How to Turn on Roller Skates - Transitions

Hey everybody, I'm Dirty Debra Harry and I'm here with Sugar Roller Skates and the Dirty School of Skate. We're at the Korean Friendship Bell here in San Pedro, California. Just skating around. This is an amazing location. If you guys ever get a chance to skate in Southern California, come to Pedro and find the Korean Friendship Bell. Super cool place to skate. We've got an amazing view of the ocean. It's pretty awesome here. All right, today let's talk transitions. Transitions are one of the most commonly asked for. How do I do a transition? How do I do a transition? No problem. When we say transition, we're talking skating forward, turning around backwards, or skating backwards, turn around forward. Today we handle forward to backward. All right, so here's the deal. Like I've told you guys before, skating is not necessarily about your feet. It's about your body weight and how you transfer it. So here's the deal. Before you even go to think about transitioning, you've got to lower your body weight. So you're going to skate forward, right, and you're going to lower your body weight. Now, if you want to turn right shoulder back and turn this direction, you've got to put your weight on your left foot, which means you're going to go down, transfer your weight to your left foot. How do you transfer your weight to your left foot? You've got a center line of balance right down the center of your body. You push that over to your left foot, thinking about over your knee, knee over baby toe. So you're going to be skating forward, minding your own business, skating forward. You're going to drop down, shift your center line over to your left foot. As soon as you do that and you've got almost like, I want to say like 90% of your body weight over your left, your right is going to be able to pick up and do things. Not that I needed to come all the way up. I just need down, shift, and the ability to move this foot. Now, before we even think about the foot, for God's sakes, don't think about the foot. First, we think about the head. You're going to be down, shift your body weight. Then you're going to look over your shoulder. Did you see my shoulder? As soon as I turn my head, my shoulder open. In order for me to do a transition, I need to be able to open up my shoulder, look to the back. Head turns shoulder, shoulder turns hip, hip turns foot. Don't think about your foot first. Down, shift your body weight, look, open your shoulder, then your hip is going to open your foot. Let loose on the hip, think heel to heel, chase toe to toe. Now people always ask, what do I do with my foot? What do I do with my foot? Okay, we've shifted, we're down, we look, we're open here, opening up the hip. Got a lot of weight on this left foot. We need to slightly lift our heel so we can go heel to heel, transfer the weight, chase with the toe. Now here's the deal about the heel. When you think of lifting up your heel in skating, don't think of lifting up your heel. Think about depressing your toe. I need the weight of your skate over your front axle. So go like this and that'll lift the heel just enough. It only needs to be literally this far off the ground. So it's going to be down, shift, look, open your shoulder, open up your hip. You can depress over your toe so you can pivot this foot back. We're going to go heel to heel and now my weight transfers over to my right foot. My toe comes up and I chase. So it's going to be down, shift, look, lift, heel to heel, toe to toe. All right, let's see it in action. Here we go. Down, lean, look, heel to heel, toe to toe. Okay, now let's do it one more time. Hopefully you can get this. Okay, skate forward, down, shift, look, hello, heel to heel, toe to toe. Now, a big challenge a lot of people have is they keep turning once they transition. It ends up looking like this. They do all this and then they're like, and they keep going. Why do they keep going? Shoulder. Your shoulder needs to, again, weight down, shift, look. Your shoulder is in an open position here. As you turn, go heel to heel, toe chasing. You've got to close this shoulder off, meaning the shoulder needs to be in a forward position as opposed to open. If you keep it in an open position, you're going to continue to turn. And if that's not what you want, don't do that. Right here. All righty, so I hope you have learned something in this little video about transitioning. Let me tell you again, practice. Don't get discouraged. If you try this one or two times and you're like, I don't get it, just keep practicing. Remember too, it's all about your body weight. When we have our body weight down, we are holding an edge. If we want to do something different, our body weight has to come up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, and then back down to hold. So down to hold an edge, up to switch an edge. You know what I mean? So I need you to practice. I need you to practice. Then I need you to ask me questions. And I promise if you have a good question, I'll answer it. Even if you have a bad question, I'll answer it. If you have a personal question, I'll answer it. I And then I'll make up new videos based on what you guys need from me. Thank you so much for watching. And if you would do me a solid, subscribe to my channel, give me a little thumbs up, give me some comments. That way I can communicate more effectively with you guys and make lots more videos. Now, if you're ever in Southern California, I'm always skating the beaches and the streets and all that. And especially skating at the Fountain Valley Skating Center. If you hit me up, I'll get you in and we'll skate together. So thank you so much again for watching my little video and, uh, come on out and skate with me. Now we're going to go check out the belt. Come on. So I got to ask you guys a question. Did anyone notice that the ring ring sound? Guess what? I got new skates. I got new skates and I got to break these bad boys in and sometimes they make this little sound just in case you guys were all going to comment about it. I know someone was, you know who you are. All right.