Outdoor Roller Skating Tips for New Street Skaters w/ Estro Jen

We are going to start our outdoor skating tutorial and we're going to start with this. So if we had a choice between an accessibility ramp here or a curb we're going to choose the curb because when you get to the bottom of the curb you aren't going to have a lot of speed going into the street. So you're going to get to the edge of the curb and like you were testing the temperature of water in a pool you're going to put a weightless foot down but you want it to go in the direction that you want to skate away from the sidewalk. So I'm going to start with all my weight up here, put my weightless foot down and then push off of the sidewalk curb onto the street. All right rather than risk going downhill. To get up a curb you want to do the same thing but in reverse. You're going to put a weightless foot up and keep your weight on the bottom. You're going to point the foot in the direction that you want to go and then you're going to push off the ground and up onto the curb. Whenever you're skating outdoors you want to stagger your stance and you also want to be comfortable shifting and wiggling your feet so that you can find stability when you need to be standing. So if you notice when I was trying to get up that curb I was trying to find stability close to the curb and I needed to go I needed to shuffle my feet in little ways so that I could find stability and not feel like I had to roll away. So some stable places are when your feet are pointed in opposite directions like a T or a V or an A. You see that? What's that? Yeah? All right let's roll. Come close to me Miguel. I just want you to be close to me though. So when we're skating on a street you want to make sure that you get close to the cars so that you've got room in the street. Yeah get behind me. So that the cars can come by. I personally love to skate against traffic when there's not a bicycle lane so that the cars can see me and I also like to move my arms and like wave so that I can show to people that I'm coming. So you want to make room for the cars especially if you live in an area where there's not a lot of pedestrians rolling around because I've encountered cars that are just like mad. Now if I were new and I was coming to the edge of this I would do anything I could to stop myself before going down this smooth handicap like holding on to a stop sign to take a break or bending my knees and holding on to something that's really stable rather than going into the street. So this is going to prevent us from like losing control. We want to be in a lot of control. So can you look at this for me Miguel? Get in here for me please. No I'm sorry. Can you come over here? I want you to show this perspective that I'm looking at. Okay so it's really smooth and it's going to go into the street and then there's a big crack there that's really thick that if you want so speed is normally our friend. Speed is normally our friend and speed will work for us when we're going over little tiny cracks like this here. You don't want to get tripped up over a crack. You want to be in a staggered stance and you want to roll over cracks smoothly. Normally speed is our friend in this situation. You don't want to go slowly over cracks but in this situation you're going to want to step step over it with quick feet. So we're going to go smooth down bending our knees and then step over the curb. I'm sorry step over the crack. Let's do that again. So this situation is a smooth accessibility ramp into a big thick crack and avoiding that crack we're going to step our feet over the crack. All right let's go. I was thinking of taking them to the lighthouse. Can I see? Yes. Skating backwards outside because of hitting rocks. Yeah skating backwards wouldn't be my choice of skating outside. You'd really have to make sure that you pick a very smooth street and for that reason because of rocks and cracks in there in the way. All right you want to mind all the traffic rules so you don't want to jaywalk. Even though where I'm from we do a lot of jaywalking. It's like totally natural but where we live here you're not allowed to jaywalk. So we're gonna mind all the laws. So there's these yellow cheese grater grates here. You want to go over these fast and you want to go over them not so thick either. So you want to like just take the shortest route possible when going over those. Oh yeah yeah Miguel taught me this trick where if you're going over like a big thick grate you stagger your stance slightly and you lean into your heel wheels lifting at the toes. That's going to put a lot of that's going to like make all of your weight go into two point two balance points and it's going to make make you go over the grate really fast and more smoothly. So if you're encountering someone like this person's painting a fence just be polite and you can step onto the grass. Most people don't know this but you can step and even roll onto and off of grass. Hello! You're gonna bend your knees over any rough area. So like this is a cheese grater grate we're gonna bend our knees over it. We can't avoid the corners we have to go through over the whole surface of it. So you just want to stagger your stance, bend your knees and go at it with speed. This oftentimes happens at the skate park where like hello you're at the skate park or you're on the sidewalk and you see someone that's coming near you and they may even be more afraid than you are of clashing and