Arcs
W eighting for Slides
Slide Arc- itecture
Revised for 2007
Photography by J. Scott Klossner
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Weight position
How you place your weight on a skateboard is critical for slides. If you weight too far forward, putting your foot in front of the front truck, you will not slide when you swing around, you will do a nose kickturn. In fact, a good exercise when you're learning a slide is to do a nose kickturn until you get the feel of it, then back your foot up. If you weight the tail heavily it can be very hard to slide. Sometimes as a challenge or for a specific trick that calls for it, I move my front foot way back and do a slide from the tail. Sometimes I move my back foot way up as well. The basic stance that I use has my front foot just behind the front truck and my back foot on the tail. There are variations which will be noted, but this somewhat nose heavy stance is the one you will see most often in this project.
Dynamic weighting: unweighting
Aside from the basic weighting is dynamic weighting used to get body weight off the board so it's easier to turn with the feet. I call this technique unweighting, a term borrowed from skiing. Actually there are a lot of annoying french terms that I could have used, but the english is geeky sounding enough. Unweighting technique is done by most skateboarders naturally, but there may be some methods you don't know about that may make it easier for you to slide. I think of unweighting as not being completely necessary, because often just having your weight on the right spot near the front truck is enough. But it is a great assistant to rotation, and sometimes unweighting makes all the difference when you're trying a more difficult slide.
The methods of unweighting I use are:
- Up unweighting
- Down unweighting
- Compression unweighting
- Weight transfer: front to back weighting
Up unweighting
Up unweighting is the easiest of the methods to learn. The idea is you start in a low crouch, then stretch up, and the upward momentum will take your weight off the board. Up unweighting makes it easier to do a twist slide. I use less twist than with the frontside twist example, and get around just as easily.
Up unweighting frontside twist slide
I start in a crouch, set lower than my usual starting stance.
I turn the board to the left, and begin to rotate my shoulders into a frontside twist slide. Already I'm starting to rise up out of the crouch.
Notice how much more upright I am from the first frame. As I rise up smoothly, my weight comes off the board and it becomes very easy to move it around into a slide. I use my back foot to guide it around to the left.
I keep the tall stance through the slide.
As my weight settles on the board, the slide slows. I have to be careful not to let the wheels snag on the road as the board takes my weight once again.
I settle back into a low crouch. From this position I could start another up unweight slide.
The resettling of the body onto the board is the main disadvantage of the up unweight, as the slide can be suddenly killed or you can hang up the wheels on the road. It's also not always so great to raise up like this, because it raises your center of gravity, and your balance is less. If you string these slides together it can be a real pain, because you have to keep crouching and raising up. All around, it's an easy and fun slide, and it has some indispensible uses, like for going up banks where you need to fight gravity.
Down unweighting
Up unweighting is an easy way to get light on a skateboard. The weight comes up off the board for a good length of time, but unfortunately it comes back on kind of hard. It's a bit clumsy. Down unweighting is a more subtle, difficult technique. But I think it's more effective. With up unweighting, you put pressure on the board when you spring up, and you put pressure on it when you come down, so that's two chances to hang up the wheels. Down unweighting gets the weight off the board without much impact when you put it back on.
Down unweighting counter rotation frontside slide
Down unweighting makes it easier to do counter rotation slides. I don't have to use as much windup to get the slide going. You can see the preparation twist I use is less extreme than on the counter frontside example.
I start in a semi crouch, set higher than my usual slide stance. I press my right hand forward to get some twist to the left. I am planning on dropping my weight and at the same time rotating my shoulders back to the right and pushing the board around to the left. As usual for a frontside slide, I skate on a heelside curve to get arc rotation.
I bend my knees quickly and also bend forward at the waist, which drops my weight down suddenly a foot or so. This takes the weight off the board. With the board unweighted, it's easy to counter rotate slide. I push the board around with my back foot, scraping off some speed with the back wheels.
I ride the slide for another 90 degrees, staying in a low crouch. My weight settles back down on the board, but it's not sudden. With the low center of gravity, the chance of hanging up is less than with an up unweight.
The counter rotation move gets me nicely squared off, facing straight across the board and centered on it as I ride the slide to 180.
The finishing crouch is pretty low. My knees are against my chest. It's a bit of a drawback, but it's not too bad.
Perhaps you're way ahead, and realize that if you string an up unweight and a down unweight slide together it will work perfectly. The up unweight slide will end in a rise, which will set up a down unweight move. The crouch I end this slide in is a perfect setup for a strong up unweight. This is exactly what I'm going to do in the Chains connected slides section. On the other hand, maybe you're not way ahead and don't know what the heck I just said. If you're confused, just start again with the up unweight, and see the difference, and it may make sense when you get to the connected slides.
Down unweighting to avoid hanging up
Another great use of down unweighting is to prevent hangups on an end of a slide or rotating jump. Sometimes if you don't get all the way around, the wheels may catch and throw you off the board. If this is about to happen, you can down unweight and lots of times the board is light enough that it won't hang. Use heavy compression down unweighting like the last frame of this sequence. You can push the board a teeny bit more around and make it. If it's a jump, you can compress heavily into the landing and get more time to push the board around so it's straight.
