ducksauce

I always wanted to be able to do wall rides when I was a kid. Alright, that’s all the self important back story I can stomach for one post.

Anyway, I want to learn frontside wall rides and there seem to be three variations; full carve up and down the wall (full arc), carve up/pop out, ollie in/carve out. For the purposes of this project, I’m focused on the first version, full carve up and down on flat ground and vertical wall. My thinking is that if I can get this version, the other versions should be much easier to get later.

I couldn’t ask for a better gif to study for a few reasons. First, Mark Gonzales is goofy footed, like me. He isn’t doing anything here that requires unusual physical attributes, meaning he’s not displaying any crazy flexibility, explosiveness or anything like that. He is also, at the time of this clip, probably somewhere in the second half of his thirties, which is useful for me as I am of similar age. It helps to study people who have as much in common with you as possible because there are fewer variables to consider when trying to learn from what they do. I don’t have to factor in youth, or unusual physical attributes when trying to figure out important points of his technique to learn from.

Since I can’t get anywhere near doing frontside wall rides right now, I’m going to take away some noticeable bullet points to experiment with, and then add to this post when I get a chance to try these things out and understand what they do and don’t do.

1. Like I noticed in my Lipslide project, MG seems to keep his rear foot slightly angled away from his other foot, meaning that it turns out very slightly to his left. When I did this in my lip slides, I noticed that it helps with keeping my shoulders from twisting too much out of control (my left shoulder tends to push forward a lot which twists my body out of alignment). I imagine it has a similar effect here.
2. It looks like not only does he put pressure with the ball of his foot and toes for the carve in, pivot (seems heavily focused on toes here) and exit phases, but it looks like he has pressure mostly left of the centerline of his board. Meaning, he has his left toes pressuring an inch or so left of the centerline (length-wise) and his right toes at or slightly behind the front bolts and also pressuring left of the centerline of the board. This seems to put more pressure on the left wheels, which would lighten the right wheels and maybe make it easier to carve back down to the street? I’ll have to try both left and right of the centerline foot placement and see what happens.
3. His front foot is either at or close to the front bolts of the board. When I do backside wall rides, I keep my foot there or slightly higher because it seems to allow me to guide the front of the board where I want it to go by taking some weight off of the back wheels and allowing the back wheels to do a hybrid pivot/slide into position. I can’t say if it serves the same purpose here, or if there is some other mechanism here that I am missing.
4. There looks like there is a small “pulse” or hard carve out of the wall ride at the end and it seems to be powered slightly more with his right (lead) leg. This pulsing makes sense if you think about a wall ride like skating a super tight transition, though I’m unsure of the role of the lead leg there. It seems like it would be difficult to just glide our of the wall ride without power sliding down the wall and landing primo, which is my problem when I do backside wall rides on slick surfaces. It looks like he is doing this on shiny tiles here, so that might be the reasoning in this clip.
5. It doesn’t look like his legs compress much during the wall ride and it looks like his spine stays pretty vertical the entire time, which makes me think that he’s not leaning super far backwards at any point during this. It seems like it’s more about slightly leaning away, and using your feet to guide the board up and across the wall, rather than jumping onto the wall. Like sliding a pen across paper to write rather than smashing the pen into the desk and scraping it across the paper.
   
6. During the pivot, his head seems to shift from his centerline slightly towards his front leg. Maybe to help him power the carve out of the wall? Maybe to lighten the back foot a little during the pivot? I’ll experiment and report back.

I’m going to not focus much on his arm motions at this point, though I’m sure there is plenty to look into there, because I want to see what is going on with the legs and torso first. I’ll update when I get a chance to try all of this stuff out.

UPDATE:

I ran the experiment on a very slight bank to wall (easier to carve up and down, plus I could skate there without getting kicked out) and overall was more successful than I was before in my feeble previous attempts at the trick.