colliding. So what I found and Lenny Johnson in Portland Oregon taught me this at the skate park. When someone doesn't know what you're going to do you want to point in the direction that you want to go in. So when you're not sure where to go sometimes you will lock eyes and go straight for what you're afraid of because you're not really sure what to do. So when you realize that you've got that feeling of confusion you want to point in the opposite direction of the person that's coming towards you and when you do that you'll go in that direction and the other person will go another way. So you really want to like exaggerate it. So there's a group of people coming up to us and I'm probably going to take the grass because they have the right of way. They're walkers and there's a bunch of them. I'm not going to make a whole group of people go unless they do give me the right of way. Thank you. Well if they weren't so nice I would have taken the grass. So this sidewalk's really smooth. My knees are just gently bent. I'm relaxed. I'm really enjoying my neighborhood. But I'm going to hit this accessibility ramp and I didn't really feel like I had enough time to t-stop and there's going to be cars coming right here. So I want to make sure that I do everything that I can to stop, look, make sure nobody's coming, and then go. The most efficient way to stop when you're street skating is the turnaround toe stop. So I'll start to use those stops but I just did want to demonstrate for anyone that's not comfortable jamming on their stops. If you're a new skater you may just want to skate into something to hold on for stability. All right a pothole like this you just want to avoid at all at all costs. Avoid. Avoid grates like this. Bend your knees when you're going up an accessibility ramp. These I gotta tell them. I gotta tell them. These are my favorite flowers that exist. These are trumpet flowers. They smell beautiful but you don't want to pick them because if you pick them they'll wilt like within 10 minutes. So they're really just flowers to enjoy but I love these flowers. They grow all over Long Beach. Sometimes people call them bellflowers. They smell like Jessica McClintock perfume. They're so good. Did you have anything to say Miguel? Okay. You want to tell them about Camino? Okay. All right bend your knees, stagger your stance every time you're going down one of these. For extra balance you want to bring your hands out. Yeah I was just going to show them in a slow down. So one way to slow down without t-stepping if you're new is to just widen your skate stance and lean onto the inside edges like this. So the wider your wheels go the slower you're gonna go. Let me demo it again. So you're skating you've got speed and you realize that you've got to stop so you can slow down and squat. Widen your stance then your toes are going to naturally come together. Another way to the best way to stop though is turn around and jumping to your toe stops but that requires like two other skills that are outside of the I'd call beginners range of motion for skaters. Another way to slow down is in derby we teach a t-stop with two outside wheels and lifting the inside. That's one way to do it. So you start with your stance. You start with your weight on one side. You open up at the hips and let one foot fall, one leg fall behind the other and I like to when I'm outdoor skating is just use the front wheels. So you lightly bend in your your knee and the foot that you open up the hip with you're gonna lift the heel wheels and just drag both front wheels. You'll see my hips are open my shoulder is above the knee that's rolling in rolling direction and then my back foot is perpendicular to it and I'm lifting the heel wheels and dragging the front wheel. I know it's a different way to teach it than roller derby people do but when you're outdoor skating and you have a lot of rough surfaces it's it's easier to apply pressure to the front wheels than it is to both outside wheels. Tips for being more balanced in a t-step are to draw this make the spaces between the toe knee and chin closer so you get really low you'll feel more stability. You can also put your hands out because you're going to find a new resistance while learning and that's going to also make you more balanced. Okay it's green let's look and there's a bike lane and where we live roller skaters are very common so we're used to using this bike lane but where you live there might be way more bicyclists and you're going to want to take the sidewalk or there may be no bike line and you want to take the sidewalk or stick to real non-trafficked streets. I'm from a small town so I just smile and wave at anyone that I see looking at me. Hey Miguel I'm going to go down ocean and then down the really big stairs to show them how to go down stairs. There's also these things I'm not sure what they're called they're like nuts from hell I know they're terrible they're really hard to go over when you're going over these nuts like I noticed they're all over Long Beach these trees that shed these little nut things acorns they're not acorns though you want to just bend your knees brace for them and relax so you bend your knees but your knees should also be really relaxed. I'm going to go over them on purpose any big cracks you'll see I just avoid them by stepping over them with one foot you can use grass to slow yourself down too thank you any questions also try and think in the in the mind of a driver so like