How to Carve on Roller Skates | Trick Tutorial

Hi I'm Shorty and welcome back to my YouTube channel. Today we're going to go over carving. First off I'm going to show you a few skills you can do on flat ground which may help you when you hit the ramps. What is carving? Carving is skating sweeping arcs on transitions to change direction. I like to switch my leading leg when carving and have my left foot in front when carving left my right foot in front when carving right. Some skaters prefer to keep the same foot in front the whole time but for me I find the body positioning a little bit awkward so I like to switch. The first drill is practicing leaning. You want to shift your weight into your edges and lean into the turn. I like to think about my inner leg knee pushing over my pinky toe and my outer leg knee pushing over my big toe. I then push my hip over my inner knee to shift my weight and lean into the turn. Another way to practice leaning is doing it while skating in a circle. You want to lean into the circle and propel yourself by pumping with your outside leg. To practice switching up your leading leg then skating a bigger rake by leaning into the corners is a great way. You can practice at first by keeping all eight wheels on the ground but as you make your path tighter you can look to lift the front truck of your inside skate and pivot on the back truck to make a tighter turn. So this brings me into pivot turns. For tighter arcs when carving you'll most likely need to lift the front truck of your inside skate or at least have less pressure and weight in the front of your skate. This allows you to lift your toes and pivot your foot around more easily. So a drill that can help you with this motion is first getting used to lifting your toes. You can do it separately or together. Once you feel comfortable in doing that you can then look to skate in a circle only by pivoting on your skates to help you turn. If you're new to carving then starting low and skating a wide arc is the best way to start. You don't have to worry about pumping and you can just ride the transition and get the feel first. So choose the angle of path you want to take and as you skate up the transition and near the apex of your arc you want to shift your body weight and start leaning to change direction and come back down the transition. As you begin to tighten up the arc and go higher you will need to pump into the transitions to gain momentum to help you turn. Pumping gives you the acceleration up the ramp and this feeling of weightlessness as you reach the apex of your path. It's when you start to feel this weightlessness that you look to lean or pivot into your turn. If you don't pump then you start losing momentum as soon as you hit the transition. If you're having trouble with pumping you can check out my how-to video on my channel. As I mentioned before for tighter arcs you'll probably need to pivot your inside foot to make the turn. Again you don't have to lift your front truck a whole lot just enough to get the weight off them and be able to pivot on your back truck. When carving you want to think about flow. So you want to keep your shoulders relaxed, core tight and look in the direction you want to go. So when you're going up the transition you want to be looking at the coping or the apex of your arc and then once you reach that point you want to be looking at where your exit path will be. You can also use your arms to help you with momentum and swing in the direction you were going. In this video I don't go over 180 turns or jumps so I'll do that in another tutorial. But I hope this video helps you with understanding carving. Please tag me on instagram shortstop.6 as I'd love to see your progress or message me if you have any questions. Thanks for watching and please like and share this video if you found it helpful. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel for more skating tips and tricks.