Roller Skating for Beginners - An Easy Quick-Start Guide for Instant Success

You've waited weeks for your skates to arrive. Your safety gear's here. All you've got to do now is skate. Stick around and I'll show you how. Roller skating for beginners. Before you even put your skates on there's a couple of tips I can give you that will help with your journey. My boots are really old and really soft so I skate without socks but all boots have a break-in period. During this period they're new, they're hard and they will hurt and rub your feet so obviously you're going to want to wear a sock. You can buy skating socks which have no seams but the main seam that most people have a problem with is the toe seam so a really good trick is to just wear your socks inside out because then the seam is on the outside and it's not against your foot which is great. Another spot that new skates tend to rub is around your ankle so a really good trick for this is to actually fold the sock back down again so then you've got two layers at the ankle and that really helps as well. So another really important thing is the way you lace your boots. These laces down here are really baggy but as you get to this middle section of your foot here this bit needs to be tight to lock your heel in. Now some skaters actually wear a strap to really lock that in if you have trouble. When you get to your hooks there's a trick with these, you always go from the top down and that locks in the lace so it doesn't come undone. It also prevents these from breaking because if you wrap it around the other way it puts more pressure on them. It's important to mention that very often your skates do need adjusting straight out of the box and I've done a video on that before so I won't cover all of that again. I'll put a link to it up here. One thing I will mention is if you're having trouble standing and you feel your skates are running away with you what you can do is intentionally over tighten your wheels so they don't roll as fast and that will help you to get used to the idea of it rolling but it'll be slower so that's a really good trick to help you get going. So the last thing is my safety gear. Embrace it, it is part of the look, it's there to keep you safe. Don't bother if other people at the rink or at the park they're not wearing it, wear it, keep yourself safe, it will help with your confidence. If you fall over it doesn't hurt you're going to want to do it again. First things first, let's stand up. Now with skating you don't want to try and get up like this because it's not gonna happen so what you need to do is stand up from a kneel so if you get into a kneeling position and from here, great the knee pads by the way, put one foot up and then you want a hand either side and then you lift get the other foot and before you take your hands off make sure you've got your balance. Keep your knees bent and we're standing. Let's do it from a bench as well. So the bench is pretty similar but often your feet can roll. I'm actually on an incline here. It's good to start with your feet in a v position so they don't go anywhere so put your weight forward so the weight is on balls of your feet and then lift so make sure the weight's still forward on the balls of your feet. Now this v position will stop your feet from rolling off before you're ready and balanced. So we've covered moving in an earlier video where I showed you how to do bubbles. Now I'm going to show you a different technique. This technique is like marching so you're marching with your feet out but you can gather speed quite quickly with this one and it feels like you're skating straight away which is why it's such a nice one. If you do feel like you're going too fast out of your comfort zone you can tighten those wheels up. So before we move the weight needs to be over the ball of your foot. If it's over the ball of your foot that means it's mainly over your front truck which is where we want the weight because it's much safer to fall forwards than it is to fall backwards. Right let's go. So all we're going to do is just a marching position with your feet turned out and what will happen is your wheels will start to roll because that's what they want to do. Knees bent, put your arms out for safety if you feel more balanced. If you start to feel a wobble, grab the ankles. It's really natural to helicopter. Try not to do that. Try and reach for the ankles. Okay let's try again. So it's just a marching movement and you don't need to push because your wheels will start to do that for you anyway. So whilst you're marching if you feel like you're uncomfortable and you're going too fast you can just roll. So let your feet go parallel and you can just roll, lose some speed and then start marching again. I've shown you moving and I've shown you if you're going too fast you can just roll but obviously at some point you're gonna need to stop. So I have done a dedicated stopping video so it's probably best to go and watch that but the easiest one for an absolute beginner to try is the plow stop. You're marching then let your wheels roll and at this point you want to push them in towards each other but the weight on the outside of the skate and that will stop you. So let me show you one more time nice and quick. So I'm rolling and then weight goes on the outside of the skates so you're leaning on your little toe and it should bring you to a stop. Everyone says bend your knee but I can guarantee you're not bending your knee as much as you think you are. So a good way to think of it is to think of getting your knee over your toe and that gets your hips down as well which is where you need to be so that way you're already low to the ground so if you're gonna wobble you can save it much easier. Hopefully this video has given you a few really good tips to get you on your skating journey. I'm Katie, you're watching Skatee and I'll see you next time. Bye!