Somedays skateboarding is not an option. It’s hot. It’s raining. It’s nighttime. You’re tired from work or the giant skate sesh from the day prior. You’re injured. Some days are just carpet-boarding days.
What is carpet boarding?
The name pretty much sums it up: stationary skateboard tricks on a skateboard deck, usually on a carpeted surface.
Carpet boarding is generally safer than skateboarding because there are no slip outs and it’s harder to roll an ankle or fracture a foot, making it a great confidence builder for beginners or for anyone learning a new trick.
It also requires less space. A couple of square metres is usually enough room for some carpet boarding.
However, carpet boarding isn’t necessarily easier than regular skateboarding; ollie kickflips, for instance, can be a challenge due to the reduced pop.
Additionally, carpet boarding is not risk free. As per video below, falling still happens. Sometimes you even land in rail (which is really not fun while carpet boarding).
Failing and falling from fingerflips.
So before your carpet-boarding sesh, clear the area of obstacles. Wear skate shoes. Use protective gear if you think you’ll need it. If you’re already injured, you may want to check in with your doctor or physiotherapist to determine which tricks are okay to do.
Most skateboarders will be familiar with practising street tricks on a carpet board. Shuvits, ollies, kickflips and heelflips are all fair game.
Freestyle is definitely possible on a carpet board. Freestyle kickflips, caspers, yoyo hops, and fingerflips all function on a carpet board.
Many stationary freestyle tricks can be done on a carpet board.
It is also possible to practise freestyle footwork such as monster walks and endovers, smoothies and jaywalks, walk-the-dogs and walk-the-cows.
YouTuber Sarah Park-Matott is a fan of carpet boarding. Her freestyle footwork tutorials often recommend carpet-boarding as a footwork improver. In this video, Park-Matott demonstrates ‘walk-the-cow’ carpet-boarding.
However, some stationary freestyle trick categories are incompatible with carpet boarding, chiefly rail tricks and truck tricks. These require trucks and or wheels to function.
You thought you could rail flip without these? Nice try.
What carpet board should I use for freestyle?
Freestyle decks are expensive and hard to come by, so it’s okay if you don’t have a spare freestyle deck that can be used for carpet boarding. Any type of skateboard deck will do as a carpet board.
Just be mindful that the more different your carpet board is from your freestyle skateboard, the more adjustments you need to make when switching between carpet and concrete. For instance, a wider carpet board will flip slower for freestyle kickflips and fingerflips. Differently angled kicks or switching between double and single kicks will make caspers and fingerflips feel different. A change in concave and or wheelbase will impact footwork.
Both new and retired decks can be used for carpet boarding. New decks are great for footwork and tricks like tailstop underflips, since there won’t be any casper griptape (griptape on the graphic side of the kicks) catching the carpet on the pivot or scoop. Retired decks with attached griptape and skid plates will be the best approximation of actual skateboarding for tricks like caspers and fingerflips.
The casper griptape on a carpet board will help caspers and hinder pivot-like motions.
Need more inspiration?
Back in the COVD-19 days, Waltz Skateboarding’s Mike Osterman did a freestyle carpet-boarding video. As well as caspers and freestyle kickflips, he attempted nosehook impossibles, varial tail underflips, varial fingerflips, 360 fingerflips, kickflip to casper, and some very sketchy tailstop to rail things.
Phillip Wingett of Plus One Skateboarding also made a freestyle carpet-boarding video. In it, he messed around with freestyle kickflips, shuvits, caspers (including caveman to casper), fingerflips, hand flips, popcorn stomps, walk-the-dogs, switchblades, and some other cool stuff.
Both videos are testaments to how much fun freestyle tricks on a carpet board can be. So, next time the weather sucks or you’re needing a lighter sesh, why not give carpet boarding a go?
If you’ve attended one of Josh Dunstone’s freestyle sessions outside Marvel Stadium (Melbourne, Victoria), you might see him teaching new-to-freestyle skaters basic rail tricks, including heelside rail-stand dismounts.
In an earlier post, we explained the difference between heelside and toeside rail stand. Heelside is when the rail of the skateboard sits closer to the heels of your feet. Toeside is when the rail of the skateboard sits closer to the toes of your feet.
