Skate Reef

Reference of tricks and skating elements

Project Date: January 2007

Skate
Gear

Layer 1 Parts

Lines

Stances
Regular stc
Middle stc
Tail stc
Narrow stc
Nose stc
Fakey stc
Switch stc
Cross stc
Switch cross stc
Drop knee stc
Reverse stc
Back cross stc

Nose riding
Hang five
Tip ride
Nose perch
Cross nose stc
Nose wheelie

Pushes
Standard push
Tail push
Mong push
Cross push
Cross backpedal push
Backwards push

Braking and drags
Foot drag
Toe drag
Cross step drag
Nose drag
Heel first drag
Cross nose drag
Tail or kick stall

Steps: basic
Two step walk
Half shuffle
Cross step
Four step walk
Uncross step
Backpedal
Beginning step tips

Steps: advanced
Half spinner
Back cross step
Front backpedal step
Reverse turn step

Steps: details
Brushing
Dig and kick
Cross stc riding
Lowering
Knee lead
Toe lead
Weight transfer
Trnsfr off tail
Trnsfr to nose

Arcs

Big board turns

Tail carve turns
Tail carve ts
Arch carve ts
Counter lean ts
Tail carve hs
Counter lean hs

Kick carve turns
Kick carve ts
Pre-turn hs
Kick carve dnhill
Kick carve hs
Kick turn 180 fakey

Drop knee turn
Cross stc to drop knee
Reverse turn
Rev kick carve hs
Rev kick carve ts

Speed control turns
Stalling with turns
Pump

Slides: rotation
Arc rotation
Arch slide
Twist rotation
Twist slide fs
Thumb lead
Twist slide bs
Torque rotation
Torque slide bs
Counter rotation
Counter slide fs
Counter slide bs
Preparation
Check
Blind moves

Slides: weighting
Up unweighting
Up unwgt slide fs
Down unweighting
Dn unwgt slide fs
Compression unwgtng
Compr unwgt slide fs
Front to back wgtng
Four wheel slide fs

Leaning technique
Counter lean
Counter lean ts
Banana shape
Compass
Quiet upper body
Arch stance
Counter lean hs
Heelside chair
Counter weight

Levers

Wheelie or manual
Longboard ollie
Cross ollie
Back cross ollie
Reverse ollie
Lifts
Cross boneless
Backpedal boneless



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Skate Reef

Layered Reef of skate elements

The Skate Reef page is a pyramid of longboard skate moves. Use it as a starting page and reference guide to put together a repertoire of longboard moves and tricks. These elements can be combined into routines and entire longboard styles can be built. For skateboarders who absorb most of the reef material, building Tribute styles and Hybrid styles should be the goal.

Reef Layer 1: Shapes

Ordering longboard tricks by shape

In the left sidebar on the Reef page the tricks are grouped by the shape and simple physics of the action performed on the board. This seems to be the most neutral way to address longboard tricks. The important factors of style, influence, and length of the board can then be dealt with separately.

The actions in my longboard styles are pretty well covered by three shapes; lines, arcs and levers.

Lines

Lines are the types of moves that might be made on the board going straight, or perhaps in very shallow turns. Walking the board, pushing, braking, and stances are examples of lines.

Arcs

Arcs are turning and rotational moves. Turns, pumping, kick turns (and the more drawn out longboard kick carve turn), rotating slides, board flips, and rotation of board and body through the air are examples of arcs.

Levers

Levers are skating movements where height changes are involved. Skateboarding involves climbing up on objects and dropping off them and a number of techniques are used to do that. There are other ways you could name this group, but Lever applies really well. In a sense a skateboard is a lever, a board on wheels. I mean to encompass in the lever category all hoists, lifts, levitations, and pogos used by the skateboarder to climb and descend objects, as well as levering.

Reef Layer 2: Chains

Connecting two or more tricks in a sequence

Reef Chains are examples of grouping of Layer 1 material, stringing tricks together. Chains are the sort of thing I would do in a session, in an informal or improvised way. They are an intermediate step on the way to mastering the more involved projects. These routines are not heavily planned out and don't necessarily have a start to finish structure.

Walk Chains

Walking out of a drop knee
Walk to tip ride with stalls
Prison walk
Grapevine
Walking with kicks
Backwards cross push walk

Slide Chains

Flowing Slide Arcs together
360 no. 1: twist in, counter out
360 slide no. 2: twist in switch, torque out
Pendulum slide
Fishtail slide
Walk and foot drag slide

Reef Layer 3: Projects

Planned projects using Layer 1 and 2 material

Projects are more involved efforts than Chains, involving much longer routines than just a connection of two tricks. Planning and diagramming of certain maneuvers is necessary, and although there may be improvising in the course of skating, there's a ordered framework of several moves that I'm trying to get through. Projects fall into basically three categories:

Standard styles

Following a standard and widespread style of skateboarding, such as new school, old school, downhill, pool riding, park, or street longboarding like you'd see in board company skate videos. A standard style is a worthwhile goal, as there may be many challenging tricks to learn to master that style. There are many resources to learn a standard skate style that list and explain tricks; videos, magazines, web sites, and several books.

