How to Ollie
The footing
I teach you the first trick you should learn
The Ollie is one of the easiest and core tricks you can learn in skateboarding. It is the task of jumping with your board over an object or onto it. I’ll do my best to teach you how, and give you something to show off to the ladies. So let’s get started first with footing.
Footing is key to the Ollie. Footing is different with each person and also your footing can change on how high or low you want to Ollie. Your back foot should be on the tail with your toe getting ready to pop it down. Your front foot should be a little bit behind the front bolts taking up about the full length of the deck. Try to get the feel for that and roll around like that trying to get the feel for it, once you feel comfortable with that, we can move on to actually doing the Ollie.
Now that you have your feet ready, lets talk about doing the actual Ollie. First I always recommend visualizing it first. Think about what you’re going to do and how its going to look. This helps really understand the art of it and gives you a better feel for it. So just take your time. So, now that you have your back foot on the tail with your toes ready to pop and your front foot in the middle ready to slide and glide, lets get the Ollie on. You first want to Pop the tail by pushing your back foot down really hard on the tail, at the same time you do this you want to jump up and slide your front foot up towards the front of the board. What you’re doing is popping the board strait up by hitting the tail, but then your front foot slides forward and levels out the board thus pulling the tail up bringing you up off the ground. So that is the art of the Ollie. It’s a simple Pop, slide, glide, land. The land is just well….landing on your feet, make sure your front foot lands on the front bolts and your back foot on the back bolts or the tail. If you Ollie to high and come down with too much pressure and you land on the tail or the middle of the board, you can actually snap your deck. So you want to land on the trucks so that they absorb the weight of you landing. When you land you should also bend your knees a little to help even out the weight and make it more comfortable. Then just ride into the sunset and kiss the ladies as you roll on by.
The Ollie in action
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