When it comes to learning new tricks on the water, there is one rather simple thing that can easily hold back your progression if you do not master it. This is of course - "the basics".
We find when coaching many people that have taught themselves a lot of what they know, that often they have skipped over the basics and moved onto more exciting tricks.
In the early stages of riding it's always best to focus on locking in some of the easier tricks like your switch riding, ollies, grabs and rail slides. Set yourself challenges and goals like riding a full lap switch or doing all your normal tricks in switch - you'll be surprised how hard this is. You can also work on adding different grabs into your tricks.
It's so important to get the basics locked in as when you move onto the bigger tricks like taking a front roll to a scarecrow (front roll 180) or taking a 360 to a 540 you need your switch landings as good as they can be. This can also be said for ollies. On a lot of the more advanced rails you will see they have safety's (a small sharp upramp part) at the front of the rail which you should try to ollie over. Quite often on some harder rails these safety's will be even higher so it's important to get as much practice on your ollies as you can to accommodate for this.
As you progress your riding you will find yourself wanting to land blind a lot more for bigger spins and flip variations, so the more confident you can be on this, the easier these will come down the line. A good way to practice your blind landings is off the end of a small box or little kicker and focus on being strong with the handle while keeping it close to your back, turning your head on landing to face the direction of travel and bending your knees to land smoother.
These are just a few of the basics that we would suggest working on but you can really never do enough of these, so keep working on them and watch your riding start to improve as you challenge yourself and try some new variations!
CAN YOU DO ALL YOUR TRICKS SWITCH?
0%All of them!
0%Some of them
0%Not yet, but soon!
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