  • Slide Arc- itecture. The link goes to the intro to Slide Arc-itecture, or you can work through the slides from the arcs sidebar and then the slide chains. This project got very deep into standup slides. It didn't incorporate other moves besides sliding, so this project now I view as Reef Layer 1 and Layer 2 material. Longer lines and routines such as those in Cruise Power would include these slide elements. My slides project is pretty much a standard style. They fit right in with a longboard park style of skating. There is some tribute to surfing on a midsize or short board.

    A suggestion for a tribute project would be to view tapes of a specific surfer such as Larry Bertelman and try to make slides similar to his cutbacks in different parts of the wave. You could also try a tribute Dogtown slide style which is not quite standup, you drag the seat of your pants and other layback moves.

Tribute styles

Researching a very specific style of skateboarding or surfing and trying to imitate it. If it's a surfing style it has to be adapted to skateboard. Tribute styles involve research such as watching films or videos, going through magazines, interviewing the masters, or travelling to see them surf or skate in person.

  • Waves. Connected longboard maneuvers in the order you would do them if you were surfing. Turns that set up a walk. Nose rides, stalls, and endings. Great for surf cross training.

  • Drop Knee Turns. The classic surf turn adapted to the long skateboard. Wingnut and Kevin Miske interviews. Research on the masters of the surf drop knee and an effort to perform their styles on skateboard.

Hybrid styles

A mixture or crossover of styles, in an effort to create something that is not widespread, and is possibly original. Figuring out a hybrid style would be impossible without a mastery of lot of Reef Layer 1 material, and you should work on as much of the Layer 2 Chains as you can. You may want to master a couple of standard or tribute styles first. Hybrid styles can be extremely laborious to learn, because the combining of two styles usually means learning tricks all over again, adapting them to different equipment, or working them out from scratch. If you can perform the material from my hybrid style projects, you're well on the way to creating one of your own.

  • Cruise Power. Routines putting together slides and walking tricks. Designed for a big board with a street wheel setup. The slides are made more challenging by being done on a big heavy board. The walk material has variations from the Reef Layer 1 Steps and Walk Chains, and some of it is quite difficult.

  • Cross Academy. Putting together street tricks and cross steps. Ollies to cross steps on a longboard. A mix of different schools of skateboarding. I just have the basics on this so far and eventually will add longer routines.

About Skate Reef

Surface Motion Skate was built slowly as I went from skate project to project while absorbing different styles. Originally I was cross training for surfing and worked only on tribute styles. Then I got into learning more standard skateboard styles and downplayed the surfing, while still being influenced by it. The styles that interested me were, in order that I worked on them, traditional surf longboarding, performance surf longboarding, park skating, old school skating, shortboard surfing, and new school skate tricks. From these styles the projects in Skate accumulated one at a time. Eventually I had a lot of tricks and routines, grouped by longboard skate style. The type of board I skated on also was a factor in grouping tricks, as some were done on street boards while the majority were developed on large flat wooden longboards.

That grouping worked until I started mixing my styles in hybrid style projects. At that point, imitating and isolating the root surf or skate style was no longer a goal. Board type and length no longer had to refer to a root style. Tricks from two styles were mixed together and finally, any trick was fair game. Eventually I knew I'd have to revise the site, since I knew most of the tricks I needed to build hybrid styles were already in Surface Motion Skate somewhere, but they were buried so deep even I couldn't find them. Some tricks were duplicated and some had never been explained in the basics sections.

For other skaters to follow what I've done, to understand how my hybrid projects work, and to build their own styles there had to be a better way of listing the tricks other than by style or board type. The list would still show those elements useful for standard and tribute styles, but it would be more comprehensive to allow easy searching for hybrid projects.

Using Reef Material Reference Page

Longboard skaters may want to go through the same process I did, starting with standard and tribute styles and working toward hybrid styles. You could look at some of the same surf videos I did to get more into the tribute style. You may want to go right to working on one of my hybrid styles and this should give you the map. Most ambitiously, you may want to create your own hybrid style. There should be plenty of elements here for you to mix and match a style, and throw in your own elements from other types of skating or other sports.

It may make sense to start by going down the list by shape, as that is somewhat in order of difficulty. Absorb some of that shape material, then work on the chains, then take on a project to follow.

Not every trick or element is listed in the shapes list. Within projects and even chains there will be extras given, and variations are given in the shapes pages. Projects will fill in details on style and technique that should round out and smooth the process of linking the basic shape material.

Reef Impressions

Google Skate -mosphere.







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Copyright ©2007 Keith Johnson
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