when this turns green this guy here he might turn right and I just want to make sure that he does this thing before I go all right my turn I would like to pretend that these like branches hanging over are like waves like I'm in the barrel all right where is the entrance all right I'm gonna cross here I'm gonna skate right into the grass to stop myself I'm gonna touch this guy I'm gonna take my hand sanitizer out hey look roller skaters so cool any questions yeah yeah or like um I would learn to step over them like you can practice just by stepping over little lines in the streets but I remember like in Argentina the sidewalks match the buildings that are in front of them so the zigzags like the tiles that were on the streets would always change formation I love the tiles that went this way because those were in the lines of my skates so I think I would suggest just shuffling and stepping over and practice stepping all right we're coming up to a curb there's a big hill here so I'm gonna carve and make little slalom s's to slow myself down if you can avoid this situation I would for me in normal situations I would avoid this can you see we're gonna go over some sand you don't want to get sand in your bearings so I'm going to try and stick to the grassy parts and try to get as little sand in my bearings as possible um to avoid this situation I would go down the hill but to go down the stairs mind getting behind me you're gonna put a weightless down and stay in the direction parallel to the stairs you're gonna put one foot down and then put the other foot behind one foot down the other foot behind can you see you can hold on to the rails please hold on to the rails for stability but if there was no rail you're just going to take it slow and keep replacing the foot that's coming down with the one that's going down again don't do this too quickly don't get too used to this too fast because if you um if you get too used to it you'll stop placing them carefully and then you may feel the need to jump down the stairs and that's not good sometimes I like to switch the direction just to mix it up for that reason alone so you do two skates per stair see I got too used to it tried skipping stairs or you can roll down the stair rail like uh Miguel did you want me to show you all right here we go I just don't want to do it Miguel what yeah I mean I could just crawl I'm just I'm just gonna crawl yeah they're beautiful all right in Long Beach we've got in Long Beach we've got um a running path and a wheeled path the wheeled path is mostly for bicycles you're not allowed to oh wow interesting normally you're not allowed to take your your dog down here but I guess all the dog dog walkers are down here right now any questions Miguel I did 49 of those before I was so mad just before 50 I fell off yeah oh yeah if you just came on we're uh we went over some curbs descending and ascending curbs descending and ascending accessibility ramps how to go down big flights of stairs how to go over cracks and cheese grater grates more easily how to slow them to slow down t-stop to slow down and widen your stance snowplow to slow down yeah inlines are definitely faster but you can't dance in those huh yeah like rollerblades have a longer wheelbase so you feel more stable this way which makes it really hard to like move your ankles and knees where quads have a shorter wheelbase so but they're wider square formation so you they're very comfortable just wearing you easily forget that you're wearing them at all so I'm going to take you to some really difficult streets to skate can I see thanks Miguel if you're looking for any drills to skate in small spaces check out our beginner and intermediate classes on our youtube channel because we've already gone over so many different ones like every way to spin hurricane kicks um like quick feet drills oh I'm sorry grass officer the skate factory is opening up this week classic wheels for outdoor skating if you're just gonna be doing this type of trail skating sunday wheels if you're going to be doing some street skating and like the surfaces are going to be changing a lot jump they want to learn jump all right molly flowers what a great name molly flowers before you jump you can practice just stepping or skating on one foot will make you really strong so to keep so just jumping like I like to play this game where I just hop over the cracks then I'll draw two places in my imagination like the word bike up there and I'll start in a big knee bend in a staggered stance and I'll try and jump over the whole word bike and the faster you go the longer you can jump so there's stepping and jumping you leave and land in a nice easy knee bend and then just skating on one foot will make you really strong the way that you go get the way that you get momentum by skating on one foot is by turning your knee in and out for momentum so you get a little momentum then when you start to lose it yes so long path or or places that are closed off to the public before you have to dodge people and obstacles definitely want to avoid cars as a beginner and avoid traffic whether it's pedestrian traffic or car traffic check out our videos that we've released in the last couple of weeks in regards to skating in small spaces because there's lots of agility drills and beginner basic skills and spins and fun moves that you can practice before going out in public oh good nice so you can step up the bridge if you're not comfortable getting full speed