After a long time familiarizing yourself with the longboard, you will feel excited to learn more new movements that are harder and require more skills. Although this is a difficult task, and you will wonder how to powerslide on a longboard, but if you try to learn, you will never regret it.
In particular, power sliding is a beautiful gesture, requiring many techniques that you can learn. And this article will show you how to powerslide on a longboard, starting with the most basic steps.
Let’s get started.
General Information About Power Sliding
If you’re starting to learn how to play skateboarding, power sliding will look quite scary. Therefore, it is best to learn other basic techniques competently before learning to powerslide on a longboard.
If you still have a lot of concerns about whether powerslide is safe to learn, the answer is yes if you learn it properly and follow our technical guidelines. Although it is a difficult task and requires a lot of advanced techniques, if you practice hard, you will undoubtedly learn excellently.
But why is learning to powerslide so important? In addition to being an advanced skill for you to practice, it also helps you learn to master other fundamental skills such as freestyle longboarding and sliding downhill.
There are three ways to stop a longboard: foot braking, powerslide, and advanced techniques.
In particular, you will often use foot braking when slipping at slow speeds and on flat roads. When using this method, you need to pay attention to use specialized shoes to avoid injury.
And advanced techniques require you to have a very high technical level to be able to apply. There are three commonly used techniques: toeside pendulum slides, heelside pendulum slides, and 360 slides.
Lastly, powerslide is the most popular and most beautiful technique to stop a longboard. You can apply power sliding even when sliding at high speed.
See More: How to do a Flip in Skate 3
Kinds of Powerslides
There are many types of powerslides for you to learn. However, it should be noted that these categories do not have a clear separation. Most of them are done in combination with each other smoothly.
- Partial slide for slowing down (speed checks)
- Crouching low on your board (sitdown slides)
- Hands-on ground, swing board around hands while sliding (Pendulum slides)
- Put one or two hands down on the ground (Coleman / glove down slides)
- Ending the slide in switch stance (180 slides)
- Remaining standing while sliding (stand up slides)
- Facing uphill (toeside slides)
- Facing downhill (heelside slides)
You may find that your skills will determine which type of study will be more comfortable. Many people feel scared when they have to stand up slides, while others find it more frightening when they sit down.
How to Powerslide on a Longboard?
Get Some Speed
To powerslide, you need to gather speed first. The faster you have the speed, the easier it will be to perform operations to slide. So the ideal place to start is a barely steep hill.
You also need to pay attention to choosing the appropriate longboard. Your longboard needs to have reliable and flexible wheels to perform the next step.
Toeside Pre-crave
After reaching a certain speed, you need to lean forward and press your foot to create a quick toeside turn. This movement is significant to generate force to help break traction in the next turn.
While doing the pre-carve turn, you also need to prepare for the next slide. Remember always to keep your feet together and bend your knees to ensure a low center of gravity.
Heelside Carve
You will find that the right time to turn again and start carving into the slide is when you slide to the side of the road. At this point, you need to press the heel of your front foot to create a quick 45º backside turn. Then, you move your heel to make leverage and bend your knees to lower your focus even further. You need to compress right before the slide, and then decompress into the slide.
The Actual Slide
After you switch to the heel of 15 to 30 degrees, you need to do several things at once:
Bend your front knee and put a considerable part of your weight on it
Push your longboard forward by pushing your heel. At the same time, you can also increase the distance between your legs by extending the hind legs out.
Combine the above movements with the rotation of your hips
Lift your arms and lean backward
Keep your skateboard going forward with your both legs
During this process, you need to pay attention to keep the knees bent and the back legs extended.
End of Slide
To end the slide and get back to your normal stance to resume riding. First, you need to bend both of your knees again and shift your weight onto the front foot, along with release the pressure of your back foot, while slightly leaning your body forward
Then you will need to pull your back foot into position the board back under you, turning your torso back to the initial position before you perform the powerslide. Also, bring your elbows back to your sides again.
Common Mistakes
As you try to learn new techniques such as the powerslide, errors can occur anytime. So below are a couple of common errors and general tips that might help you when mastering this technique.
- Don’t add too much weight in the front, and this would cause you to pivot on the front truck with your back wheels which come off the ground, to avoid this remember to slideout your longboard
- Do not kick out the board with the back foot while riding straight, also avoid performing a heelside carve just before kicking out
- Remember to put your weight on your front foot to make it easier to kick out and start the powerslide.
- Note that some amount of back lean is essential as well. If you are leaning forward too much, it may cause some unwanted influence of wheels, lean forward enough to prevent falling backward.
General Tips
- Aim for a lawn or sand ground to minimize your possible injuries compared with concrete when you want to stop
- You can have your arms open to increase wind resistance which might help you slow down when you want to stop
- To avoid causing an accident, you must always pay attention to pedestrians and traffic
- Never stake with your proper protective equipment such as pads to protect your hands and legs away from scratch and a high-quality helmet for protecting your head from any serious injury
Read More: Skateboard Powerslide Instructions
Conclusion
Learning how to powerslide on a longboard can be challenging to get started with, but once you’re determined and trying, you’ll love it. Because it is a difficult skill, it helps you to improve your technique significantly. You will feel satisfied and happy with yourself if you can master it.
