How to survive skating down a hill like a pro - Beginner roller skate tutorial

Today I want to help you make your roller skating world just a tiny bit bigger by teaching you how to tackle one of the most dreaded things in the roller skating world. A hill. If you're envious of all these TikTok and Instagram skaters that are just hillbombing like there's absolutely nothing to it and you would like to do that too, then this is the video for you. Hi guys and welcome back to a new tutorial. If you're skating world is small and you feel like you are stuck to your garage, your driveway, down the street because those dreaded hills are just scaring the bejesus out of you and you don't know how to do a controlled descent without actually dying and getting hit by a car, then for those who don't know me, hi my name is Dee and I am on a mission to create a life that I love. Not just like but love and to inspire others to do the same. Now one of the things that I absolutely love is roller skating and of course as always I'm going to explain it step by step to try to give you all of the tools that you need to become very confident in skating hills because the more technique you have the more your world opens up to you. Okay so that's the hill behind me and that is the one we're going to tackle. So before we start there are a few points that no matter which of these methods you use are going to be very very important for you to take into account. Start early. The later you start on a slope the more momentum you have, the more speed you have and the more of a radical disruption you will have to do in order to stop. The second thing that you have to take into account is you also need to be very low. The closer you are to the ground the more center of balance you have, the more stable you are. If you're all the way up here you have absolutely no way of saving yourself if you hit something. And finally do not panic. Accidents happen when people panic. Try to keep your cool. There will always be a way to save yourself. Be it that you hit yourself into the grass, maybe you hug a lamppost. There is always a way if you do not panic. The v-plow requires you to tense your leg muscles to keep them going together in kind of a bubble to a point in order to slow yourself down. Now this is not my favorite way of doing it because it requires a lot of power to do on a slope. And two, because your feet are very much in a horizontal line, if you hit one pebble or one crack that's slightly too big, you will face plant forward. And I've seen it happen. It is not fun. It is very very painful. You do a little bubble and you bring your feet together and I need to pee stance. You know my knees are together and I'm like oh no I need to pee. I'm pressing into the inner side of my heel so where my my big toe is. That side. And I'm kind of pushing my heels outwards and then bringing my feet together. And this is helping me stop. Now this works well on small hills. You do a little bubble, push. But as soon as you start going fast and you have momentum, it's going to require a lot of strength to keep this up. Which is why this is not a stop that I would recommend. If you are in a dire situation and you need to stop quickly, I do not recommend doing a v-plow. What do I recommend? Well, this is a way that you can easily stop. And it requires you to skate backwards. And I know that sounds crazy. That sounds intense. But skating backwards actually gives you the most control over your speed. Hi! Editing Dee here with a short animation to explain to you why going down a slope backwards is actually much much safer. So imagine this is you and you're going down this very steep slope. If you're going face forward, the distance between your face and the floor is very long. So if you do face plant, it's going to be a long trip down. But now imagine you're going down the same slope backwards. The distance between your face and the floor is much shorter. So if you were to fall, you can easily lean over and use your hands to stop your fall. And if you do manage to fall on your face, it will be less far and thus hopefully less painful. Teaching you this is actually a danger to myself because I have not skated with this in probably three years. But first, let me insert one of these into my skates. With this stop, you're able to and stop pretty fast. Because what you're doing is you're lunging into your front leg, putting all the weight forward and you're pushing with this toe stop backwards. You need to be very much low in your center balance, the core tight. And you are not leaning back but you're leaning slightly forward. So my weight is in my front leg when I'm pushing with my back leg. You don't have to extend your leg all the way because actually you don't have this much pushing power. Your leg needs to be just slightly behind you and then you push. So be careful, don't push it aside like this because then you don't have grip. Go straight back and push into it. Now I know it's scary to do transitions especially when you're going at speed. So the way you can do it is literally your open book. So you're going at speed, open and in your opening you have to be very low. So you're opening, you are low, extend right away. Because that is going to be the thing that's going to save you. By using less pressure, you can actually gradually go down without fully coming to a stop. And remember to always look back to where you're going. So into backwards, to see where you're going. You see that this obstacle is here, right? You need to be aware of what's happening behind you. Now if you are a bit more of a daredevil, you can jump and stop. And this brings me to what I think is one of the easiest ways to tackle a hill. If you have your edging down, if you can do a little turn, then this is the easiest one. I call it the side to side smiley because you're kind of making side to side smiley faces. And the way that this works in terms of physics is you're taking your downwards motion, your downward force and you're converting it back into an upwards one which will slow you down. How do you do this? Feet staggered, I will lean towards my little toe and open it up. Now if you are feeling like you're not able to make this move when you lean, you might need to loosen your trucks. Your trucks are the base where your wheel is attached. There are big pins underneath it and if you loosen those, your skates actually become looser on the base. Now in the beginning that might feel a bit weird but it gives you more control. So then with just a little lean, I'm already in my smiley. Other side, a little lean, in my smiley. You reach the top of your smiley, switch and your weight is always in your back leg so your front leg can maneuver and take you to where you want to go. You come to the top again, you switch again, weight is in the model pose and that is how I can switch the legs. So the weight transfer is at the top of the smiley when you're basically standing still for a split second. Okay now for my favorite one, my favorite move. It looks so beautiful and it's so efficient in slowing you down and stopping you and it makes you seem like you're a professional roller skater even if you are not and that is what I call my slope spins. It's not really a spin but it does look a little bit like it. It literally brings you to a stop every time. In order to do this move, you have to again be going backwards. Okay that's the best way to enter this move. I'm going backwards and in my backwards I extend on my toes like I'm going to do the toe stop stop that we had before but I'm on my front wheels and then I open and in my opening putting pressure to the inside edges so where my big toes are and then turning and bring it into a T and this is what I'm constantly doing. Bring it back into a T because that is going to stop you. See I'm always ending up in my T and this is why I can just stop on a slope no matter how steep the slope is. Open putting pressure to the inside of my big toe on the back leg and to the inside back so on my heel from the front leg. So you're going to feel that you're going to build some stamina in that heel. You look where you're going open bring it back to T open bring it back to T open bring it back to T and you can make it as big or small as you want. If you're not going too fast and you just want to stop you can also use this T motion to stop. So if I'm going back T and I stop. So I just open my hip bring them together and everything here is rock hard because this is what's keeping me from going downwards. My abs are tight too because I don't want to be going like this air doll thingy right. Now once you're comfortable with this move you can start to stylize it and stylizing is with your arms. Nobody knows that you're trying to control your speed. Everybody just thinks that oh you're having fun on a hill or you can do a bring them together. Now that move bring your arms out to in means you're going to spin faster. So if you're afraid I would not recommend doing that yet. I would just keep my arms 90 degrees alongside your body for stability but not all over the place. You're not a windmill. Arms up in the air arms together and you can even connect them and keep going until you're down. Now this will make you dizzy so beware. You can also just use it for speed control by doing slow down okay going too fast slow down etc. Now if you're thinking D I'm nowhere near skilled enough to actually do these moves that you're trying to teach us. Then I have a nice little playlist here full of beginner tips that are going to help you get up to a certain level that you can actually start trying these hills because your world gets so much bigger once you're not afraid of actually tackling hills. Now let me know down in the comments what other types of videos you would like to see. I'm trying to share more of myself with you and skating is one of the things that I really love about my life but it's not everything. So I want to show you a bit more of that and my process that's going into creating the life that I really really love. So yeah thank you for watching and I will see you in my next one. Bye!