and then going over the bridge you just want to step up the bridge we can go to one right now right there across the street oh it's gated off there's two ways to go over with confidence and with care with caution so with caution you just want to step side to side up the bridge so it's a flat bridge then speed your friend and if there's big cracks in between the the wood then you don't want to go over with speed you just want to walk over it hopefully it's not a very long covered bridge but if you hit an obstacle like this try not to jump one of these obstacles you just want to get slowly close to it and step over it just proceed with caution when in doubt proceed with caution when in doubt figure it out before just winging it anytime in skating that i wing it i regret it you never want to wing anything you just want to baby step back to what your level is and i in my mind i still feel like a bright inspiring examples to look up to should we say hi to lolly my little sister lolly she worked at um she had so many so many different jobs she's been like a tile presser a farmer banana jungle keeper um but she used to work at this sailing repair place and she did a work trade for a sailboat so she's working on her sailboat today in the marina so that was a good crack to stop at or even here too so this crack is like if you were going slow over it you you want to stagger your stance and lift the weight out of the wheels as you go over it so it's very smooth we'll do that again so lift the weight out of your wheels in a nice staggered stance to make it smooth and then if you want to practice like going over these kinds of surfaces onto them and off of them if you stay on them for too long they'll take your speed away but a lot of places only have this to skate on and if that's your case you definitely want a 78a wheel that's really big because the bigger the material is yeah 78 oh stop um 78 is the lowest durometer that we really make outdoor wheels on so the softer they are and the bigger they are the less you'll feel the cracks i think he's exercising but motorized looks like it feels good carving i guess he is exercising a little bit he's balancing all right what else do we have i'm trying to think of another are there any questions i'm trying to think of another skill to teach that we haven't gone over yet whoa transitions okay crossovers aren't really an important thing to learn outdoors in a roller rink they're definitely important um but transitions and going to your toe stops for a transition you want to use your butt to turn backwards and it's best to like practice in the grass like here so you go to the grass you're going to look behind you and then point your butt to the obstacle that you're going to then all of a sudden you're backwards and if you want to stop you can go to your stops so okay so if you're doing a transition or a 180 turn you're going to oh we're going this way you're skating you practice in the grass first you're gonna look behind you very quickly very briefly look behind you and then point your butt in the direction while lifting both feet for outdoors it's much more seamless if you're picking up your feet and not dragging your wheels and not putting your balance in between both skates it's much better if you're picking up all the weight and then landing you want to leave and land in a nice knee bend just like we went over in the jump but on this you want to point your butt in the direction that you're going after you briefly look at it so you briefly look in your new you look behind you and then you point your butt in that direction then when you've got wheels on you're going to start in a nice knee bend you briefly look behind you and then point your butt in that direction when you land make sure that you're in a nice knee bend and then if you're going to stop stagger your stance and go to your oh yeah oh look these dogs love it they want to skate all right hello no worries i know he doesn't want to skate such beautiful dogs many dogs get many dogs get jealous of roller skating they really want to skate and they'll bark and whenever i see dogs i just wave to the dog owner to let them know that they see me because the dogs might jerk um but oh lower back you're gonna feel your lower back when you first start skating and skating is going to make your lower back very strong so you want to take lots of breaks if you start to feel any pain in your body at all you just want to take a break the lower back is very sensitive and a very and very powerful so you want to be really gentle on it skating will make your lower body and your back extremely strong it requires yes i was just gonna get to that you want to use your your abs muscles and your glutes to protect your lower back so you want to be in a nice bend so that your shock absorbers are taking a lot of like your knees are your shock absorbers so your knees are going to take on a lot of the impact from your skating and you're you're gonna see you want you want to borrow power from your butt and your legs to take the impact away from your lower back but if you start to feel lower back pain stop take a break then start again because um it's very common for roller skaters i know from coaching roller derby and skating clinics that when new skaters start skating hard it's their lower backs that feel weak in the beginning but that almost that goes almost like it goes completely away in a couple of weeks because their lower their ab muscles and their lower backs