A heelside rail-stand dismount is the transition between heelside rail stand back to being on the skateboard with the feet on top of the griptape and or bolts. Other skateboarders might label this trick a ‘primo-stall dismount’, but freestylers generally do not for reasons explained by Stewart Storrar below.
Scottish skater Stewart Storrar explains why freestylers don’t like the word ‘primo’.
But I digress. Back to Josh Dunstone teaching newbies how to heelside rail-stand dismount. His first piece of advice is to ‘just fall out of it.’ In other words, wobble the board a little with both feet until the stupid thing plops down onto all four wheels so that you can aim to land on bolts.
While falling is core to the skateboarding experience, deliberately falling out of rail-stand is as clumsy and unpredictable as it sounds. The board resists tipping out of rail because the tight trucks and offset wheels provide too much stability. For a moment, you’re suspended in coconut-wheelie-like stance where you’re not sure if you’re going to fall on your face or your behind. A jolt runs up your legs as you land because you didn’t have enough time to remember to bend your knees. You land bolts but your feet are way too toeside, with only your heels resting on the griptape.
Falling out of rail really feels as awkward as it sounds.
Why fall when you can jump?
There is a better way to heelside rail-stand dismount: add a little hippie jump.
Heelside rail-stand dismount frame by frame. 1) Knees are bent in preparation for the jump. 2) Downward pressure applied through the balls of the feet makes the board tip out of rail. 3) The body travels upwards. Legs extend out. 4) Legs are fully extended. Board has transitioned completely out of rail. 5) Feet catch the board. 6) Soft knees and ankles help absorb the force of the land.
To warm up, do some stationary hippie jumps on your board. When you jump, keep your gaze on the bolts. Focus on pushing through the balls of your feet, with the toes being the last part of your body to leave the griptape. When you land bolts, think about absorbing the force of the jump with loose, bent knees.
Mitchie Brusco talks a lot about how hippie jumps help ollies. Put aside the ollie talk and just look at how his toes are the last thing to leave the board. Take note of those soft knees and ankles.
Once this feels comfortable, get into the heelside rail-stand position. Stand with the balls of your feet on the wheels and the arches of your feet resting on the rail of the skateboard.
Push off, just like you would in a hippie jump. Because you are driving force through the balls of your feet into the wheels, this knocks the skateboard out of rail, ready for you to land back onto it.
At the start of the hippie jump, pressure builds up underneath the balls of the feet. This toeside-heavy force makes the skateboard tip out of rail.
This jump technique gives you extra time in the air to spot and cushion your landing. It also prepares you for rail flips; the additional air time is essential for makes/bails or extra rotations (double flips, triple flips).
Needing extra help?
If you’re still very new to rail-stand dismounts, jumping will seem intimidating at first. Don’t be afraid to break things down into more manageable steps. For instance, you can start off going from heelside rail to bolts while holding onto something and or while being on carpet.
Whatever you do, don’t practise deliberately bailed dismounts as this encourages bad habits. You need to attempt to land bolts in order to learn where to position your shoulders (roughly above where the bolts will end up) prior to and during trick execution.
Heelside rail-stand dismount (side on) frame by frame. Notice how the shoulders are always positioned where the skateboard is expected to end up.
Wanting more homework?
Once you are comfortable with the basics, you might want to start fine-tuning individual elements.
Jumping higher. Later on, you’ll need the extra air time for rail flips, so jump as high as you can go.
Floating. Start trying to keep your knees tucked while you’re in the air. This skill will help you later on when you start to learn rail flips as it gives the board space to rotate beneath you.
Landing in different foot positions. Not only does this exercise mimic the unpredictable landings that you’ll experience when you start doing rail flips, it also allows you to seamlessly transition into the next trick.
Here are some heelside rail-stand dismount drills.
For those of you who are looking for a challenge, try
One-footed jumpy exits for extra style points
Landing cross-footed, varial, or into stationary wheelie for extra (x100) style points.
Josh Dunstone demonstrates cross-footed and body-varial variations of the heelside rail-stand dismount.
The first time I was introduced to freestyle was watching the Bones Brigade Video Show when I was ten years old. I remember seeing Per Welinder in the Venice Beach scene and he was doing his freestyle routine in front of this random local crowd. Like they just gathered to watch. There was breakdancing going on, hip-hop music, [and was] just such a ghetto street vibe!
