@@InlinePilot went roller blading this morning, and here to confirm it works! I was practicing on the sidewalk (London has smooth stone that are in squares) and every now and then I would catch an edge, but when I tried it on the tarmac it worked well! Thanks for the video.
I guess they do not mention this because they assume your all weight is in your front foot and the breaking foot just breaks. But to break you eventually put your weight somewhere in the breaking foot. Thank you for the tip
True, often the advice is to lighten up the dragging skate. Keeping the back foot in the air would indeed prevent it from drifting sideways 😅, but no matter how light I would touch the ground, it would always drift left or right, eventually.
Very happy with the floor of the garage, great for practice. Are you having a tri setup for street skating, or you think there’s also an advantage for slalom?
Try to skate on one foot being able to correct your direction (10-20meters). When you can get it stable you can try to put rear foot slightly down and adjust as long you progress.With 3-5 days training, 2-3hours each, you should get some results.
First of all most people do the same mistake by T-stops and thats to shift too much weight on the dragging foot. The position is the main cause of spinning or loosing balance. If You learn to shift all of Your weight on Your front foot itll be easy as taking a candy from a kid. Try dragging one foot on only 1 (front) wheel behind You and going as low as You can on Your front foot - good exercise to a well balanced position and to exercise Your leg muscles - those are the basics
This is such a great tip! It happens to me that my foot comes to the side again without me intending it to! I will give it a try to put some more weight on my toe.
@@InlinePilot I managed to come to a full stop on both sides with your tip!! When I drag with my right foot, I need to focus on my heel. With the left foot I need to focus more on my toe! Thank you so much for uploading these videos! I'm going to try circling the 3 cones next :D
@@jolijn4263 Awesome you progressed in your drag stop now, congrats! 👏👏 Interesting there's a difference between both sides. Maybe something different in your pose, knee bend or the angle of your dragging skate. But at least you have a stable basis to start playing around with it now. I realised later that with skating around those 3 cones, I didn't really follow Tiago's original idea. I definitely have to give that another try and do it at higher speeds to get into those small drifts by using lunge turns instead of parallel turns. Still so much to learn with that for me also 😊. Thank you so much for returning to report on your results! 👍
@@InlinePilot There are some unusual circumstances: I didn't skate for 8 months due to winter and an injury, and this was my second time getting back to it on new skates! So my balance was less than ideal... Which makes it extra impressive that I just solved a problem I had last year so quickly with your tip!! Generally speaking, I pronate on one side only, and one knee bends more easily than the other. Last year I focused on balancing on 1 leg and changing the angle of my foot to try and do a t-stop. Clearly I was focusing on the wrong thing! I saw Tiago's video too! My cones are coming the mail today... Summer is back yayyy! Time to put on my skates and repeat what I learned yesterday!
@@jolijn4263 Wow seems quite clear the trick didn't just work for me then. That's exactly why I thought others should know this too, nice! Although pronation can have different reasons, for me I solved it by shifting my frame to the inside. On the right foot much more than on the left. Once you're close, a shift of 1 millimeter can make a big difference, but I needed to shift it at least 5mm sideways on the heel bolt. Have been planning to make a video about that. Maybe after the next. My main way to tell whether to shift the frame more to the inside, is to feel whether I need to press more to the outside of my foot to get on the edge of my skate (to get to the point where you don't fall to either side). Now that I ride on edge with equal weight on both sides of my feet, everything's so much more stable and easy. Enjoy skating around your new cones! 🤗
Well, you're right and you're not right at the same time. I mean that's a good exercise on control and it can learn you to keep the proper position of the feet, but it alone won't give you stability. The stability in t-stop and in many other stopping techniques starts from the position of your torso and hips/knees. Because a) they are much heavier than feet, b) hips have the biggest muscles in your body, hence they can give much more power, and if they're in the right position, you will transfer all that power to your braking wheel/wheels. The hips should be close to each other, in a "closed" position, with the knee of dragging leg pointing to the front. Kness bent of course. There are some small points that will give that right position and your idea here is ok, since it worked well for you. I know three key points that guarantee good position. But position is not enough, you have to understand where to get the energy to keep that position, because on higher speed you will need much more energy. And I usually use t-stop with only one wheel - the front one and it works fine, because my hips are in right position at that moment. And i can simply switch to dragging with back wheel also. On higher speed i switch to all wheels , i tense my hips, i transfer body weight etc. Sorry for such a long read, I've learnt t-stop intuitively, and understood all that theory years later. But it saved me a lot on all types of surfaces and hills , so yeah i can write a novel about it.