-The foot placement actually helped significantly with my backside wall rides. I put my top forefoot a hair to the right of the centerline of the bord and experimented with different placement below the front bolts and overall if allowed me to pivot more easily and carve out more easily without having to use the high front foot placement I mentioned above.
-In frontside wallrides, the front foot seems to need to be high for me, around the lower two front bolts. Any lower than that and I can carve up, but cannot pivot or even come close to carving out.

-Keeping my front forefoot to the left of the centerline seemed to help with maneuvering the board once I was up on the wall. The rear forefoot seems to need to be more on the centerline of the tail though because when I had it to the LOC, it was more difficult to carve up the wall and I ended up simply bashing my trucks primo on the wall.

—The vertical spine thing was right on, but I was most successful when I kept my torso further away from the wall during the whole trick. When I hit the wall from too sharp an angle and with too much speed, my legs compressed too much and my torso was too close to the wall for me to maneuver it with my legs. I got too cramped up to move.
-I did best when I kept enough distance to move my legs so I could guide the board up and across the wall with my forefeet.

-I was unsuccessful with carving out of the wall, however. I found my best wallrides left me leaning too far towards my back trucks and efforts to carve out either resulted in the board slipping out to my right or sliding down the wall and landing primo.

-My arms became a big problem. There is a fence on top of the wall I was using and as I carved up the wall, I kept on grabbing the fence. It seems that like Mark Gonzales, I need to swing my arms up to get the lift needed to carve up the wall, and then swing my arms backwards to avoid touching the wall or fence. I wonder if this will help with carving out of the wallride?

POINTS TO FOCUS ON

1. Front foot at rear front bolts, slightly left of center with forefoot. Rear foot on centerline of tail.
2. Vertical spine, maintain more distance so you don’t compress into wall and guide board with forefeet.
   
3. Lean more towards nose as I carve up wall so I don’t slip backwards as I carve out.
4. Get my arms out of the way and look where I want to land. I think looking will guide my weight where it needs to go, maybe?

Lipslides are one of my favorite tricks, but I am pretty sloppy with them, so I figured I would do a breakdown of Seimi Miyahara, who seems to have the most control of this trick of anyone I’ve seen so far. I’m specifically interested in how he lip slides on ledges, which seem like they have some different requirements than other applications, like rails, walls, etc…

Here is his whole Evisen part. There are quite a few lip slides in this, but I’m focusing on one specifically towards the end.

I’m going to see if I can get useful information by breaking his Lipslide down into entry, control, and exit phases. My thought is to break each of those phases down into the direction of his whole body momentum, angle of approach, foot positioning, weight distribution, and what his upper body is doing. I’m also hoping to gain some insight into what each of these parts is doing specifically to make the trick happen. Nerdy, I know, but fuck it, this is how I like to think about things. Time will tell if this information actually helps my lip slide improve. I’m doing this journaling/note taking publicly, not to try to look smart or whatever, but because I’m hoping that if someone sees this and has some useful insight (whether its technical, or about how I’m approaching this), they can share that info in the comments. I’m thinking out loud on this so help is appreciated!

Here is the whole lip slide

The entry phase

Foot placement: His rear toes are angled slightly outwards, to the left. In my skating, I have a big problem with my left shoulder driving forward during the middle and end of a lot of my tricks, which twists my body and throws me off balance as I land, or turns my landings so they don’t continue in the right direction. I started experimenting with angling my left foot out like this for kick flips, because my shoulder turn is most pronounced during that trick, and my rear hand tends to whip forward across my body during kick flips, which makes the shoulder problem worse. The rear foot angle seems to help because it directs some of my energy backwards, and I think it also keeps my left knee and hip opened up towards my rear, which helps lock my shoulder in place from driving forward as strongly. I assume that is the case here, with Seimi. Maybe it helps with keeping his weight focused more backwards and stops him from over rotating his left shoulder forward as he shifts into the lip slide position.

It looks like the balls of both of his feet are in the middle of the board, width wise, which is consistent with what feels most stable for me too. Seems obvious, but I read somewhere that no matter what size deck you are riding, your balance is really on the strip of the deck down the middle, the width of your base plates. That idea seems like it helps a lot with stability problems people have when learning tricks. Seems not worth mentioning, but simple stuff like that helps me when something feels wrong and I can’t pin point what it is.