Per Welinder skates at Venice Beach in the Bones Brigade Video Show (1984).
For some reason this looked like the coolest thing in the world! So I was always fascinated by the freestyle concept, and always wanted to learn it from then on.
What was the first freestyle trick you learnt?
I’ve been a street skater my whole life so there is a fine line between defining street-style tricks from freestyle tricks such as a kickflip, etc. I’d say the day I learnt a switchblade on a freestyle deck was when I felt like I had landed something freestyle for the first time.
Do you combine street tricks with freestyle or do you keep them strictly separate? And if you do combine them, can you give us an example?
Things like shuvits, manuals, nose manuals and big spins I love doing and it works with freestyle too. Doing a g-turn to shuvit out is one of my fave flat ground tricks to do for sure. I’ve still never done a kickflip on a freestyle deck, it seems completely different to a standard street board. I need to work that one out still!
Can you tell us a little bit about your setup?
My deck is a reissue Powell Peralta Per Welinder freestyle which I put a custom old-school-style griptape job on for the vibes. I also had to have custom skid plates made for it because no one was selling the plates to suit this shaped deck. A guy in Australia made them for me and sent them over. My trucks are the Independent 109s with the T-hangers. Wheels are Mode 55mm freestyle wheels with Bones Reds bearings. I’m also running some big 1/2″ riser pads but I’m thinking about putting thinner ones on to mellow out the ride height. It’s actually the most expensive skateboard I’ve ever set up!
Someone in Australia makes custom skid plates? Deets please?
Haha yeah!
There’s a guy I found on one of the Aussie skateboard collectors pages – his name is Davert Skate (I think). He makes rails, copers, lappers and more, mainly for old-school boards…[Finding him] was pretty cool because I did buy some modern-style skid plates from Mode but their shape was a little different to the old-school Welinder. The guy had to measure up the Welinder and design a template to fit the actual deck which I approved first so he could make them. I got my very own red ones. Now there is a template for them in Oz! I believe Powell may have released a few complete freestyle decks lately which I assume have their own skid plates nowadays too. But a few years ago I couldn’t find them.
Yeah, freestyle is still so niche in Australia, which can make it hard to find parts or even other people to skate with. Have you found many other Adelaidians who are into freestyle?
We do have a little crew that catch up every couple of months or so. My old school mate Ben freestyles a fair bit so him and his girlfriend Tanya started the Adelaide freestyle group!
Simon and the Per Welinder (second from the left) at the inaugural Adelaide freestyle meet (Jan 2024).
It’s been great to hang out with friends and inspire each other. Myself, Blocky, Jason, and Tom Liggins are the older guys. Then there’s Jamie who is a teenager and his freestyle is amazing to watch!
Having a crew must be so helpful. Are there tricks that you’re all working towards at the moment?
We all have different tricks so it’s more like we all fire each other up, try and teach different things, and it also keeps us motivated to keep freestyling. Skating with your friends is always fun.
Final question. Who rocked it better: Per Welinder with the headband or Rodney Mullen with the white socks and shoes?
Now that’s a tough question. Welinder def brought the more punk feel to skating but I’m going to give it to Mullen for the perfect 80s ‘I’m here to kick ass’ skate nerd look.
Rodney Mullen nerd rocks the white socks and shoes in 1988. Photo credit: Don Walheim.
Connect: Simon Ingels skates with friends in Adelaide, South Australia. They don’t just skate freestyle, but if they do, you might find them at the courts of the SA United Church Netball Association. You can also see Simon DJing around town; check out the deets on Instagram, @simon_fiction.
As freestyle skaters we tend to focus a lot on our setup. Our wheels, trucks, skid plates, bearings, spacers and griptape have different effects on how tricks feel and the way we ride. Over the past few years Waltz Skateboarding has produced a variety of single, symmetrical and double-kick decks. Each have advantages and disadvantages depending on the way we want to skate. I have been lucky enough to skate a range of Waltz decks so I would like to provide a guide or review on these.
The Bixby
The Bixby is an asymmetrical double kick.