Thanks for your detailed perspective! I'm sure that strength and pose have a lot to contribute to a successful T-Stop, as they do for so many other skating skills as well. In the end, stability comes from feedback. Either passive, like an arrow being pushed back straight by the air, or active, like the steering of a boat. So it's not just about force, but how that force is directed so that deviations are countered by a correcting force. Correct me if I'm wrong, but your description sounds to me like you believe you have found a passive stability in your T-Stop, so that you can remain static and still be stable. On the other hand, I can imagine that dragging only on the toe, or only on the heel, while not having the other wheels on the ground, can also allow for changing the point of contact to the ground, relative to the ankle/leg/hips, to apply an active feedback similar to changing the placement of weight between front and back when all wheels are kept on the ground. To be honest, I can't really explain the physics of why the method I'm showing here actually works. It would make more sense to me that changing the angle of the dragging skate makes a bigger difference than where it has the most friction on the ground. Maybe it's just that it indirectly causes the foot angle to change, even though it feels to me like there's more to it. I don't know. I will keep experimenting and maybe one day my experience and my conscious understanding will meet each other and shake hands 😆
First, sorry if my English isn't perfect, it's not my native language. Then, I really enjoy watching this type of videos. As you said, I learnt from doing it, I have no theory and I don't really understand what I'm doing, I just do it 😂 I'm 35 and I learnt since I was 11, so I think my practice is ok 😅 I just want to understand why I don't succeed in some moves, so I'm back to basics. For the T-break, I never put any weight on my back foot. My front leg is bent, my back leg is stretched, locked in a straight position. To slow down a little, I just let it scrape the ground like a dead weight. If I want to slow more or stop, I try to bring my back skate closer to my front skate. Since my back leg remains straight and my front leg bent, my back leg is longer than my front leg, so my back skate will apply more force on the ground. I'm never unbalanced since all my weight stays on my front foot, and I don't turn randomly either. In practice, it pull on the muscles of the inner thighs, between the legs, if it can help (sorry I'm bad at anatomy 😅) I really don't know if what I'm doing is right or wrong, but it actually works pretty well 😂
Thanks a lot for your detailed description of how you T-brake. Sounds good to me, especially if it works well for you to effectively brake. I can't judge whether there's anything that can be improved about that. Maybe some more experienced skaters are able to provide some useful comments or acknowledgement. I only have a bit more than 2 years of experience in inline skating, so my main focus on this channel is sharing what is helping me as a beginner/intermediate skater that I haven't seen much, or at all, in the instructions of others. I'm curious, though, what moves are you wanting to improve on?
@@InlinePilot Thanks for your answer 😊🙏 Well, I still can skate backward 😅 I'm pretty sure it's in my head because I can easily turn around without falling. I can jump, up and down stairs or sidewalks one foot by one or with a jump... But when I try to go backward, I think I'm just scared to fall and it blocks me 😅 I also have a leg shorter than the other, so my balance is not equal on both feet, I'm like stuck in comfortable positions I always use but it's really hard to switch my main leg. I know everyone has a better side, but I feel really locked on my right side. For example, if I try to stand on my left foot, I just lost balance in few seconds, but with my right one I can stay indefinitely, taking speed or losing it when I want/need. I also got injured, not rollerblading but motorcycle accident, twice. I'm now affraid for my knees and neck, I know one more bad fall could have dramatic consequences but I can't stop rollerblading, I just love it so much 😂 So I return to basics, trying to understand theory to fight fear and regain confidence in myself and my capacities to have good reactions in perilous situations 😅 Videos like yours are very interesting because you explain how it works for you and it allows to compare with my habits and see what is different. I think we all adjust our balance in our personal way. That's why I shared my way in return, maybe it can help someone else 😉🙏
