How to Ollie Higher on a Skateboard

If you're going to make any real progress skateboarding, you have to start with the ollie. The ollie not only lets you skate around the city or skatepark without having to get off the board at every sidewalk or lip, but it's also the gateway to nearly every serious trick.

Difficulty:

Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Perfect your current ollie until you can perform the move quickly on a variety of surfaces and can land the ollie every time (or almost every time). Getting your form down on your current ollie height takes you straight into achieving higher ollies.

2. Bring your legs up. Your impulse might be to start popping the board harder with your back foot. However, no matter how hard you pop the board you'll only ollie as high as you can jump with both feet. So practice getting both feet high into the air through the ollie, even if you end up executing a little bit of a "ghost ollie," in which you get higher than the skateboard.

3. Pop the board. Stand on the board without moving. Pop the board hard with your backfoot. The important thing to pay attention to is timing your jump a split second just after you pop the board.

4. Put an object in your way. This helps force you to ollie to at least the height of the object. If you're nervous about eating pavement, then ollie up to something that has a soft surface, such as a patch of grass on top of a curb. Make sure you have solid forward speed, but don't overdo it.

5. Keep the board level. As your skateboarding improves and your ollie height gets better, you have to pay more attention to keeping the board level through the ollie. Have a friend watch you during a skateboarding session so you can find out if your board is at a strange angle during the ollie. If the board is tilting upward, raise your back leg faster and higher. The opposite is true if the board tilts down.