Tricks You Should Learn First

Start with the basics and build on them. Sounds easy enough, but what are the basics? First, we’re going to assume that you’re comfortable riding your skateboard. You not going to have much luck learning tricks if you can’t stand on your board and ride around. You need to get good at that so that you develop the balance you need for doing tricks. Once you’re got that figured out, there are all kinds of things you could potentially do with your skateboard. Make it flip, slide on it, spin it, etc. Categorized below are a few simple tricks of each type.

Jump It
A good ollie is the best place to start. Almost every modern trick involves popping the tail of the board to get into the air, and that is best learned through ollieing. Ollies help you get around too. Once you are comfortable ollieing you’ll be able to jump up curbs, over cracks, down stairs, go other places without ever having to step off your board.

Rotate It
Once you learn to ollie well you can take it a step further. A 180 is like an ollie, except you rotate 180 degrees with the board and land riding fakie (backwards). A frontside 180 may be a little bit easier to learn because you can always see where you are going. The alternative is a backside 180. This involves turning your back to the direction you are going.

Spin It
A pop shuvit makes the board spin 180 degrees, but you don’t turn your body with it. The backside pop shuvit is commonly one of the first few tricks skateboarders learn. Learning to frontside pop shuvit is harder for most people, but it is still a fairly simple trick.

Flip It
The two most basic flip tricks are kickflips and heelflips. Which one you learn first is up to you.

Slide It
Which sliding tricks you learn first can depend on what obstacles you have available to skateboard on. I first learned to backside boardslide on a parking block. It was a small, heavily waxed curb. Backside boardslides are generally easier to get the hang of than frontside boardslides. Frontside boardslides can be a bit scary because you are more likely to fall back towards your blind side. It’s better to get used to balancing and sliding on a rail with backside boardslides. The backside noseslide is another simple sliding trick. It’s good to learn it on a curb, ledge, or box, as opposed to a rail.

Grind It
The best choice for your first grind is a frontside 50-50. You’ll have more control than you would for a backside 50-50 because you’re ollieing towards an object that is in front of you.

Stall It
After you learn how to drop in on transitions, you’ll want to learn to do some stalls on the coping. Rock to fakie is a simple stall that usually tops the list of what to learn first on transitions. The other is a backside 50-50. The trick tip linked here shows a backside 50-50 grind, but the concept is the same.

Combine It
Once you’re got some of these basic tricks down you can start to combine them. Combine a kickflip with a backside pop shuvit and you get a varial kickflip. Two backside pop shuvits together makes a backside 360 pop shuvit. Add a backside 180 into that and you get a backside bigspin. How about doing that into a frontside boardslide? Combining tricks is where skateboarding really has potential.

Simplify It
So which tricks should you learn first? After you learn to ollie, any of the tricks listed on this page are fair game, other than the combined tricks. There’s no real order to learning tricks, but just to give you something concrete to go with, these are the first five tricks I learned: ollie, frontside 180, kickfip, backside pop shuvit, backside boardslide. Have fun.

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