@@kyw78 Thanks for sharing that. I was having limitations with my left leg for a while. I just couldn't get any thrust out of the underpush. It took me a long time to figure out that it was that I was simply not bending my left knee as much as my right, so there was no spring in my left leg to unwind and make that push. I also had returning pain in my left knee after intensive skating. So the solution for me was to build muscle strength by training off-skate doing sustained deep leg lunges, while making sure to keep the knee joint perfectly straight. Maybe that might help you too. I actually have a video about how I learned backwards skating, but it was not titled like that. Now that you shared this I realised my mistake and adapted the title and thumbnail to show that it's mostly about backwards skating. My main point is that learning backwards skating is like learning to skate all over again. And the first thing I needed to learn (just like I did for forwards skating) is to balance rolling on one foot, and do that for both feet. After I could do that, I was able to roll in the scissors position backwards, do parallel turns and start learning crossovers. Here is the link to the video: czcams.com/video/IP80uYCGzRg/video.html
@@InlinePilot Thanks ! I watched your video and I totally agree with the notion of new skill. Even the fact of looking on your back when you go backwards, maybe it's one of the things that blocked my mind... 🤔 I wear glasses and I guess you're looking with the side part of your eyes... The part glasses doesn't cover ? Maybe it restricted me to feel I know what is behind me and feel safe to go backwards. I guess I have to find my own balance with my both body and eyes capacities/restrictions. Your exercises are interesting, I'll try it. But I have one question, because maybe I'm wrong from the beginning with this : you always begin forward before going backwards? You never start backwards from the very beginning of your move? I wanted to learn to push and stop backwards before taking any speed, but maybe I'm wrong and I should work on transitions with a minimal speed instead of trying to start backwards... 🤔 I think I will try to switch from forward to backwards with one foot, it could help, and work on my transitions could help me to feel more comfortable backwards... 🤔 Another question, when you make the reversed T-stop, when your perpendicular foot is in front of you, how do you do not blocking your wheels on scratches from the ground? Just getting lower? I just need to bend my rolling knee more? Anyway, thank you so much for your answers, I really enjoy talking theory, even if I'm not fluent and it's quite hard to speak technical stuff in English 😂 Another new skill in progress 😁👍
@@kyw78You're doing pretty good with your English, it's not so bad at all. I'm not native English either, by the way, I'm Dutch. Thanks for taking the effort to have this discussion and practice our English together! It's definitely helpful in the beginning to be able to look sideways out of your eyes when going backwards. But if you get more comfortable with it, you will be able open your hips, turn your whole upper body and also turn your head sideways, to look backwards more straight. So I think this problem with the glasses should improve, eventually. I'm still not fully there either, btw. Interesting you noticed me starting forwards all the time. I haven't really thought about that. I think it's partly to practice my transitions, but mainly because when going backwards I don't really like pushing off on an inside edge and then lifting up my foot. When going backwards, I mostly use underpushes or criss-cross motions without taking any foot off the ground, which works better when already having some speed. I sometimes start off on an underpush-turn straight into backwards, but I'm not good at accelerating backwards from low speeds yet. That's something I'd like to learn, and also develop some strong calf-muscles to do that. For the backwards T-Stop, I'm not sure if I understood your question correctly, but I think you're asking about how I don't get my dragging wheels catching on irregularities in the road. When I do a backwards T-Stop I first put practically all my weight on the rolling foot. And, like you said, drop down, and then start the drag with the other foot. I keep both knees close together as well, practically touching. From that X-like stance, without much weight on the dragging foot, it doesn't really matter much what surface it is dragged on. But it was difficult for me to do this on my left leg as the rolling leg, because my right leg is my dominant leg. So putting all my weight on the left leg was counter-intuitive in the beginning. And going low on that left leg was more difficult too, because it was a bit weaker, just like it was with the under push.
I have the feeling that I get more stability the closer my dragging foot is to the rolling foot when coming to a halt. In the end, my dragging foot is perpendicular, centered and almost touching the rolling foot and I can stand still without losing balance. I believe keeping it perpendicular and centered also minimizes the chance of rotation. But in the end, it is so much about developing a feeling for it, especially for higher speeds. I'm going to observe that more thoroughly from now on, because I'd really like to understand it better so I can give other people tips on how to learn it. I'll also try out your tip or see if I'm doing that already intuitively.