A Waltz Bixby Mini (7.4″) complete getting unboxed (Dec 2021). Having an asymmetrical shape that caters to a wide range of tricks, the Bixby is often described as a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ board.
Feeling closer to the modern popsicle board than other Waltz decks, I found that the Bixby let me do all ollie tricks I could do on a popsicle while still being small enough to skate freestyle.
The nose of the Bixby is very tapered while the tail is wide, making it versatile and great to learn any trick on. However, the asymmetry does affect your trick selection depending on which end you are standing on.
Overall, I believe that the Bixby is a shape great for skaters new to freestyle as well as skaters who have done freestyle for a while and want to do a wide range of tricks stationary and or rolling.
The Huntington
The Huntington is a single kick. This means that it has a single upturned tail while the nose is virtually flat.
Rhiana Grigore with her pro model, which is based on the Huntington shape (7.4″ x 28.05″). Photo credit: Waltz SkateboardingReleased in 2022, the Karaoke also featured the OG Huntington shape.
The single-kick shape is beneficial for many reasons. One is that when doing tricks like caspers and truck stands you feel less resistance keeping the board up when standing on the nose. 360 caspers and casper flips feel easier to get the board spinning. Casper to caspers become substantially easier to learn because you can pick the board up higher with your foot before flipping it. Carousel truck tricks become insanely less challenging, because you don’t have to fight gravity as much on the nose, and there is less to spin, because of the Huntington’s short deck length.
Another great aspect of single kicks like the Huntington is that when doing rail flips you have the choice of speed and height. Flipping off the tail will give you a higher, slower flip while using the nose will provide a faster, lower flip.
However, single kicks often become stretched or flimsy because of the lack of concave. To combat this, Waltz designed the Huntington with a small enough concave to support the board but not too much so they could keep the nose flat.
A downside to this deck is that some people find it harder to do footwork tricks because of the flat nose. Generally speaking, this deck was made mostly with stationary tricks and technical combos in mind.
The Twin Tail
The symmetrical choice of the Waltz range is the Twin Tail.
Released in November 2022, the Yuta Fujii Crane was the first Waltz model to feature the Twin Tail shape.
Designed for Japanese skateboarder Yuta Fujii (IG: @y.fujii.fs) and his unique bag of tricks such as no-handed 50-50s, spins and shuvits, the Twin Tail is great for the skater who loves to dance heaps and do lots of footwork instead of staying in one spot all day.
Yuta Fujii performs his signature tricks on the Twin Tail.
It provides a versatile feel for ollie and wheelie tricks as well. Some people really like the Twin Tail because its symmetrical shape means that they don’t have to think as much about the position of the board. However, if you come from skating a smaller board, the Twin Tail will feel a little big but more stable while rolling. Rail tricks, truck stands and footwork will most likely feel strange at first.
Rail flips will also be slower because of the wider tail. I have heard it said that the Twin Tail is like skating two Bixby tails (steep and wide) so if you like the feel of the Bixby’s square kick you might enjoy this deck.
Personally, I find this deck to be heaps of fun because of how much I don’t have to think about switching ends of the board and being able to do ollie tricks as well as 50-50s. It is also great for caspers which are some of my favourite kinds of tricks.
A Final Word
I believe that any trick is possible, no matter what setup you choose to ride. However, I found that I unlocked new tricks when I switched deck shapes. For instance, on the Huntington’s flattish nose, I learnt pressure flips and casper to caspers. Although, nobody is the same! You might find that the Twin Tail has a great kick for caspers and rolling tricks but you don’t like how it flips under you from rail. Eventually your skating will adapt to fit whatever you are riding so do try different shapes and see what you like the best. But if you can’t afford to try all of the different decks, don’t worry! Any deck you ride will let you learn whatever trick you want and progress in the same way.
Editor’s note: Jamie Wong usually skates either a Bixby or Huntington but is not affiliated with or sponsored by Waltz Skateboarding. Flatlandia also lent him a Yuta Fujii Twin Tail for the purpose of this review.
At the time of this post’s publication, Waltz Bixby (II), Huntington (I and II) and Twin Tail are available online from Waltz (USA) and Aikenheads (Perth, Australia).