and their lower body gets stronger and they don't feel that pain anymore do you have anything to add since you broke your lower back so miguel says exercise your core if your lower back's a problem to counterbalance this to counter strengthen all right where you have to go around this so i'm going to go down the curve like i displayed earlier except for there's a crack in front of this curve so i'm going to get both feet down slowly and then start my push well after you so there's three ways to go down the curve so this crack right here you're not going to want to do the blended go straight from the sidewalk to the curb you're going to go down step step and then off but if it is smooth you can dip your test the temperature of the incline put a weightless foot down take your weight your body weight from up here and transfer it into this foot here and smoothly push off of the curb you can also what miguel is recommending this is a lot easier on inlines because you've got less wheels well when you have less wheels it's much easier to jump off of curbs when you've got more surface area under your feet you don't you don't really teach beginners how to jump off the curbs but you can go right off in a staggered stance when you land make sure that your knees are bent let's go through this way so we can go through okay on these rough areas we're going to stagger our stance we're going to avoid this scene right here entirely you really want to use your arms when you're street skating you want to be relaxed these oh this is a good one speed bumps when you go over a speed bump you want your knees to be really easy and relaxed and let your shock absorbers take the brunt of the hump so you're going to stagger your stance just let your knees go up and over you're really going to want to go over this with speed not slowly i think i need to write messages on my masks like i'm smiling back here i'm smiling under here so all these cracks and bumps i hope you're getting them i'm bending my knees staggering my stance and relaxing my body over the impact over the rough stuff the things that are causing impact we're going to go around the restaurants yikes what who monterey hi monterey this is like the reverse of a speed bump on a on a divot like this you just want to do the same thing as you would over the speed bump separate your leg stance bend your knees migueli you okay is it because monterey was watching you got really confident on a dip on a divot like this miguel's pro you know when you fell you like baseball slid your hands are up the camera was in the air when you go over this divot it's just like a speed bump it's just flip the opposite way but you do all the same things you just relax bend your knees let your body go in the divot and out of it just like oh up and over the speed bump come on miguel i also want to mention that the number one thing i see beginner skaters doing that prevents them from learning faster is by staring at the ground you want to scan the ground but you want to look up like you really want to enjoy the experience as much as possible because your muscle the memory in your muscles is going to get used to like your equilibrium and your muscles are going to get used to the moving environment quicker and you scan the ground for any cracks or rocks but once you know where they are you look around you're going to feel much more stable that way the ground's not moving most beginners will stare at the ground and it takes like 30 times to break a habit for me at least so you might want to just remind yourself 30 times and don't don't be hard on yourself just remember oh i'm looking at the ground i should look up i'm staring at the ground look up i'm staring at the ground look up just do it do it as many times as it takes so you start to enjoy the environment all right now we're on bricks i remember taking my best friend from first grade on this path oh we're gonna go this way and he hit these stairs they came up like they were sneaky stairs you know when you come up to a set of stairs and you don't know it's there my friend jumped and it was fine but i'm gonna show you what to do when you see sneaky stairs so we may be having a conversation and we don't know that stairs are coming up and they just seem to like jump out at us when that happens you want to bail or grab a hold of the rail so if i were to see these sneaky stairs here you can't really tell that they're coming if you're not confident jumping i would just stop and go into the rail try not to let your hips go into the rail take the force take the force with the rail here and then you can walk down the steps if you're going to jump and you've got no other option then you're going to want to stagger your stance and land in a nice knee bend so my friend who was his first day skating we hit this exact same scenario he's really tall but he got to the end looked at the stairs and then landed in a nice knee bend all right now if i were on here i would choose to go onto the bench because this just kind of stinks and when you land make sure that you're landing jumping off of obstacles you're in a nice easy knee bend so this is not the smoothest it's not marble and then we're gonna hit wood we're gonna stagger our stance you might want to pump over this so a lot of teachers will call this scissors i like to call it bubbles but pumping can sometimes change the resistance to hitting rough surfaces and make it more comfortable hi hi we are almost at the lighthouse hi how