@Neosublimation interesting, so your T-Stop is actually a perfect T and not an L? Or only at the end? Does that mean your wheels are not turning during the drag? Don’t you get flat spots then? Makes sense that draggjng closer by will be less likely to throw you off balance. When I do a backwards drag my feet are much closer and don’t really have this sideways pull I had with the forwards TStop. Unless I deliberately drag on my heel to turn into the inverted mohawk.
@@InlinePilot I have observed this more closely in the past week. At higher speeds it is indeed an L. But when coming closer to a stop I find the T better. I actually don't know whether the weels are spinning. Probably during the L and less during the T. And yeah, practicing slides (not only T/L brake, but also soul slide) has worn off my wheels a lot.
@@Neosublimation thanks for reporting your findings back here! Makes sense. Of course wheel wear is expected. Flat spots are the worst, so probably you don’t get them because you have an L-drag at higher speed then.
If u have bad stability and weak legs then yes. Otherwise you should be able to one leg skate with confidence so your Tstop is always useful. You build your balance and needed muscles with practice or focused weight training.
Necessary, but not sufficient. I’ve been able to do one-footed slaloms left and right until at a standstill, for more than a year, and pretty fast, too. But I still couldn’t hold the t-stop on one side for very long. So there’s definitely more to it than just skating on one foot, and my legs apparently were not smart enough to figure it out by themselves.
The key to good T-stop braking is your courage to accept the fact that your wheel rubber is eroding 🤣
Nothing some Dutch courage can't solve 😁
Thank you for this tip, I haven’t heard of it anywhere else. I will give it a try tomorrow. It makes a lot more sense now.
Hope it helps, let us know how it went!
@@InlinePilot went roller blading this morning, and here to confirm it works! I was practicing on the sidewalk (London has smooth stone that are in squares) and every now and then I would catch an edge, but when I tried it on the tarmac it worked well! Thanks for the video.
@@kapowshi thanks for reporting back and awesome to hear that it worked!
Thanks! Your advice surprisingly worked well.
Great to hear, happy braking! 😄
I guess they do not mention this because they assume your all weight is in your front foot and the breaking foot just breaks. But to break you eventually put your weight somewhere in the breaking foot. Thank you for the tip
True, often the advice is to lighten up the dragging skate. Keeping the back foot in the air would indeed prevent it from drifting sideways 😅, but no matter how light I would touch the ground, it would always drift left or right, eventually.
That’s a really good explanation! You’ve got a point. Thank you for sharing this!
Thank you for this very good explanation. I have never heard anyone mention this before. You have given a very helpful tip here.❤
Great, hope it really works for you when you try it out!
thanks, waiting for a video like this for a long time
Great video, thanks!
Great tip, never heard this one before. Gonna try tomorrow. Thanks for sharing 🤲🏻
Awesome, very curious how it goes for you. Love how you’re also sharing your beginner’s experiences on your channel. 👏
You have such a nice parking lot to practice in. I am just starting to try tri set up and have to learn to stop all over again. lol
Very happy with the floor of the garage, great for practice. Are you having a tri setup for street skating, or you think there’s also an advantage for slalom?
Try to skate on one foot being able to correct your direction (10-20meters). When you can get it stable you can try to put rear foot slightly down and adjust as long you progress.With 3-5 days training, 2-3hours each, you should get some results.
First of all most people do the same mistake by T-stops and thats to shift too much weight on the dragging foot. The position is the main cause of spinning or loosing balance. If You learn to shift all of Your weight on Your front foot itll be easy as taking a candy from a kid. Try dragging one foot on only 1 (front) wheel behind You and going as low as You can on Your front foot - good exercise to a well balanced position and to exercise Your leg muscles - those are the basics
This is such a great tip! It happens to me that my foot comes to the side again without me intending it to! I will give it a try to put some more weight on my toe.
Your symptom sounds very familiar indeed, hope now you can finally get that foot under control 🙂 Please let me know if it helps or not.
@@InlinePilot I managed to come to a full stop on both sides with your tip!! When I drag with my right foot, I need to focus on my heel. With the left foot I need to focus more on my toe! Thank you so much for uploading these videos! I'm going to try circling the 3 cones next :D
@@jolijn4263 Awesome you progressed in your drag stop now, congrats! 👏👏 Interesting there's a difference between both sides. Maybe something different in your pose, knee bend or the angle of your dragging skate. But at least you have a stable basis to start playing around with it now.
