FIRST STEPS ON INLINE SKATES

Hey guys, welcome back to the This Is Soul Skate Shop YouTube channel. I am Ivo, the owner of This Is Soul Skate Shop and Skate School. We are here right now in our beautiful skate shop. So if you need some fresh gear before you start and skate, check it out here on ThisIsSoul.com or in our shop in Amsterdam. Last week, we made a video about everything you need to know before you start skating. So get the right gear, get the right protection, what you need to wear. And now we're actually going to go out and skate. So you need to find a nice spot where there's no traffic. For us, that's the Vondelpark, which is right behind our store. So we're going to go there right now. Are you ready? Let's go. We're here in the Vondelpark right now, so let's do this. In the previous video, you saw what gear to get, like protection, what skates, that you should wear some jeans. And I explained also the first literally little steps that you should take. And these are the steps on the ground. So also, the first little steps that you should take. So when you finally get up on your skates, first, you practice like the crab movement. Moving in a circle like a ballerina on the spot. And then after that, of course, the proposal falling technique. This is the most important thing, is that you become friends with the ground. So don't be scared of the ground, but see the ground as your big friend. That's going to save you if you feel insecure. You get down to the ground. That's the most important thing. So if you didn't practice all those things yet, go watch the previous video first. Then now we're going to actually start to skate. And the goal with skating is to not make any steps at all. The goal is to flow, to make movements that are fluent like this. So not lifting up your feet at all. That's the goal. But we leave that goal for somewhere in the future. And right now we're going to just start with actually putting up our feet, lifting up our feet and making steps like that. If you just put your feet in a little V position, like a little pizza point shape, like I'm standing right now. And you start lifting your feet up, you automatically go skate. All right. Then if you put them side by side, you roll and then eventually you stop. That's the first exercise. Then just continue this exercise, gain some more speed, do a little sequence of stepping in some penguin steps like this. Rolling, stepping, rolling. And that's how you can make it like your first lap around the park maybe even. Then you also want to want to stop with the penguin technique. And that's doing the opposite. So if you put your toes towards each other and then step like that, then you're going to stop. So if you do this, you start, if you do that, you stop. To start with the penguin technique, you're only going to use one foot first. So when you skate, you roll and then you put one foot in front. That's how you make your first stop. So this stepping stop that I just showed you is actually a lot of expert skaters, the best skaters in the world. Not everybody uses this technique without them realising it. If you just talk to a person and you're just kind of standing and chilling like this, you do it actually constantly. If you're riding backwards, you put your feet like this. If you're riding forward, you just constantly readjust your foot like this. And so that's kind of the first technique that you need to acquire is to not only start like this, but only make this stopping technique. If you practice it a couple of times, so rolling like a penguin and then stopping, if you've done it a couple of times, you can speed up. When you master the speed up version, you can then start with a precision version of the stopping technique. And for that, you need to find a line somewhere on the ground. And here you can see there's a line between the concrete, the asphalt and the grass. So we use this line to stop at and I'm going to just pretend that it's maybe like the border between the sidewalk and the road that I need to stop at before I'm going to cross the road. Right. So I really, really need to stop at this line. It's an important exercise before you can go out skating on the street. So I want to stop at this line, get some speed and then I'm going to put my foot right there and stop right in front of it. If you master it, if you did it successfully at the right spot, then you can speed it up. If you, for example, did it, but you're too far away, then you need to work on your precision a little bit. And so practice this about like 10, 20 times and then you can continue to the next exercise. So that was like a penguin movement stopping technique, but we also have a braking variant and there's a difference between stopping and braking in inline skating. Let me tell you the difference. And the difference is that with the stopping technique, you come to a complete standstill. And with the braking technique, it's used to slow down with. So in practice, a lot of skaters use a combination between braking and stopping techniques. Let me explain a little example for this. And a popular braking technique is, for example, the T-brake. But to do a precision stop with the T-brake is really hard. So a lot of skaters use the T-brake and then they put one foot in front for the precision stop. So they do the penguin stop, boom, like that to make the precision stop afterwards. So you slow down with one technique and then you come to a complete standstill with another. We just did the penguin stop, but now we're going to do the penguin braking technique, which you can use if you're going really fast to slow down with. When you do the penguin stopping technique, you're going to go a little bit faster and then you make a step, but you still have some speed. So then you make another step afterwards and then maybe a third one and then you come to a standstill. I still use these braking techniques and stopping techniques myself. So it's not only the first one you have to learn, but also one that you keep continuing using later on. You want to have different stopping techniques and braking techniques in your toolkit to use in different situations. We have a list of all these techniques that we teach people. We have a Saturday morning class here in Amsterdam at 10.30 in the Vondelpark, where we teach this entire list. But we also do private lessons, of course. And if you want to learn online with us because you're not in the Netherlands or you don't have the ability to come to the classes, then continue watching these videos because we make a new video every week. Right now, we have a lot of topics about skating techniques. We do a whole beginners series, but we also do reviews or other videos like what's it like skating in the rain or skate maintenance. So check out our YouTube channel and subscribe and I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye bye.