5 Advanced Tips to Become a Fingerboard Pro

You're going to learn five advanced #fingerboarding techniques that will improve your fingerboarding immensely and help you on your journey to become a fingerboard pro!

Wanna know the secrets that that even most pro fingerboarders don't know? Well watch the video to find out!

99% or more #fingerboard related tutorials focus on teaching tricks themselves and follow the same generic template.

Step 1: Know how to do these tricks before proceeding

Step 2: position your fingers like so

Blah, blah, blah...

Well today, I’m going to share some insight that can apply to every trick you learn.

1) Perspective: Change the way you look at fingerboarding tricks. Think about your approach to a kickflip 5-0. Let’s say you’ve struggled to lock in the 5-0 part. Where are your eyes looking? Most likely at the board! Try looking at the obstacle instead.

To learn this method, practice this initially with simple grinds. Try a simple 50-50 on an obstacle.

This is a great technique to employ when you are struggling with a combo grind. What I find is that I will switch to this technique and land within a try or two. If I continue to struggle, I will switch back to looking at the board. Sometimes a shift in perspective is needed to land a trick!

2) Break it down: Break a fingerboard trick down to the fundamentals. When you want to do a kickflip rotation, what are the ways to get the board to spin the way you want? Most of the time we absent mindedly flick.

Example: When riding in the upside down “inverse” stance, I had the epiphany that the motion to do a switch ollie in that stand is just a regular ollie pop, but upside down… This motion proved to me that it was possible, and I just had to re-think my own approach!

By taking something complicated, and stripping it down to it’s building blocks, you can identify the movements that are essential to making the trick happen 😊

3) Loading: I talked about this technique in my heelflip tutorial. Loading is a subtle movement used to gather momentum taken prior to performing a trick. In slow motion, you can see Taylor subtlety moving the nose of the board towards his body, further increasing tension between his front finger and the board. You can use this tension to leverage an even faster rotation allowing you to flick a faster and more horizontally leveled flip trick.

Heelflips is an obvious example, however, another good trick to see loading applied is a switch front finger impossible. By popping the board from the pocket, I load tension. I release the tension during the wrap, which is then makes a faster, more horizontal spin.


4) Pressure: I don’t see nearly enough people talking about using pressure as an advantage. By applying pressure in specific ways, it can allow you to perform tricks in ways that are different. There are tricks where being very light on your fingers works best. For other tricks, applying a heavy amount of pressure can be essential to the trick.

An obvious example of a trick where pressure is essential is with pressure flips.

5) Hesitation: I highlighted this technique in my Kickflip tutorial. When performing tricks, most of us, if not all blend the flick motion into the pop motion. One of the best tips I learned from skateboarding was separating a trick into parts. Focus on the ollie first then the flick. This hesitation makes for a more stylish trick.

BONUS) Use your body: Despite what the name implies, Fingerboarding requires more than using just your fingers. Most tricks utilize your fingers, hand, wrist, and arm to move a certain way to achieve a trick. Furthermore, even how you walk/move can affect your fingerboarding especially when doing a long line! Practice.

Let me know in the comments section below if you found these tips to be helpful!