I realised later that with skating around those 3 cones, I didn't really follow Tiago's original idea. I definitely have to give that another try and do it at higher speeds to get into those small drifts by using lunge turns instead of parallel turns. Still so much to learn with that for me also 😊.
Thank you so much for returning to report on your results! 👍
@@InlinePilot There are some unusual circumstances: I didn't skate for 8 months due to winter and an injury, and this was my second time getting back to it on new skates! So my balance was less than ideal... Which makes it extra impressive that I just solved a problem I had last year so quickly with your tip!! Generally speaking, I pronate on one side only, and one knee bends more easily than the other. Last year I focused on balancing on 1 leg and changing the angle of my foot to try and do a t-stop. Clearly I was focusing on the wrong thing!
I saw Tiago's video too! My cones are coming the mail today... Summer is back yayyy! Time to put on my skates and repeat what I learned yesterday!
@@jolijn4263 Wow seems quite clear the trick didn't just work for me then. That's exactly why I thought others should know this too, nice!
Although pronation can have different reasons, for me I solved it by shifting my frame to the inside. On the right foot much more than on the left. Once you're close, a shift of 1 millimeter can make a big difference, but I needed to shift it at least 5mm sideways on the heel bolt. Have been planning to make a video about that. Maybe after the next. My main way to tell whether to shift the frame more to the inside, is to feel whether I need to press more to the outside of my foot to get on the edge of my skate (to get to the point where you don't fall to either side). Now that I ride on edge with equal weight on both sides of my feet, everything's so much more stable and easy.
Enjoy skating around your new cones! 🤗
Well, you're right and you're not right at the same time. I mean that's a good exercise on control and it can learn you to keep the proper position of the feet, but it alone won't give you stability. The stability in t-stop and in many other stopping techniques starts from the position of your torso and hips/knees. Because a) they are much heavier than feet, b) hips have the biggest muscles in your body, hence they can give much more power, and if they're in the right position, you will transfer all that power to your braking wheel/wheels. The hips should be close to each other, in a "closed" position, with the knee of dragging leg pointing to the front. Kness bent of course. There are some small points that will give that right position and your idea here is ok, since it worked well for you. I know three key points that guarantee good position. But position is not enough, you have to understand where to get the energy to keep that position, because on higher speed you will need much more energy. And I usually use t-stop with only one wheel - the front one and it works fine, because my hips are in right position at that moment. And i can simply switch to dragging with back wheel also. On higher speed i switch to all wheels , i tense my hips, i transfer body weight etc.
Sorry for such a long read, I've learnt t-stop intuitively, and understood all that theory years later. But it saved me a lot on all types of surfaces and hills , so yeah i can write a novel about it.
Thanks for your detailed perspective! I'm sure that strength and pose have a lot to contribute to a successful T-Stop, as they do for so many other skating skills as well. In the end, stability comes from feedback. Either passive, like an arrow being pushed back straight by the air, or active, like the steering of a boat. So it's not just about force, but how that force is directed so that deviations are countered by a correcting force. Correct me if I'm wrong, but your description sounds to me like you believe you have found a passive stability in your T-Stop, so that you can remain static and still be stable. On the other hand, I can imagine that dragging only on the toe, or only on the heel, while not having the other wheels on the ground, can also allow for changing the point of contact to the ground, relative to the ankle/leg/hips, to apply an active feedback similar to changing the placement of weight between front and back when all wheels are kept on the ground.
To be honest, I can't really explain the physics of why the method I'm showing here actually works. It would make more sense to me that changing the angle of the dragging skate makes a bigger difference than where it has the most friction on the ground. Maybe it's just that it indirectly causes the foot angle to change, even though it feels to me like there's more to it. I don't know. I will keep experimenting and maybe one day my experience and my conscious understanding will meet each other and shake hands 😆
First, sorry if my English isn't perfect, it's not my native language.
