It's winter now. That means that you won't be able to get out much and won't be able to hit the skateboard parks.
However, that doesn't mean that you should stop practicing and dreaming up your killer combos. Fingerboards are a great and cheap way to experiment with tricks and painlessly learn the physics behind the moves.
Freeskate
Tech Deck has some amazing ramps, rails and other obstacles that you can get to go with your fingerboards, but they are not necessary. Even if you are at school, you can ollie over pencils and slide and grind against staplers, binders and books. Here are some tricks to get you started:
Shove It: Start in the standard position, place your index finger on the middle of the board and your middle finger on the tail of the board. To do a shove it, stay still and use your middle finger to make a light flick towards you to spin the board and apply pressure with the index for control.
Ollie: From the standard position, move backwards suddenly and push down with the middle finger to get the board up into the air. Slide your index to the nose of the board to balance out and land flat.
Slides and Grinds: Use an Ollie and land the board on a rail or edge to slide and grind. If you turn the board 90 degrees and land with the board itself, that's a slide. If you land on the trucks of the board, then that's a grind.
Expand Your Boarding Experience
Aside from fingerboard, there are the larger handboards that are about a third of the size of a standard skateboard and you use your two hands to operate the board.
There are also fingersnowboards if you want to try out some of the snowboarding tricks you will see during the 2010 Winter Olympics. Gravity Fingerboards make some real nice fingersnowboards and you can use you almost anywhere you use regular fingerboards.
Related Stories:
- Tech Deck Fingerboards and Handboards
- The Science of Skateboarding
- Build Your Own Skatepark
- Skateboarding Sports Records
