7 Reasons Why Your Roller Skating Is Not Progressing - Important Tips For Beginner Roller Skaters

In this video we're going to cover seven reasons why your skating might not be progressing as quickly as you'd like and obviously I'm going to tell you how to fix them and if you stick around to the very end we've got two bonus skills as well. So the first thing we're going to talk about is how to stand. So obviously you're going to draw on what you know. So obviously walking, so hip width apart and you're going to do this. Doesn't work for skating. So what do I recommend is the stance that we call staggered stance in roller skating. So you choose whichever foot feels the most comfortable to go in front and most of the weight goes on this back leg and this is your staggered stance. Now this will help you to balance but it'll also help you to absorb impacts and if you feel a wobble from here you can very easily take a knee. Another thing we need to talk about is your arms. So these can really really help you and they can also hinder you. So if you're trying to learn to skate and they're flapping around they're going to throw your balance. So the best thing to do is to put your arms out to the side. Now I am a figure skater so mine go up here but if you want to be more comfortable you can put them more sort of here just to give you a bit of balance and they really really help. So when you skate you want to go opposite arm to leg. So if you're skating it's this kind of action is great no problem. What you don't want to do is twist your body to a point that this arm crosses your center line because then what you're doing is you're over rotating your top and you're actually then throwing yourself back off. So think if you're going to skate like this which is almost like a jog which kind of works keep each arm on its own half of your body. Another really really important aspect of arms is when you start to feel a fall the natural thing is to helicopter the arms. Try not to do that because that is going to exacerbate the fall. If you start to feel a wobble it's best to get your arms out and get low because getting these out will help you to regain your balance. So another really important thing and thing that initially feels incredibly alien is your posture because roller skating posture is kind of different to what you may have done in the past. So when I say get low it's about a knee bend. Now you don't get low by bending at the waist you get low by bending the knees. So if you think about your belly button this is a really weird point but it works you want your belly button down the middle of your skate. So if your belly button's too far back your weight will be too far to the back of your skate. If your belly button's too far forward it means you're too far forward over the front of your skate. So if you think about bending your knees and getting your belly button in the middle of your skate that will make a really big difference. So if we go back to the staggered stance from the beginning so you've got a nice knee bend your belly button's over the middle of the skate that most of the weight is on which is this back one. So you're skating you've got your arms out this is great posture and if you have a wobble or you hit a stone you've got a chance to save yourself because your weight's spread and you can take the knee from here and you can hopefully save wobble. So this is a great place to start. When you start skating it's not unusual to get this kind of short choppy skating. So let me show you what I mean. You get this kind of short choppy strides but do you know what if you've never skated before the fact that you're standing up and moving I'm pretty sure that's a win but you want to take it from there and progress from there. So think about back to the belly button idea. When you're doing these short little steps your belly button is in between your two skates. In order to commit your weight to one side because we want to do is you want to hold each foot and stride stride skating like this. To do that you need to put the belly button over the skate and commit your weight to one of your skates. Now this will happen slowly so you'll find that you're able to do this more and more and hang one side than the other. Really important aspect of this is when you do start lifting your foot belly button over your foot and you're like yes I can lift this one don't lift it to the side because it's gonna pull you back over. Always lift this foot to the back and that will help your balance your belly button and everything in line and this leg as well in line. I do have an entire video on striding or stroke skating as it can be called so when you're ready check that out. A major part of progressing as a skater is to drill the weaker side so everybody has a side that feels more comfortable. I do but everyone does. I am left footed and I like to rotate but lots of people like to go the other way. Actually majority of people prefer the opposite direction so when you're practicing things make sure you drill the weaker side and it may be that you need to drill the weaker side twice as much as the easy side but that will really make you an even all-around skater and it will make a really big difference to your progress. So you remember when you're at school and the teachers are like have you planned it and you're like oh I just want to do it it's so boring. I kind of agree that they were on to something. If you're gonna go out for a skate have a think about what you want to practice so think okay last time I did manuals and I did bubbles so this time I really need to practice my manuals again but maybe I should watch a skatey video and do one of her drills. So basically binge watch, plan out what you're going to do so when you get to your practice area you don't waste any time watching videos and things like that when you get there you know what you're going to do and it's going to help your progression a lot quicker. So the last thing we need to talk about is equipment. Now they always say a bad workman blames his tools but in this case it might be true. If you have a pair of skates that say are under the 50 pound mark they tend to have a plastic plate they're more of a toy so if you think about this is actually a piece of sports equipment there's no way you want to go and spend two or three hundred pounds on your first pair of skates you don't know if you like it it's crazy. So a good way to try out skating for the first time is to head to the rink. Now I know the rink skates are a little bit spatty you might want to wear a sock but they're normally quite a good quality skate and they give you an idea of what it's going to feel like. So I'm talking around the hundred pound mark now this will give you a good skate it will give you a metal alloy plate a lot of the times this will give you an adjustable toe stop and the wheels and things like that you can always swap the wheels out so you don't need a separate pair of skates for indoors and outdoors just change your wheels and if you want to get into something like the dancing like I was showing you the rhythm moves you don't need to buy a skate like this you can just take your toe stop out and put in a jam plug because if you're going to skate in the rink they're going to want you to have a jam plug in. So there are ways that you can save money in other areas to get the better overall skate and it will make a big big difference to your skating. So we've spoken about seven different things that could be stopping you from progressing and how to fix them so we're now on to our bonus section. So the first bonus tip is to skate to music because if you think about it the music's got a beat so if you're skating to the beat you're going to stride evenly on each foot and then as you get better you can hold each stride for a count of two beats so you're elongating your steps and this will really really help in your skating and the second tip I'm going to show you is a really fun drill. So for this drill you will need three cones my cones are at home I have used shoes but that's great because you can do the same thing you don't need cones three of anything will do. So the first two cones put my feet together and I'm going to corner don't forget your arms so this is practicing both ways of cornering so it's keeping you even and now I'm going to do crossovers to here and then crossovers around this cone shoe to here and then I'm going to do back to my two feet and now this time I'm going to do my crossovers again and go for this one. Now this is really good because it gets you looking where you're skating so I have to look where my cones are I've got to look ahead this is really really good for stopping you looking at your feet as well. So I hope as you've watched this video a couple of things have stood out to you and you've gone I'm going to try that that could do it so I really hope you've had that eureka moment. I'm Katie you've been watching Skatie and I'll see you next time. Bye!