Then, I really enjoy watching this type of videos. As you said, I learnt from doing it, I have no theory and I don't really understand what I'm doing, I just do it 😂
I'm 35 and I learnt since I was 11, so I think my practice is ok 😅 I just want to understand why I don't succeed in some moves, so I'm back to basics.
For the T-break, I never put any weight on my back foot. My front leg is bent, my back leg is stretched, locked in a straight position. To slow down a little, I just let it scrape the ground like a dead weight. If I want to slow more or stop, I try to bring my back skate closer to my front skate. Since my back leg remains straight and my front leg bent, my back leg is longer than my front leg, so my back skate will apply more force on the ground. I'm never unbalanced since all my weight stays on my front foot, and I don't turn randomly either.
In practice, it pull on the muscles of the inner thighs, between the legs, if it can help (sorry I'm bad at anatomy 😅)
I really don't know if what I'm doing is right or wrong, but it actually works pretty well 😂
Thanks a lot for your detailed description of how you T-brake. Sounds good to me, especially if it works well for you to effectively brake. I can't judge whether there's anything that can be improved about that. Maybe some more experienced skaters are able to provide some useful comments or acknowledgement. I only have a bit more than 2 years of experience in inline skating, so my main focus on this channel is sharing what is helping me as a beginner/intermediate skater that I haven't seen much, or at all, in the instructions of others.
I'm curious, though, what moves are you wanting to improve on?
@@InlinePilot Thanks for your answer 😊🙏
Well, I still can skate backward 😅 I'm pretty sure it's in my head because I can easily turn around without falling. I can jump, up and down stairs or sidewalks one foot by one or with a jump... But when I try to go backward, I think I'm just scared to fall and it blocks me 😅
I also have a leg shorter than the other, so my balance is not equal on both feet, I'm like stuck in comfortable positions I always use but it's really hard to switch my main leg. I know everyone has a better side, but I feel really locked on my right side. For example, if I try to stand on my left foot, I just lost balance in few seconds, but with my right one I can stay indefinitely, taking speed or losing it when I want/need.
I also got injured, not rollerblading but motorcycle accident, twice. I'm now affraid for my knees and neck, I know one more bad fall could have dramatic consequences but I can't stop rollerblading, I just love it so much 😂 So I return to basics, trying to understand theory to fight fear and regain confidence in myself and my capacities to have good reactions in perilous situations 😅
Videos like yours are very interesting because you explain how it works for you and it allows to compare with my habits and see what is different. I think we all adjust our balance in our personal way. That's why I shared my way in return, maybe it can help someone else 😉🙏
@@kyw78 Thanks for sharing that. I was having limitations with my left leg for a while. I just couldn't get any thrust out of the underpush. It took me a long time to figure out that it was that I was simply not bending my left knee as much as my right, so there was no spring in my left leg to unwind and make that push. I also had returning pain in my left knee after intensive skating. So the solution for me was to build muscle strength by training off-skate doing sustained deep leg lunges, while making sure to keep the knee joint perfectly straight. Maybe that might help you too. I actually have a video about how I learned backwards skating, but it was not titled like that. Now that you shared this I realised my mistake and adapted the title and thumbnail to show that it's mostly about backwards skating. My main point is that learning backwards skating is like learning to skate all over again. And the first thing I needed to learn (just like I did for forwards skating) is to balance rolling on one foot, and do that for both feet. After I could do that, I was able to roll in the scissors position backwards, do parallel turns and start learning crossovers. Here is the link to the video: czcams.com/video/IP80uYCGzRg/video.html
@@InlinePilot Thanks ! I watched your video and I totally agree with the notion of new skill. Even the fact of looking on your back when you go backwards, maybe it's one of the things that blocked my mind... 🤔 I wear glasses and I guess you're looking with the side part of your eyes... The part glasses doesn't cover ? Maybe it restricted me to feel I know what is behind me and feel safe to go backwards. I guess I have to find my own balance with my both body and eyes capacities/restrictions.
Your exercises are interesting, I'll try it. But I have one question, because maybe I'm wrong from the beginning with this : you always begin forward before going backwards? You never start backwards from the very beginning of your move?