His lead foot is almost exactly in the middle of the deck, and angled perpendicular to the length of the deck aka totally sideways. I need to try this sideways angle as I think I tend to angle my front toes a bit more towards the front of the deck. His sideways placement might help also with the shoulder rotation problem and keeping more “energy” (I don’t know what else to call it) focused towards the rear.

The placement of the foot in the middle of the deck seems like it does multiple things for each phase of the trick:

1. It gives him plenty of room to pop with as he ollies
2. When he lands, his lead foot is still behind his front bolts, which gives him the ability to do tricks out of the lip slide, since he still has room and strength to pop his ollie to second lip slide and then his next kickflip out of the second lip slide.
3. This seems to keep his feet closer together during the sliding/control phase of the trick which I’ll talk about more in that phase.

His head, which directs where his weight goes, seems to stay slightly behind his lead foot during the ride up and ollie phase. I think I tend to lean forward both off the board and also towards my lead foot, which throws me a little off balance during a lot of my tricks, as I tend to land nose heavy. On a lip slide, it makes sense to lean backwards a bit more before the trick, since you are going to have to push the board forward to slide as you land. Still, I should experiment with keeping my head a little behind the lead foot like he does.

It’s hard to tell for sure from this angle, but momentum wise, it looks like he is approaching the stair/ledge from a slight diagonal, maybe like 10 degrees off parallel. I notice that for all of my ledge tricks (sadly few) I always slide better when I am pretty close to parallel on my approach, but some tricks, like lip slides, seem to require a small angle so I can pop over the ledge. If the angle is too sharp, you stick and don’t slide, and if you are perfectly parallel, it seems harder to ollie on to the obstacle without throwing your weight way off the board. It looks here like that slight angle allows him to keep his weight centered and balanced over the board with enough momentum to slide well. He seems to be going medium fast, which gives him enough momentum to slide and do two subsequent tricks during the slide, but also not so fast where he loses control and doesn’t have time to adjust for each trick in the series.

The slide/control phase

It’s helpful that they filmed from two angles here.

Entering the slide, it looks like he Ollies just barely high enough to get onto the ledge. As far as maintaining momentum goes, this makes sense. It seems like for most ledge tricks, it’s easier to maintain momentum from the rolling to sliding phase if there isn’t a large, jarring gap between the two. Meaning, if you ollie too high to get onto the ledge, once you touch the ledge your weight dropping puts the brakes on your momentum, which screws up your slide.

During the slide, it looks like his head is positioned more towards the center of the board, which makes sense. If his head was over the rear foot, it would put too much weight on the back wheels and despite the smooth surfaces of the ledges, they would likely stick too much. Too much towards the front of the board and he would likely not be able to pop to the next ledge or do the subsequent kick flip afterwards. This might be part of my problem in my own lip slides actually. I tend to keep my feet wider than him during all phases of the lip slide, so while my weight is central, like his, it’s harder to shift and control my weight during the slide. Wider stance=more distance for my weight to travel to lighten one leg or the other.

His board is angled diagonally, nose forward, as he slides rather than perpendicular to the ledge. I tend to slide a hair more perpendicular to the ledge, but I think his angle might be a product of him knowing he has to pop over to the next ledge and then kick flip out of that one. It seems like it would be easier to do those follow up tricks with a more angled slide because the board has less distance to travel to be in position for each of those tricks. You can see this during the transfer from one ledge to the next, where he kick turns his board forward briefly towards the second ledge and then re-angles as he touches down on the second ledge. This could help a lot with my problems exiting the lip slide, which I’ll mention in a bit.

