A skateboarding trick, or simply a trick is a maneuver performed on a skateboard generally while moving. Learning and perfecting new tricks is the main goal of many skateboarders, and most of a skateboarders time is spent learning these tricks.

Basic Freestyle skateboard tricks involve balancing on some other part of the board than all four wheels, such as two wheels or one wheel, the tail of the board, or the edges on either side. It includes flipping and manipulating the skateboard in and out of these stances which were invented in the earliest years of skateboarding, this forms the basis of freestyle or flat ground skateboarding.

Aerial skateboard tricks involve floating in the air while using a hand to hold the board on his or her feet or by keeping constant and careful pressure on the board with the feet to keep it from floating away.

This class of tricks was first popular when Tony Alva became well known for his front side airs in empty swimming pools in the late 1970s and has expanded to include the bulk of skateboarding tricks to this day, including the Ollie and all of its variations.

Flip tricks are a subset of aerials which is based on the Ollie. The first such trick was the kick flip, which involves spinning the board around many different axes. It also includes combining several rotations in to one trick. These tricks are arguably most popular among street skateboarding purists, although skaters with other styles perform them as well.

Lip tricks are performed on the coping of a pool or skateboard ramp. Most grinds can be made on the coping of a ramp or pool as well, but there are some coping tricks which require momentum and vertical altitude that can only be attained on a transitioned riding surface. Those include Inverts and their variations as well as some dedicated air-to-lip combination.

Skateboarders can combine many types of basic, easy and complicated tricks together and find many new combination of skateboarding tricks which helps it keep it appeal amongst skateboarder followers.

The people who invented those basic, early tricks named that trick whatever they wanted. And most of the time it reflects what that person is thinking about the trick at that particular time. The earliest tricks were often named after the person who invented it. For e.g. Andrecht after Dave Andrecht; Ollie after Alan “Ollie” Gelfand; Elguerial after Eddie Elguera.

Sometimes a trick got more than one name as several people invented the trick independently around the same time or the original name was lost and it was given a new name.

Most of new tricks are invented through combining existing tricks together rather than creating something distinctly new, and the name reflects that. For example Danny Way was the first to do a Kickflip into an Indy, so he simply called it a kickflip indy.

Do you want to learn how to skateboard like a pro? Well then there is one important thing you need to know.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Skateboarding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.