How to Do a Kickflip on a Skateboard

Video Transcript

"My name is Shawn Connolly, I live in San Francisco, California. I'm a sponsored skateboarder and I also run a program called SF Skate Club for Kids. Now what I'm going to explain to you today is how to do the kickflip on a skateboard. Now to do a kickflip, you're going to want to make sure that you have good ollies because if you can't ollie, then you'll never be able to do a kickflip because what it requires you to do is hit the tail and jump off the ground, flip the board over, land back on the board and continue rolling straight. So what you're going to want to do when first learning how to do kickflips is test foot placement because for every flip trick that you learn on flat ground, its going to require you to learn how to figure out where your foot works the best. Now you put your foot on the tail exactly like you would for an ollie using the tip of your toe to get as much pop out of the board as you can from the tail. Now your front foot is going to be somewhere hanging slightly off with your toe pointed slightly towards the front of your board. Now the reason for this is that after you hit the tail to do the ollie, you're going to drag your foot up the side of the board out past the nose and that's going to make it do a kickflip. Catch it and then land and roll continue rolling away forward. Now just like with any flip trick, its going to take a lot of patience for you to learn how to do all of these tricks. So you're also going to want to learn how to do your tricks on flat ground, not moving and test them out. Now if you notice that the board isn't flipping enough, you may have to jump higher and you may have to put a little less shoe on the board with your front foot so that there is a little less board there to stop it and it flips a little quicker. Now if you notice that its doing too much of an ollie, you may have too much foot on the board. And this is how you do a kickflip. My name is Shawn Connolly and I'm from San Francisco, California and I run the SF Skate Club, a children's program for skateboarding. You can learn more about it at sfskateclub.com."