Will Ermish
How to Frontside Flip on a Skateboard.
Our skate instructor Coyote Rob breaks it down in today's trick tip tutorial.
Hey, what's going on, everybody! Today we're going to teach you how to do front side flips or the front side 180 kick flip. This is a classic trick, and if you really get into skateboarding, you have to learn front side flips. They are so much fun. Everybody has their own style, but I'm going to give you my tips.
So the first thing when you do front side flips, is to make sure you can front side 180 and kick flip. Like, really well. Make sure your kick flips are super easy, you have pop, and then make sure your front side 180s are the same. Make sure you're comfortable with them and be sure you can rotate them all the way around. If you're still kind of doing, like a pivot, you're not ready for a front side flip.
So this trick takes two steps of evolution. We've noticed the thing that people do wrong with front side flips is they kind of pivot them and they kind of don't try to throw the trick in between their legs. Now, obviously, you don't want to have a front side flip that's just like a hard flip and then you turn your body because that looks bad.
But when you're first learning, it's a lot better to throw the front side flip vertical in between your legs, because when you're a little kid and you're a little bit shorter, it's kind of scary to throw the front side flip in between your legs. You think you're going to popsicle or you think you're going to hit your man parts or whatever. But you need to get comfortable with throwing the board underneath your legs, because that's going to open up the door to having more control on your front side flips. It's going to help with hard flips, all that stuff. You definitely don't want to learn front side flips where you kind of try to 180 kick flip it. You kind of want to throw it in between your legs like that.
So first we're going to get into the foot positioning for the front side flip. You want to make sure you put your front foot kind of in the middle, a little bit lower than a kick flip. And you want to put your back foot kind of in the corner, a little bit above the pocket. So the simple explanation to this trick is you want to kind of lean back as you pop, not too much. You want to scoop the board down and forward. And then right here, this is the secret part. You want to flick off the corner. And the goal is to make the board flip right under your knee. So you want your flick to go outside and you want the board to go underneath you. And this is going to be really scary. So to practice it, just throw it in front of you and just bail it like a bunch of times. And if you can't get the full 180, just lean back and shove the board farther in front of you. Once you start landing a bunch of them like this and you feel the board flipping vertical straight underneath your legs, now you're ready to kind of fine tune the trick and make it look really good.
So once you're comfortable with throwing the front side slip in between your legs, you're ready to kind of flick them sideways and catch them and turn. So the only thing that you need to do differently is when I initially showed you the foot set up. You just want to move your foot farther like a kickstart and that's just going to allow you to get more friction on your flick, which is going to make the board go more sideways like this. So all you have to do is play around with how much you scoop the board forward and your flick.
So when you're throwing them vertical, you flick almost at a 90 degree angle. When you want them to catch sideways, you flick at a 45 degree angle and you move your foot farther on the board. I'm going to play some examples in slow motion of ones that I catch more sideways. But if you really want to see a good front side flip, check out Andrew Reynolds, maybe Tyler Price and yeah, that's pretty much it for the front side slip. This trick is super fun and it's one of my favorite tricks to do down stuff when you flip it and catch it sideways. It's amazing. So I hope you enjoyed this trick tip. If you have any other trick requests, make sure to comment down below. I'll see you guys next time. Peace.