For me, personally? Because there’s nothing else quite like it. It’s pure kinetic energy – constant movement with no downtime – and there’s always more to do, and try, and explore, and experiment with. One day I can do nothing but footwork, the next, nothing but big 720 shuvits and 360 double fingerflips.
But for the industry and larger culture of skateboarding? Because not everyone has access to a vert ramp or wants to jump down stairs. Freestyle needs to exist to keep skateboarding diverse.
You’ve been wearing many hats for freestyle, including pro skater, content maker (for Broken Fingers, Freestyle Tricktips), contest judge and MC, stockist, and more. What has been the most challenging role? What have you enjoyed the most?
Honestly, the most challenging of the lot is the combination of my roles at Moonshine and Offset; the business side of skateboarding is an absolute headache. For Moonshine, it starts with actually getting the product right – lots of theorising, testing, checking, designing, and so on – and then the stress of getting it made and ensuring it all passes quality control (one new woodshop we tried produced an entire batch of decks that basically had to go straight in the bin, they were so bad).
Then on the Offset side of things, there’s all the hassle of logistics (imports, shipping, tax and duty, stock control), coupled with wanting to do it right. I try to test everything I want to sell, or at the very least hand it to someone I know [who] can test it for me. There’s a lot of badly made products out there, and more than once I’ve been burned by something that seemed great on paper but turned out to be bloody terrible.
Freestyle Tricktipsisn’t easy either, but for a very different reason: every single trick I cover takes literally weeks of thinking and considering from every angle. I didn’t want to just ‘create content’ simply to please an algorithm and drive sales; it’d obviously have been a lot easier to do the old fashioned ‘pop the tail, flick your foot, wait until you see the griptape, put your feet on it, roll away smooth’ cop-out of a video, end with a good ol’ ‘like, share, and subscribe!’, churn ’em out at a rate of one a week, and watch the ad revenue and board sales roll in, but I wanted to make sure people didn’t have to make the same mistakes I did when learning these things. I really try to cover ever major detail and point out stuff other videos just won’t consider, and that takes AGES to work out and plan.
Honestly, these two things make being a ‘pro skater’ seem simple by comparison. 720 shuvits? Way less stressful than endless piles of customs documents and trying to explain all the ways a kickback can go wrong.
Tony Gale’s YouTube tutorial on the kickback, including troubleshooting.
As for fun? I’ve really enjoyed MCing while I’ve been on the injury bench for the last year or so. I’m always suprised people let me anywhere near a microphone, never mind actually enjoying my bizarre ramblings. Being able to hype people up, highlight things people might miss or not know, and joke around with friends at the same time is a real pleasure for me, and I hope I can keep doing it for the foreseeable future.
Ah Moonshine. How did you end up helming the freestyle side of that?
The story behind that is a bit of a winding one.
When Moonshine started, it was Adam [Nanaa]’s plan to do a very eighties company – shapes only, no street skaters. He used to ride for Zorlac in the eighties and wanted to recreate that vibe, so he started making boards for a lot of his favourite vert skaters, new and old.
Moonshine Skateboards in 2015, before it pivoted to freestyle.
Chris Hudson started handling the European side of things for him, and while we’d crossed paths a couple of times, it never went anywhere until the NASS Festival in the UK in 2015. A bunch of us were doing freestyle demos there, and my friend Fairbro went over to the vert ramp between freestyle sessions to check it out. He was quite drunk, got talking to Hudson (who was also quite drunk), and basically said, ‘Oi! Why doesn’t Moonshine do freestyle? You should talk to my mate Tony.’
Needless to say, Chris did, and then he talked to Adam, and Adam said, ‘Yeah, I love freestyle. Let’s do it. Tony, you run the freestyle side of things. Tell me what you need. Pick your team, design the decks, and I’ll make it happen.’
Two or three years later, post-Brexit, Chris Hudson bowed out (things were getting too expensive and difficult), and I stepped in to handle the European business entirely, that’s basically how Offset started. A couple of years after that, Adam decided he’d had enough of the vert side of things, and dumped the whole vert team, leaving Moonshine as an entirely freestyle company barring the odd guest model for vert legends.
