As we’ve written earlier, the history of modern skateboarding dates back to the middle of the 70s of the past century, when surfers began to practice skateboarding while the ocean was flat.
Eventually, skateboarding evolved into an independent sport that did inherit a lot from its ancestor, surfing.
But the history didn’t end at that point. During the recent twenty or thirty years, surfers began borrowing back the elements from skateboarding. Like airs, with their grabs and rotations, and so on.
Apparently, surfing and skateboarding go hand in hand nowadays. And that’s great news! Because, no matter how challenging surfing is, you can master it with a skateboard without even having to get into the water!
This post will tell you which skateboarding tricks will help advance in surfing.
Carving
Carving turns in skateboarding, just as in surfing, are the fundamental maneuvers. In the narrow sense, what we do while surfing is we keep making turns, drawing lines on the wall. It’s a smooth up-and-down movement.
In skateboarding, we do the same thing when skating in bowls. Carving can also be practiced on a slight slope — this will be very similar to sliding a large wave but in a more relaxed manner.
The advantage of skateboard carving is that your body movements are very similar to those in surfing. So, if you keep skating regularly and minding the movement of your head, shoulders, arms, etc., your surfing will improve!
Stall
When we skateboard, we often skid to reduce the speed. On a surf, we will stall to drive into a pipe or get back to the source of energy.
To practice this skill, build up moderate speed on your skate and slightly press the tail to make your front truck get off the ground. The trick is to maintain balance and avoid falling. Putting too much pressure on the tail will make it bite the ground, causing the board to stall. Just about the same thing happens in surfing.
Kickturns
Surfboards are not equipped with wheels, but they do have fins. A surfboard turns around the fins the same way as a skateboard turns around its rear truck.
So, whenever you perform kickturns in the upper ramp, you practice the maneuvers like reentry, snap, and tailslide.
Two rear wheels are a pivot point in a skateboard for rotating 90, 180, 360, and more degrees in different directions. You can practice the rotations both on a flat surface and vert ramps starting will small ones and gradually increasing the vert height. By doing this, you’ll learn to control your body so that you don’t interfere with its rotation. To do this, you need to turn your head first, then shoulders and arms, and then the hips. That’s actually the way we perform surf rotations!
Ollie
Ollie is a basic skateboard trick that distinguishes complete beginners from those who began showing some progress. Ollie is a special skateboard jumping technique.
As soon as you’ve learned to land an ollie, you can undertake surf jumping on the flat. And practicing ollie in a vert ramp on a skateboard will help you nail surf jumping from the wave lip in the ocean. This is not an easy trick, so first, you need to become pretty confident performing ollie on the flat. And only after that may you try performing it on a ramp radius and make sure you are wearing some protective equipment.
Boardslide/50-50
Boardslide/lipslide are two other skateboard tricks. When performing boardslide or lipslide, a skater performs a sliding trick standing on the center of the board while maintaining balance. The difference is that a lipslide is when a skateboard slides along an obstacle on its front or back tail (lip), while the boardslide is a maneuver when the board is sliding on the rail between its two axles.
Both tricks will be helpful for surfing, particularly lipslide, because you make similar body movements on a surf when performing tailslides or reentry.
50-50 is sliding an edge/rail/coping with both your trucks. This technique reminds a surfing trick called floater, especially if performed in a bowl at high speed. So, if you keep practicing 50-50 in a vert ramp, you’ll soon be able to take this skill to the ocean waves.
So, in addition to the fact that skateboarding is fun as such, it will also help to reach new frontiers in surfing. Skateboarding will let you learn to slow down and take control of your body when carving. It will also help you learn to perform airs and slide the wave lip.
And if you keep performing all this on a surfskate, you’ll be able to fine-tune your surfing technique and make it one-hundred out of ten!
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