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Slide Chains

3 60 Slides: linked 180s

Slide Arc- itecture

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Twist slide fs
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Slide Chains: flowing Slide Arcs together

Linking turns is a way to keep up the flow of your skating through different turn techniques. You can pick up speed by pumping and reduce speed by deep carving. If you have banks or ramps where you are skating you can use climbing and dropping to control speed, but on flat ground linking turns are your speed control. Linking slides takes the speed control of carving one step further than deep carving. The wheels release and scrape off a lot of speed.

Linking slides together is one of the most useful and fun things you can do with slides. If you've gone through and learned the three basic rotations in the Arcs: Slides section, you can start to string them together in Slide Chains and see how the different techniques go together in different situations. I'll demonstrate my favorite ways of linking these slides, and try to get across the method of experimenting with combinations to see what works.

Each Slide Arc or basic 180 slide has your body in a different position at the end, which if you work it out, can lead right in to another slide. The lead in can either be a windup for that next slide, or simply a continuation of that body motion to keep it going. You can keep twisting your upper body back and forth to string slides, or you can keep the twist going in the same direction to extend the rotation another turn. If you don't understand what I'm talking about, maybe the pictures and breakdown will give you the idea.

360 slides can be done two ways. One way is to connect, or link two 180 slides. That's the way the Slide Chains in this feature work. I do a 180 using a rotation technique, then use another or the same type of rotation to come out of it with another slide. The second way to do a 360 is to get enough rotation on it at the start to carry a full circle. This will only work on a very smooth surface. It may work on a surface that is not smooth if it is a bank, and you do 180 up and 180 down, with no real linking. It is not part of this article, but I'm letting you know about it for comparison.

Refer to the sidebar and follow the links to Layer 1 Parts if you want to see the Arc breakdown of the individual 180s and other techniques. Some of the links go to Lines parts, stances and so forth. Use the Back button to navigate back.

Notes on 360 slide function

Linked 180s can be done with some space in between, which might be useful if you're going downhill. Say you want to slow down a little but not too much. You do a 180, scrape off some speed, ride fakey for a while, then do another 180, take off more speed, and you're back to regular stance. The Slide Chain linked slides are meant to be a means of flowing rotation techniques and shoulder turn right together. They feel great, but have the downside that a lot of speed is taken off. You may slow to a crawl after a linked scraping 360. That's the breaks. You may have to push to get going again. If you don't want to slow down so much, try to scrape lightly on the slide out, almost a kickturn. On these examples, I go for a lot of scrape because I'm mostly concerned with the slide being a trick, with a certain look, feel, and scraping sound, and I'm not so concerned with speed control function. Once you get these down, however, in a park situation I assure you they will come in very handy. You can slide to slow down and pump to speed up and you won't have to push and drag your foot so much.

360 no. 1: twist in, counter out

This is what slide arc- itecture is all about. If you just threw this 360 using twist technique, or just using torque, you would miss out on a lot of the great features of this slide. This slide starts with a twist slide and ends with a backside counter 180. The frontside twist beginning is very smooth in the initiation and first 180. You are unlikely to blow the beginning, hang up, or over rotate into your fakey stance in the middle, when the going is critical. The frontside twist leads right into the preparation for a counter rotation. With the counter backside out, you literally pull yourself out of the slide for maximum control. This is the best way to do a linked 360 if what you're going for is control with little chance of goofing it up.

Remember that counter rotation refers to the action of shoulder rotating against the slide direction, and is not to be confused with counter clockwise direction.

Frontside twist 180

I start in a heelside arc, using the chair stance. I like to lean my shoulders away from the turn, while my seat leans into the turn. This makes for great balance. My right arm begins to come forward, slowly, into the twist to the ccw or frontside direction.

Now I've twisted strongly into the turn. The force of the arc I was skating on, straight downhill and across, makes it easy to twist and break the rear wheels into a slide. No unweighting is needed. My weight is forward, just behind the front truck. The board begins to scrape around ccw, but smoothly and slowly turning, very in control.

Here is the midway point between the linked slides. The next slide will be a counter backside slide. Note that this slide is actually a switch stance 180. Now if you go back to the Arcs section where I did the counter backside slide, you can see why I went through all the trouble to do it switch stance. It's because now in the context of a 360, that's where I am, half way through a 360, in switch, or technically, fakey. Because I've practiced it separately, I'm ready for it. Note my normal back foot is up front. There is some advantage in this, because my right foot, my stronger pivot foot, is now forwards, where I need it to rotate the slide. This along with the counter twist I'm about to go into, gives this part of the slide decent power as well as great control.

Counter rotation backside fakey 180

I've relaxed my twist and "reset" my shoulders parallel with the board. What I intend to do is twist way into a preparation for the next slide. The twist is really just a continuation of the twist I was doing before, an extreme ccw twist. The upper body feels a lot like the beginning of this routine. But because my weight has shifted and the board is around 180, it has become a backside slide.

I reach my left hand way back, leading with thumb down. I am neither torquing nor twisting into the rotation. All I'm doing is setting up a nice twist, a solid support so I can pull the board underneath me while my upper body stays still. As usual in backside slides where extreme twist is used, I don't look where I'm going but look backwards.

I turn my shoulders back cw, and at the same time pull the board around ccw, using the counter rotation method. My right foot is the pivot foot and my left foot functions as the sweeping foot which pulls the board around. It feels a little like I'm kicking the board around backwards with my left foot.

In this frame and the next is the check. In this case, the check helps get the board around the last quarter turn of the slide. I press my left arm across my body and my right arm and hand back

The twist gets more extreme to finish the check. Compare this with the end of the backside twist in the last connected slide, or the twist slide bs in the Arcs section. You will see that much more effort is put into the check at the end of a counter rotated slide. In a way, the check is the whole thing, because there is not much rotation generated by the start of the counter slide.

Now I relax out of the check and the slide is done. At this point I could start another 180 frontside twist slide if I wanted.

The thing you want to get in the feel of this Slide Chain is to keep the twist going in the same direction, to get a smooth linking. The beginning feels like you're putting some twist rotation on the board, but in the middle, the twist is just a setup to pull the board around. Last, your twist goes the other direction to check the board the rest of the way around. So there are really two motions, one twisting ccw through the first 2/3 or so, and one cw twist to check the board around at the end.