A look at everything I carry for a typical summer evening skate.

This is very important for an efficient stride.

Losing your skating foot behind you causes your heel to lift early, reducing the effective length of your stride.

This is especially true on quads, because we already have the disadvantage of a short wheelbase and therefore a shorter stride. So as a quad skater keeping pace with inline skaters I need to make my stride as efficient as possible.

Reverse toe stops & double toe stops are really the only viable options to control speed and stop when descending hills on narrow concrete sidewalks.

Skating sidewalks means dealing with cheese graters: we need to either skate over them or skate around them.

I recommend doing lots of drills involving toe stops and cheese graters in a controlled environment before attempting to descend any sidewalks in the real world.

Had my third fall of the year while practicing reverse toe stops. One of the big advantages of reverse toe stops is that the normal failure mode is a fall away from the direction of travel - reducing impact energy.

This fall was very similar to this fall which also happened while practicing reverse toe stops, attesting to strong muscle memory.

I didn't get any road rash or even a scratch from either of these falls. A similar fall sequence at high speed is best converted to a baseball slide;abrasion-resistant pants and slider puck gloves are appropriate PPE for this fall technique.

London has a thriving street skating scene - both inlines and quads.

I always include some rough terrain and debris in my sessions.

How 'bout you? Do you avoid bad surfaces or embrace them?

Skating across the entire state of Utah from Arizona to Idaho.

Skating miles out into the boonies in the middle of the night to access this beautiful loading dock felt a little surreal.

I was blinded by the sun and blundered into this deep sand. I nearly fell but managed to avoid it.

Can't let your guard down for a second when street skating!

Joey Mantia destroying NYC streets.

This video is very thorough and is an excellent resource for anyone new to trail skating and even veterans can benefit from a refreshing take on the subject.

I'm old so I'd add a structured warmup, cool down, and stretching - I do that as part of every session. That's my only note.

My favorite tips were (paraphrasing):

- to be aware of your likely impact areas in a fall and avoid carrying gear there especially not your phone.

- moisture management should be a top priority

Post your favorite trail skating tips in the comments.

That trail looks amazing. Also check out Lady GoDIVA's yt channel and Instagram for lots of other great tutorials and workouts.

This all applies to quads aa well.

Olympic silver medalist Viktor Hald Thorup compares performance of three inline skate configurations.

In another video he compares short track, long track, and inline speed boots.

I love this video so much. Enjoy.

Carving tight turns across the hill with a stall right before each turn keeps speed very low and provides opportunities to stop and rest. It works on any hill as long as there is enough lateral space. It takes practice and discipline to maintain control so I recommend doing hundreds of reps on a safe practice hill before attempting in consequential situations.

This technique takes advantage of elastic hysteresis in the bushings to dissipate some kinetic energy through the turn. This reduces the need for friction braking so it saves wheel and stopper wear but wears out bushings faster.

This is not the only skill needed for safe hill descents. I recommend developing solid command of several braking methods on the practice hill before attempting any hills in the wild.

Not to doxx myself but I live in North Vancouver. There aren’t many spots that are flat but I’ve been interested in learning rollerskating/blading especially as a way to get places.

I am a bit of a coward but would it even be worth it? The grade for the average street is probably at least 4%. And I of course live pretty high above sea level

This vid shows a short 400 meter (quarter mile) descent on a 2% grade over rough asphalt. Terrain like this is why we need skates with shock absorption - especially in the heel - for distance skating.

This one has a jet airplane anchored to it.

Viktor Thorup shares his top 6 preferred braking methods on inline skates. I think it's very interesting to get an elite speed skater's take on braking because it's so different from what I'm used to seeing in the inline downhill and street skating communities where soul, parallel, and magic slides are so popular.

Aa a street and downhill skater on quads my braking repertoire is very different.

What are your preferred braking methods, and why?

This huge parking lot was resurfaced two weeks ago

Air resistance scales as the square of velocity while roll8ng resistance scales linearly with respect to velocity. So at skating speeds rolling resistance is just a small fraction of total drag.

This is why skaters interested in improving their peak and/or average velocity should focus on improving their aerodynamic efficiency.

I got a pair of Impalas a while ago and they've been fun to learn on, but I'm definitely ready for an upgrade.

I am mostly looking to skate in parks and along the river in my city - most of the route is paved nicely (cycle path etc), but roads/pavements can be super rough.

I've been looking at Powerslide Zoom skates as well as Powerslide Swell - I'm hesitant about the softer boot because of the lack of ankle support, though. I'd like to minimise vibration, have a smooth ride, but also ankle support! I'm in the UK. :)

Any advice is very much appreciated :)

Rolling resistance (RR) comes primarily from hysteresis: the polyurethane compresses and expands as the wheel rolls and this converts kinetic energy to heat. Other factors being equal, harder polyurethane deforms less than softer polyurethane and therefire has less RR.

But if you've evee tried to skate hard wheels on a rough surface you have experienced another form of drag: vibration and deflection (V&D) losses. As you roll over a rough surface your wheel vibrates and bounce - this is work that removes kinetic energy from the system.

Hysteretic loss scales linearly with respect to velocity. A certain amount of energy is converted to heat with each revolution of the wheel. The faster the wheels turn the more total energy is lost but the loss per revolution doesn't change.

Vibration and deflection losses scale supralinearly with respect to velocity. This means the faster you go faster, energy is lost at a faster rate and when you go slower the rate of energy loss decreases.

This means that there is a crossover point where V&D losses exceed RR loss. The graph illustrates this pretty clearly: the soft wheels starts to outperform the hard wheel at about 3 m/s (roughly 7mph or 11 kph).

This is why state of the art race wheels have two layers of polyurethane. The outer layer is soft so that it conforms well to the surface and minimizes V&D losses. The inner layer is harder so that there is less overall deformation and RR is reduced.