Now that I think about it, this angle is very similar to how I corrected my lip slides. Originally, I would turn totally perpendicular during power slides, and I struggled to turn the board forward again to keep rolling. So I watched video and saw that a lot of people, for shorter power slides, tend to angle the slide to more of a 45/60ish degree angle, rather than a full 90 degree turn. This helped a lot with my slide and also my exit from the slide. I suppose it’s the same idea here.

Two big things I notice with his arm and general upper body positioning during the lock in and slide phases are that overall, he keeps a relaxed structure in his upper body. I tend to have a tense upper body which makes all of my arm movements and counter balancing movements exaggerated and stiff. So even if I land something, it looks and feels awkward because my upper body seems to be working against my lower body, rather than helping with the forces generated by my lower body.

His arm movements are roughly similar to what I’m doing, whipping my left arm back and my right arm forward as I lock into the slide. The big difference I see is that generally he seems to keep his shoulders and elbows in roughly the same spots and his forearms seem to do the whipping motion. So the centrifugal force generated by the turning arms seems to hold his upper body in place, rather than whipping it out of place, which is what happens to me. He also keeps his elbows lower than shoulder level, which looks like it grounds him more than how my arms kind of flail at or above shoulder level a lot, which makes me feel disconnected from my board.

His forearm whipping during the slide is only to support the ollie and kick flip afterwards. During the slide itself he keeps his right hand resting in front of him and his rear hand back, behind his torso to a slight angle, and lower by his floating ribs/hip area.

His face/eyes look like they are looking more forward and maybe more towards the nose of his board than I do, which is to look a couple feet ahead of me towards the tail side of my board. I do not know if this is because of the subsequent tricks he is going to do or because it’s better lip slide technique. In my head, it feels like it would make my left shoulder poke forward more, but maybe that’s because I’m biased by that big problem in my skating. He doesn’t look like he struggles with that at all.

As far as the actual slide goes, it looks like he is leaning back, of course, and that he is driving heavily with his rear foot as the front foot stabilizes the board in its position. While he is sliding, it looks like both of his toes are pointed forward in the same direction (perpendicular to the length of the board.) rather than keeping that rear foot angle he had as he rolled up to the ledge.

*Side note: I went skating after that last paragraph and while I couldn’t try any of this stuff on a ledge, I did try out some of the foot positioning and arm positioning during tail slides on a curb and power slides and it definitely felt different. It was much easier to pop out of the tail slides and exit power slides using my arms like he did in the lip slide (lead arm cross body, rear arm pulls back) and also felt interesting using the closer together foot positioning (lead foot behind front bolts).

The exit phase

Since this isn’t just a normal, plain old lip slide, I figured I would look at how he exits both his first and second lip slide from a couple different angles. It seems like the things he does to make both tricks possible would be the same things that would allow for a simple roll out or pop out of a lip slide.

So, my main problem when I exit is that I can only exit my lip slides by kicking the nose down to the ground and jerkily pivoting my tail off the ledge. It’s ugly and cumbersome. I think my main problem here, judging by this video study, is that my legs are too far apart and my arm swing is too out of control. The arm swing leads to my second problem, which is that rear (left) shoulder driving forward and twisting me off balance.

Since his foot position on the exit is already set, it doesn’t make sense to focus on this. It seems like the two big things with Seimi’s exits is:

1. That he has his lead leg behind the front bolts of his front truck, which keeps his legs closer together which seems to give him both more strength to maneuver his board, but also the ability to keep his weight in the sweet spot slightly to the left of the middle of his board without the risk of putting too much weight on the nose.

2. His arms swing quickly from the Dracula like position (right arm whips across the torso at the elbow, left arm whips backwards to the left.) back in the opposite direction in a circle. He swings his arms first and as his swing is almost finished, he then pops his ollie out. The circle from the kick flip one is similar, but a lot tighter and smaller, likely from the tension still in his upper body from the pop from ledge to ledge. Anyway, his arms swing in a really similar way to how a Muay Thai fighter swings their arms for a kick.

