off into a lower speed. After several attempts, or several practice sessions using the fluctuating speed method, this lower speed will be faster than your previous "at speed". Get it? Simple, effective, but . . . dangerous.
Self deception in sports
Some advice must be given here before you go out and adopt this method. To put it bluntly, you're gonna fall. And maybe fall hard. Sports involves a form of self deception in that there must be a battle between confidence and the certainty of failure. What this means is that every step of the way you must have great confidence, and yet underneath that confidence you must realize that you may fail, and you must be totally prepared, and totally accepting of the responsibility, for that failure.
For example, if you're in a basketball game and you shoot, you must be totally confident in your shot, because that's the only way you will have the rhythm to make it. And yet, inside, you must know that you only have a 50% chance of making that jumper, so you better follow it up by chasing the ball in case you need to rebound or box out an opposing rebounder. Do you see how hard that is, and how self deceptive? And in skating, I think it's a tougher mental paradox, because it's much more dangerous than shooting a basketball.
Pushing the envelope means you must deceive yourself. You must be confident that you can make this trick at a higher speed, and yet be ready for a total miss or fall. What you do is get up your confidence while in the back of your mind having an escape plan. In fact, you should practice your escape plan by going up fast and just coming off your board and seeing how bad the fall is. You should have practiced running it off or shoulder rolling if you come off the board, before you add a lot of speed.
It's a logical, disciplined approach to doing something dangerous. You may want to put on some pads while you push the envelope.
This idea of speeding up may be exactly what you were doing before, if you're like a lot of skateboarders who have aggression. The thing that I would think would be different is to try to push and then back off in a controlled way, with the goal of trying for a 10% increase in speed by trying it 20% faster. If you already practice this way, then you have a discipline that I don't see in 95% of skateboarders in my spots. In general, they go one speed, whether it be fast or slow, all the time, all day. Give this a try, the results will impress you.
I have practiced this way for years and have been able to add a lot of speed in several different sports. I will tell you where I fail and get injured. I practice bailing out of the most likely place where I will fail. What gets me is if something unexpected happens. One day I was jumping on roller blades at speed. I was determined to push the envelope, but warmed up by practicing a bailout way up high but only part way around the rotation I was going for. I thought I was ready, because any accident was likely to happen while up in the air or upon landing. I was in the exact middle of my workout and perfectly warmed up and confident. I skated in at full speed and went in on too deep an edge and slipped before the takeoff. I lost a lot of skin off my knee and was pretty much shaken out of my confident mental state because I was caught unaware. There was nothing I could have done to prevent that accident, but I healed and within a couple of weeks I was at it again, trying to push the envelope, this time watching for that slip on the takeoff. I got hurt, but only a little worse than I was prepared for. Likewise, there will be no way for you to prepare for the slip up and injury that will get you. Just realize it's going to get you and be conditioned enough that hopefully you wont get badly injured. That's the risk, and if you cant take it, you shouldn't be going any faster than your current "at speed".
Many skaters may be athletic and daring, but they are just not going to be able to get this kind of mental discipline, and so are going to be in the crash and burn mode most of their practice session. Those lacking aggression are going to be unwilling to tap into extra speed and will be trapped in the lower speeds of muscle speed. It's hard to say who has it worse. I know that daring and aggression cannot be taught. If it exists in a person, it often cannot be channelled and made useful. I hope some of you crash and burners can learn to channel your daring by using progression/regression of speed and height. You who lack confidence, the best advice I can give is wear pads and to try to practice falling. Get it in your head that falling can be fun, and it's part of the sport. Push the speed a little, and have reasonable goals.
Backing off into the comfort zone
Most skaters get jerky and look tense when they start to add speed to a trick. Perhaps the toughest thing to do at those higher speeds is to remain calm and not speed up your body motion as you increase your speed. You should do the opposite, in fact, move your body slower and think calmer the faster you go.
When you slow down from pushing the envelope and back off into that comfort zone you should feel a great sense of relief. Try not to back off too much, to where you were before. The idea is to take it at a slightly slower speed than your outer limit, but still be in the pocket. The extra speed should give you extra stability, and it should be easier to initiate any trick. Only now you're not pushing the envelope so you should be confident you can make it, and confident that you won't fall or can take any fall easily. Do a few more attempts at this speed, trying to add flow and smoothness.
What to think about
At this point you really shouldn't be thinking about too much. The analysis you did at a slow speed doesn't belong when you're at speed. You should be going on "muscle memory", the intelligence built in your muscles from many repetitions of a maneuver. Try to keep your mind a blank and just watch what's going on around you or listen to the sounds.
Use my technique of giving yourself a sequence of cues either in images in your mind or by talking to yourself, in as few words as possible. This is discribed more in the story section of this practice article.
The idea is to adopt a very streamlined mental approach and not to fill your brain with a lot of neurotic garbage that only will knock down your confidence.
Go back and practice it slow
Now you have to return to reality. Shake off all that adrenaline from your high speed attempts and go back and practice what was wrong. Slow way down and start thinking critically and analytically again. Break down whatever was wrong and attack it. Work on your weakest element of the trick. Then practice the rest slowly.
At this point you can go back up and pull off a few more attempts at speed. Another option would be to just go on to another trick and start the whole pattern over again. This is usually what I do.
Sometimes I take a group of tricks and vary the speed of them together. So say, a couple of different slides, I do them slow, then try faster one at a time. Then increase the whole group until I see where it starts to fall apart. Then I back off on the slides that are shaky and keep pushing the ones that are working. There may be a half hour of different slides at high speed, but some I can do faster than others. Eventually I slow the whole group down again and go into my warm down. This group pattern keeps the overall speed of the session consistent and saves energy.
I think you will find that this is the way to practice all skateboard tricks, classic style, longboard, and new school. If new school skateboarders would try to add speed to their simple tricks and make them bigger and more flowing, their skating would look much better. Then at the same time they could be working on harder tricks at a slow speed. There would be a whole progression of speed that they'd have to think about, which would keep their minds off a lot of the technical flip, spin, and stance mumbo jumbo that clutters their minds. They would probably be a lot less frustrated, too.
When you vary the speed as well as the difficulty level of the trick, there are then several tricks being practiced in the same session at different speeds. With the easier tricks at higher speed, and the difficult tricks at low speed, there should be a high percentage of success built in, rather than the same tedious "stuck" speed and low percentage of makes I see in watching most skaters practice.
