A year ago, Skate IQ’s Mitchie Brusco started popping up in the feed with pointers for street, park, and vert. Usually I don’t find non-freestyle trick tips engaging. After all, a freestyle kickflip is nothing like an ollie kickflip. But Brusco’s tips weren’t trick specific. He’d talk about ‘floating’ in ollies, but the concept was transferable to other jump tricks.
I then found out that my transition-skate friend had signed up to the Skate IQ program. When I met up with her, she was practising getting into tailstop and stepping around on the board. It did not seem like the transition/skate-obstacle-focused program I had imagined.
Feeling the fomo, I signed up for the free 7-day trial, hoping to gain more board control and some constructive criticism on my flatground ‘street’ tricks.
The Phases
Accessible via an online browser or the Skool App, the Skate IQ program is a series of online tutorials that are divided up into three Phases, before sectioning off into street, park, and vert specifics.
Phase One is aimed at building foundational skills. Each tutorial focuses on a particular skill, consisting of a minute read and a 3-5-minute video. There’s usually 2 homework drills that each take 10-30 minutes to do. Participants can go as quickly or as slowly through the course as they like, but need to master all skill sets to pass the test at the end.
Absolute beginners will find the drills challenging. ‘Push with a 5-Second Hold’ is essentially a slow push and balancing on the front foot for 5 seconds. Not an easy feat for beginner skaters who have yet to learn the nuances of weight distribution while moving.
The lengthy number of time/reps spent on each drill improves the stamina for beginner-intermediates. ‘Partial Squat with Toe and Heel Press’ is easy to do until one does it nonstop for 10 minutes. In the Skate IQ discussion threads, participants shared stories of fired-up, crampy muscles after devoting so much time to these manoeuvres.
The program also requires participants to dedicate equal amounts of time in switch-stance. For me, pushing switch for 5-10 minutes was humbling.
Having a structured set of drills also highlighted weaknesses. As a freestyler, I thought I was pretty good at getting into ‘switch’ tailstop. But try alternating between 10 reps of tailstop and 10 reps of ‘switch’ tailstop? It’s hard to not compare the two.
Phase Two heavily focuses on the ollie, which is unsurprising since the ollie is a fundamental for street and park. There’s no ‘go into tail stop and then slide your foot up the griptape’ exercises. Instead, be prepared to work on 20+ drills, including bent-knee manuals and tail-tap hippie jumps. Skate IQ even covers the flattening out of the ollie with a ripping routine called ‘tree jumps onto a ledge’, which is really hard to explain without the video demonstration.
Phase Three moves onto ‘perfecting manuals, 180s, shuvits, and kickflips’. It’s behind a paywall and you’ll need to be on the paid program for a couple of months before you can access extra fine-tuning goodness.
The Community
To keep participants accountable, there are various discussion threads. Here you can share successes/failures, ask questions, make course structure suggestions, and network with fellow skaters. The broad church that is Skate IQ makes it hard for a freestyler to engage in a lot of the conversation. For example, ‘afraid to pump higher at the vert’ isn’t a topic a flatgrounder can comment on. And posting freestyle-specific tricks like cooper flips or no-handed 50-50 will probably get some head-scratching from the congregation.
However there are little nuggets of wisdom for those willing to sift through the posts:
- the weekly reviews which allow you to learn from other people’s mistakes
- the lengthy tutorials on a particular skill
- the potential of recruiting non-freestylers to the dark side (nah, nah, just kidding)
The Cost
It’s great to see a structured program made by a reputable source (a professional skateboarder with years of coaching experience) that builds on skill level bit by bit. The gated community that Skate IQ provides is a bonus; everyone there is on the same journey with you, with the goal of improving their skateboarding.
But something this good doesn’t come for free. If you want to stick to the Skate IQ program for more than a week, you’ll have to sign up to a monthly subscription of US$49 (roughly A$80) or an annual subscription of US$365 (roughly A$590).
So is the Skate IQ program worth it? Depends.
- Can you afford the monthly subscription of US$49?
- Do you have the time, energy, and the discipline to follow through with drills at every skate session (roughly 2-3 hours per week, spread across 2-3 sessions)?
- Are you comfortable with making videos of yourself skating and uploading it onto a public platform for anyone to see?
- Can you deal with and learn from constructive criticism?
- Do you enjoy contributing to an online forum as part of the learning process?
And if you’re a freestyler,
- Do you own a popsicle setup*?
- Are you wanting to pick up general skills or tricks, such as ollies, shuvits, wheelies?
- Do you have the creativity to adapt Brusco’s method to your freestyle needs?
- Do you also do street, park, and or vert skateboarding, or just want to really work on your switch game?
‘Do you own a popsicle setup?’ sounds like a funny question but what’s funnier is the response I got from using a freestyle board for ollie attempts. ‘I don’t know how this board is supposed to react. I’ve never been on this board, I’ve never coached anyone on this board, so it’s hard for me to connect with what you’re doing, with how much the board is popping.’
If you said ‘yes’ to all of the above, then you should consider the Skate IQ program. You’ll definitely get something out of it. Just keep in mind that there might not be a direct correlation between doing Skate IQ drills and figuring out carousels. Best sign up to Denham Hill’s online coaching if you’re wanting freestyle specifics.
AN ADDITION: if our review convinced you to try Skate IQ for a month or two (or forever), please subscribe using our affiliate link. It will go towards paying our monthly Skate IQ subscription fees. 🙏