This is a little flashier than most of the kicks you will see in Muay Thai, but the arm and leg counter movements are the same. I like this one because of the jumping element too, which is more similar to what we are talking about here. Here, you can see Saenchai starting in the same arm position as Seimi (that Dracula like position. You know, the one where he has his cape drawn across his body) used during the slide, and then he does a circular whirl of the arms which powers the lifting of the leg. I think the arm whirl also has something to do with powering a strong push into the ground with the planted leg, creating a rebound force. That’s just a guess, though.

I think the arm whirl is cool because it creates a small, but strong “whip” through the torso to generate momentum for the legs to move. Usually it seems like a lot of the power in skateboarding comes from the legs up, but in this case it seems like an arms down kind of approach helps. It also creates this momentum without twisting the shoulders too much and distorting the stable shape of the body.

Anyway, nerding out aside, it looks like the arm whirl powers the right leg pulling up as the left leg stomps down, which raises the nose and angles the board back a little more forward. This, done as a smaller movement, looks like it would allow an easy pop out or roll off way of exiting the slide. Almost like turning it into a super short manual off of the ledge.

Riding away seems pointless to discuss because this video clip doesn’t show a simple exit.

Summary/take aways

1. Rolling up, rear foot angle away, front foot in center of deck, perpendicular to deck.
2. Don’t over ollie the ledge. Smooth entry and slide with deck at a 45 degree angle to the ledge. Front foot is right below front truck bolts. Arms (bending at elbows. Rest of body is stable) move to Dracula position during slide. Look diagonally right and forward with head. (experiment with this).
3. Arm whirl for power to lift nose and angle deck towards roll out position or to ollie out.

I’ll keep watching footage to see if there are other ways to do things during each phase which might help solve the problems I and other people have. Maybe different arm position or something. I’ll also experiment with the things I saw here and see how that goes. I’ll probably update this post based on what happens.

RESULTS

Because of Covid 19, it took me a while to get a chance to test out the info I gathered from this breakdown but I got the chance today. My main focus was on the point of keeping my lead foot further in the middle of the deck during the ollie into the entry phase, and keeping that same foot below my front truck bolts during the slide phase of the trick and this made a huge difference in both my ability to control the pop into the lip slide, but also my ability to exit the lip slide more consistently. I usually land one or two lip slides per 20/30 attempts. Today I was able to land much more consistently. I think I attempted about 20/30 lip slides on two different ledges and I landed about 8/9 of those. Of those landed, I was comfortable landing the majority of those, with a few sloppy ones. So it seems clear to me that the foot placement had a big impact on my ability to comfortably enter and exit the trick, with no negative impact on the slide.

I didn’t focus on my arm movements much and did not remember to emphasize the rear foot angled away from the lead foot, though I think I did do that a bit because I’ve been making that more of a habit during all of my tricks lately, to good effect.

Problems to fix: First, I need to relax more and sink my shoulders during the entry phase. It seems like my upper body is disconnected from my lower body too much both in shoulders being elevated, with high arms, and also with my upper and lower body separating from each other during the entry phase too much, which resulted in a bunch of poor entries with little to no slide. I think the issue was my legs were ollieing and turning into the trick with my upper body staying too locked in place, then as my wheels made contact to slide, my upper body would twist strongly and whip into place which would throw my balance all over the place. I need to sink my shoulders and keep them connected to my hips, but in a relaxed way. It seems like disconnection between hips and shoulders and too much body tension during the entry were my biggest issues.

Things to improve. I would like to slide longer, so I need to investigate that problem and maybe do a breakdown of someone doing a long lip slide, so see what points I can glean from that study. I would also like to learn some exit tricks, like Seimi does here, from the lip slide. Ollie and kick flip out both seem like realistic ones for me as I can do both reasonably well and I have the footage of Seimi to study for more points to glean from him. For those kinds of exits, I think I will need to choke up on my front foot position to make those things happen. Meaning, I think I need to really keep my foot a little further towards the middle of the board, maybe an inch or two in from where I currently have it now, below the front bolts.

I thought about writing some glib intro to this review. Some anecdote trying to be cute, but what the fuck, you don’t want to read all that.