you doing miguel all right little bricks big cobblestone and finally what we've been waiting for the smooth sidewalk the smooth strand hi let me see how are we doing are we still on there all right i'll look at it hey monterey kiana i'm doing it michael get in there camera shy how do you quickly dodge obstacles like that garbage i just dodged as i was reading your question kimberly or pedestrians that didn't see you coming so earlier i suggested that when you see a pedestrian you want to point in the direction away from the pedestrian and go that way because usually the pedestrian is more afraid of you than you are afraid of them because you've actually got momentum so you want to point in the way that you're going so to signal to them you're going that way and i mean because if you're afraid then you we tend to eye lock with what we're afraid of and go right for them so it's really important that you practice pointing in the way that you want to go and then going that direction and that gives the skate part too all right check out this beautiful view i'm using 78a outdoor wheels there's the queen maybe they should to answer your question um lavanya but i don't i'm not sure the standard bike signals i just point in the direction that i go and that usually works all right now i'm gonna bomb this grassy hill because i love bombing grass because if you fall it's like you're falling in the grass it's not a big deal before i do maybe i should just make sure that no one's asking questions because i think we're gonna end up here does anyone have any last questions that i can teach on this smooth ground here yeah you want to skate to the beautiful views okay jennifer colby coble i want to suggest that you look up our um 180 turn uh turnaround toe stop tutorial in the intermediate class on our youtube because that's where we show that hi montre we love you too hillbombing is the best it's like skiing without a lip ticket like hillbombing is the raddest it like makes skiing accessible to everyone on roller skates crookedly mounted plates like really bad well tk to answer your question you know you can't get the plates perfect i mean you can get them evenly in the center but not perfect to one another um if they're really crooked i would suggest loosening the trucks because that's going to give a little more freedom in your leaning and turning ratios my mascara geez it's actually the birds of prey mascara that was given to me free in the gift bag at the at the wrap party what skates and wheels did you use for the outdoor stunts on birds of prey um they were custom made skates um they were higher top 265 in special colors and the wheels were actually our um 78a classic wheels i lost all the comments i guess it's oh all right we're gonna take off pretty soon thank you very much for coming and joining me on this outdoor street tutorial um if you liked this there's plenty more coming almost every day we've got content so please subscribe and if you want notifications for when it all comes out please hit the notifications bell and if you have any other questions about this outdoor skating tutorial pretty pretty pretty please put them in the comments because i love engaging with you all um i'm definitely missing being able to teach in person you know teaching in front of the camera is um it's definitely a learning curve to learning it as a teacher because you can't like test the temperature of the class you know you can't engage with all of the students watching and there's 300 people on here and it's almost impossible to know what all of you are doing and what levels you're at so i really miss teaching in person but um in these times all i've got is your comments so please do me a favor when you get off of this please comment please like the video if you were into it and i read every single one of the comments oh thank you so much for liking it i really appreciate you liking the video we're going to be transferring everything to online thank you john thompson miguel how are you feeling yeah okay they want to know thank you imagine ham thanks fan army thank you tara fleming thanks roller jammin thank you molly all right skate park for beginners as soon as the skate park's open we will but we happen to do have some rails and obstacles in our driveway that we're practicing on so we'll bring those out all right thank you jaylen so much thank you kiana i love you kiana all right i'm gonna bomb this grassy hill i might um i might crash but nobody worry about me i'm good at crashing they you know what's also really cool in california since they don't have sledding they have what's called ice blocking and i was like blown away when i found out about this you can get big fat ice blocks at the grocery store and you can they take these ice blocks up to the tops of these hills and then they slide on them like you would sled like if you're from a snowy weather place like i'd like i am you sled on snow well here they sled on ice on grass i've always wanted to freeze my roller skates into big blocks of ice and like try to skate ice skate down it all right here we go i'm going over this way where it's steeper i need to do it again it's so it's like so satisfying time to go all right all right even though i have essential oils on my mask it's hard to breathe in here heavily you want to watch the sunset okay i'll turn it off all right see you later i love you back mouth see you guys see you girls see you everyone ah you're my spirit animal see you later