He’s been very supportive of freestyle from the get-go. He’s given me the carte blanche to put anyone on the team I wanted; he forked out ludicrous amounts of money on bespoke moulds when I said we needed them; he came out to the World Round-Up in 2017 to hang out – the only event sponsor who did, I should note – and has often said to me that the freestyle team is everything he wanted the vert team to be when he first started. Like I said earlier, it’s not always the easiest job, but it’s satisfying and we’ve done a lot of good stuff together over the years, and that couldn’t have happened if Adam hadn’t taken that big chance on me (and on freestyle in general) back in 2015. I’ll always be thankful to him for that.
Today’s Moonshine Skateboards is all freestyle with a completely different vibe.
Moonshine has a particular board design and aesthetic. Can you describe what makes a typical Moonshine deck?
On the shape side of things, it was my top priority that the decks all had to make sense. I wanted to do things that other companies weren’t doing (or at least they weren’t before we did), and the decks had to actively benefit the tricks, style, and body shape of the rider whose name was on it. We’re not going to put out any deck unless it has a reason to exist, in effect. I didn’t want to just do generic shapes cut out of a street mould, or eighties throwback shapes that make all the same mistakes and have learnt nothing from the last thirty-five years of freestyle.
Another thing that I was dead against was making one deck for the rider, but another deck with the same graphic to sell to the consumer. That’s far more common in skateboarding than you think; people want to skate like their favourite pro and buy the deck with their name on it to try to emulate them, completely unaware the pro is skating something totally different. If you want to skate like Toshiaki Fujii, you should be able to buy the exact same deck Toshiaki Fujii uses. That just makes sense. That’s also why there’s no 7.6″ or 8″ version of my shape available, despite people constantly asking for it – that wouldn’t work for my tricks…I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.
As for the graphics: they’ve changed a lot in the last ten years. Our original artist, Chris Alliston (IG: @chris.j.alliston), was doing these really intricate line drawings in pen and ink when we first started making freestyle decks, and over the years his style has evolved along with Moonshine and the team, which has been great to see.
Chris Alliston’s ‘Druid’ graphic.
David Paul Seymour (IG: @davidpaulseymour) has done a bunch of great graphics for us, too; he did the art for the Kill Your Idols (a deck which started as a joke and a big middle finger to the eighties fetishists, but is now so popular it’s probably going to hang around forever) and the Felix Jonsson decks, which are two of my favourite graphics ever.
Julia Kienscherf (Germany) on the Kill Your Idols deck at Paderborn 2024. Photo credits: Philipp Rathmann.
We’ve also got Peter Andersson to do some watercolour graphics for Mirei and Ikkei as an experiment, which was really interesting to do – I don’t think watercolour paintings have been used on a deck before.
At any rate, all of those decks centre around an animal that, in one way or another, reflects something about the rider. But in the last year or so, we started working with Coffee Time (IG: @mr_coffee_time), a great artist in France that Stephane of Putain! introduced me to, and we’ve basically given him free rein to do some fantastic art based on mythological figures instead of animals; he did Nick Beaulieu’s latest deck and Carmen’s new one, and he absolutely knocked them out of the park.
That said, the only really guiding principles for art are:
no blood, guts, and cheap eighties skeleton graphics, and
no childish cartoony nonsense.
Everything else is basically on the table if we like the idea and it looks good. We’ve obviously already got some more art concepts knocking about, and I might genuinely think the next one might well be the best one yet…but I guess everyone says that, huh?
OK, last question: Josh Dunstone said you threw him into a bin once. What in the kangaroo was that all about?
Honestly? I don’t remember. I’m not going to try to pretend I didn’t, and I’m sure he can’t pretend he didn’t deserve it in that moment. Frankly, I’m just disappointed in myself. I mean, *once*? He deserves binning a few more times than that. These are rookie numbers in this racket. Gotta get those numbers up.
Tony Gale and Josh Dunstone at Euro Freestyle 2019.
Connect: Tony Gale (IG: @coldkennels) wears many hats in the freestyle skateboarding community. If you didn’t know about his Freestyle Tricktips, you must check them out. Tony’s offered to come over and help organise an Australian freestyle contest, except for the fact that flights from Europe to Australia are stupidly expensive and we have too many things that can kill us (sharks, snakes, spiders, jellyfish).