I bought these wheels because online the 56mm size are described as being 37mm wide, which is a little wider than the Spitfire conical fulls I usually ride. I’m into wide wheels at the moment because they seem to handle the rough streets and longer distances I skate better than smaller, narrower wheels which make the bones of my feet feel like they are dissolving. So dramatic!

I also like the wider wheels because they look cool on my fat boy set up, and lastly, they usually seem to slide better than narrow wheels do for me, though I’m discovering this has a lot to do with the hardness of the wheel too.

Anyway, these are chubby wheels and I like how they look. They are 101a, which is harder than the 99a I usually ride, but I discovered, despite my firm belief otherwise, that harder wheels actually don’t feel that bad on the streets I ride on. They still hold speed well and don’t mess me up any more on cracks and pebbles than 99a do. On rough ground, anything harder than 85a feels like shit to me, so that’s not a big factor. I discovered this interesting tidbit riding some Loophole wheels, which I also love and will review at a different time. The only thing I should mention regarding the difference in roll feel between 99a and 101a is that some 99a formulas do feel noticeably better on medium rough ground. The old (like a year ago) Bones easy street Fatties in 99a felt softer than the usual 99a wheel, but slid just as well as Formula 4, which are kind of the gold standard for me. Unfortunately, I think Bones stopped making the fatties. Que sera.

The big difference in 101a wheels, which is true of these OJ’s, is that they don’t slide nearly as well as 99a Spitfire Formula 4’s. Don’t get me wrong, I can get these to slide ok, but they aren’t as reliable and easy a slide to break into and control as the F4, 99a’s. But this is not a deal breaker, and is true of all the 101’s I’ve tried, including the F4 101a.

There are two things I like about the less grippy nature of these wheels. I can control and predict the slide. This means I’m not scared of sticking when I am going fast and trying to slide with these because unlike some other grippier wheels, I know how much slide I will get out of these and what I have to do on the board to get that slide. Ive tried some other 99-101a’s which have inconsistent slide, which is pretty scary because you can’t trust how things are going to go when you are going fast. Why this is the case, I cannot say.

The second thing, which I almost forgot to mention because I was spouting off for so long about slide, is that the little bit of extra grip makes wall rides easier for me. Not those nose bonk ones where you scoop up into a wall ride but nollie pop out, which seem to work fine for me on pretty much any wheel. I mean full wall rides, which on slick wheels tend to slide down onto the sides of my trucks unless I hit them just right. With these wheels, I can carve out of the wall ride better because they don’t slide easily for of the wall. I hope that makes sense.

Shape wise, they look cool and the contact patch is wide enough to feel solid on the ground, but the edges are rounded enough where they don’t instantly catch on the ground when you are trying to slide, like square edges wheels tend to. They are not symmetrical, but I haven’t gone deep enough down the rabbit hole of this stuff to be able to confidently tell you what the two different sides of the wheel is supposed to do. Probably something to do with locking in on different surfaces, and ease of rolling up on stuff for slappies, but that’s just speculation on my part.

Anyway, what am I trying to say….I like these wheels. I like the shape and in limited applications I like the grip. I would trade the grip for the nice, easy but predictable slide of 99a F4‘S, but if OJ decides to make these Mini combo shape in 99a I’ll give those a shot.

Occasionally I pick the brains of good skaters I come across for tips on how they get better. The two best pieces of advice I got were to skate with people who can pull you up to the next level (paraphrased) and to relax.

As I mostly skate alone, the first piece isn’t really one I can use often, but the advice to relax has been gold in an unexpected way.

Most obvious, is that when I am tense, it’s hard to control myself and the board in any meaningful way. The unexpected by product is a sense of flow I get into when I am warmed up and relaxing just enough, but not too much. It’s hard to talk about without making myself cringe, but it’s this sense of ease which makes every move feel linked to the previous one, even the inevitable stumbles and falls.

This is not to say I’m great at skating when I feel this ease, but skating feels great when it’s there.