How to Learn Skateboarding as a Complete Beginner

Most people learn to skate badly because they learn it in the wrong order. They watch a video, buy a board, and roll straight into a skatepark bowl on day one — then conclude skateboarding isn't for them. It is for them. The order was wrong. Here's the right one.

Step one: find your stance

Regular (left foot forward) or goofy (right foot forward)? The reliable test: have someone give you a gentle shove from behind when you're not expecting it. The foot you step out with is your front foot. Neither stance is better — but forcing the wrong one costs you weeks.

Step two: push and brake until they're boring

Find a flat, smooth surface — an empty car park, a quiet trail — and push. Then foot brake: drag your back foot lightly until you stop. Do both until you can go fifty metres without looking down. This takes most adults two or three sessions and it is not wasted time; every later skill assumes it.

Step three: carve

Turning on a skateboard is leaning, not steering. Gentle S-turns across the full width of a path teach your ankles and knees what the trucks do. Carve both directions equally — riders who only turn one way hit a wall the first time a park forces the other.

Step four: small drops, then the park

Ride off a kerb. Then a small bank. When both feel routine, you're ready for a beginner-friendly skatepark — on its flat area first. In Colorado that means somewhere like Trails in Centennial or Cornerstone in Littleton, where the beginner flat is wide and the morning crowd is thin.

What to buy (and what to skip)

• Buy: a complete board from a real skate shop ($120–$160). Big-box boards have unsafe trucks and bearings.
• Buy: flat-soled skate shoes. Running shoes grip wrong and hide board feel.
• Consider: a helmet and pads, especially if you're over 30. There's no toughness prize.
• Skip: anything marketed as a trick trainer. Your money is better spent on one hour of coaching.

The mistakes that stall everyone

Looking down at the board while pushing, leaning back when scared, and practising once a month. The fix for all three is boring: eyes up, knees bent, sessions close together. Three sessions in a fortnight beats one a month by an embarrassing margin.

The shortcut

Everything above can be learned alone — it just takes three times as long and usually includes one avoidable fall. A single beginner lesson compresses the first month into an hour: stance confirmed, pushing corrected in real time, and a plan for what to practise before the next one. Our adult beginner and kids' programs both start exactly this way.

Written by Evan

Head coach at Rocky Mountain Shred School. Thirty years on a board and more than 1,200 students coached across the Denver metro.