I wanted to learn to push and stop backwards before taking any speed, but maybe I'm wrong and I should work on transitions with a minimal speed instead of trying to start backwards... 🤔
I think I will try to switch from forward to backwards with one foot, it could help, and work on my transitions could help me to feel more comfortable backwards... 🤔
Another question, when you make the reversed T-stop, when your perpendicular foot is in front of you, how do you do not blocking your wheels on scratches from the ground? Just getting lower? I just need to bend my rolling knee more?
Anyway, thank you so much for your answers, I really enjoy talking theory, even if I'm not fluent and it's quite hard to speak technical stuff in English 😂 Another new skill in progress 😁👍
@@kyw78You're doing pretty good with your English, it's not so bad at all. I'm not native English either, by the way, I'm Dutch. Thanks for taking the effort to have this discussion and practice our English together!
It's definitely helpful in the beginning to be able to look sideways out of your eyes when going backwards. But if you get more comfortable with it, you will be able open your hips, turn your whole upper body and also turn your head sideways, to look backwards more straight. So I think this problem with the glasses should improve, eventually. I'm still not fully there either, btw.
Interesting you noticed me starting forwards all the time. I haven't really thought about that. I think it's partly to practice my transitions, but mainly because when going backwards I don't really like pushing off on an inside edge and then lifting up my foot. When going backwards, I mostly use underpushes or criss-cross motions without taking any foot off the ground, which works better when already having some speed. I sometimes start off on an underpush-turn straight into backwards, but I'm not good at accelerating backwards from low speeds yet. That's something I'd like to learn, and also develop some strong calf-muscles to do that.
For the backwards T-Stop, I'm not sure if I understood your question correctly, but I think you're asking about how I don't get my dragging wheels catching on irregularities in the road. When I do a backwards T-Stop I first put practically all my weight on the rolling foot. And, like you said, drop down, and then start the drag with the other foot. I keep both knees close together as well, practically touching. From that X-like stance, without much weight on the dragging foot, it doesn't really matter much what surface it is dragged on.
But it was difficult for me to do this on my left leg as the rolling leg, because my right leg is my dominant leg. So putting all my weight on the left leg was counter-intuitive in the beginning. And going low on that left leg was more difficult too, because it was a bit weaker, just like it was with the under push.
I have the feeling that I get more stability the closer my dragging foot is to the rolling foot when coming to a halt. In the end, my dragging foot is perpendicular, centered and almost touching the rolling foot and I can stand still without losing balance. I believe keeping it perpendicular and centered also minimizes the chance of rotation.
But in the end, it is so much about developing a feeling for it, especially for higher speeds.
I'm going to observe that more thoroughly from now on, because I'd really like to understand it better so I can give other people tips on how to learn it. I'll also try out your tip or see if I'm doing that already intuitively.
@Neosublimation interesting, so your T-Stop is actually a perfect T and not an L? Or only at the end? Does that mean your wheels are not turning during the drag? Don’t you get flat spots then? Makes sense that draggjng closer by will be less likely to throw you off balance. When I do a backwards drag my feet are much closer and don’t really have this sideways pull I had with the forwards TStop. Unless I deliberately drag on my heel to turn into the inverted mohawk.
@@InlinePilot I have observed this more closely in the past week. At higher speeds it is indeed an L. But when coming closer to a stop I find the T better. I actually don't know whether the weels are spinning. Probably during the L and less during the T. And yeah, practicing slides (not only T/L brake, but also soul slide) has worn off my wheels a lot.
@@Neosublimation thanks for reporting your findings back here! Makes sense. Of course wheel wear is expected. Flat spots are the worst, so probably you don’t get them because you have an L-drag at higher speed then.
I'm afraid doing the T-Stop while in the high speed, that's always turn to going backwards and full down 😢
That would be dangerous indeed. Hope it will help when you try to drag more on your heel to get your skate back forwards
If u have bad stability and weak legs then yes. Otherwise you should be able to one leg skate with confidence so your Tstop is always useful. You build your balance and needed muscles with practice or focused weight training.
Just learn to skate on one foot and all your questions will be resolved.
Necessary, but not sufficient. I’ve been able to do one-footed slaloms left and right until at a standstill, for more than a year, and pretty fast, too. But I still couldn’t hold the t-stop on one side for very long. So there’s definitely more to it than just skating on one foot, and my legs apparently were not smart enough to figure it out by themselves.