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).
In January 2024, we had this ambition of making a hub for Australian freestyle skateboarding. It would be online, to overcome our country’s geographical expanse, and it would be a website, to avoid people needing to subscribe to specific social media platforms. The name would be Flatlandia and the goal would be to ‘connect, inspire and equip’ Australian skateboarders.
So, after twelve months, how is it all going?
Connect
In one of our earliest interviews, Maple Roads rider Rohan Cowley once said, ‘If I had more friends or connections to freestylers in Australia I would have just stayed doing freestyle.’ We didn’t want to see Cowley or another skater moving away from the discipline due to a lack of social support, so we started creating networking opportunities for the locals via Instagram (@flatlandiafreestyle) and the Flatlandia blog.
Instagram was instrumental in organising and promoting local meets. Thanks to the platform and much persistence from the OllieFans crew, Melbourne’s freestyle meets have evolved from being the occasional catch-up to a weekly routine at Marvel Stadiums, Docklands. Sydney’s cohort of freestylers are starting to come together as well, though less frequently and with no fixed address.
Sydneysiders Lala and Hillary having a lark at the 10 Feb 2025 sesh at Carriageworks, Everleigh.
The blog features interviews with locals and commissions content from locals. So far, ten Aussies have been interviewed by Flatlandia. Guest writers Rohan Cowley, Josh Dunstone, and Stuart Maca’Ghobhainn have made their thoughts known about competition runs, which skateboards to ride, and how to start out as a freestyle beginner. We hope that these semimonthly posts have raised the profile of all involved and enable them to find like-minded skaters in their home towns.
Equip
Unless you live in Perth, Western Australia, it’s near impossible to get dedicated gear from the neighbourhood skate shop. Most freestyle hardware needs to be ordered directly from overseas manufacturers, attracting shipping fees that cost more than the goods themselves.
To make freestyle more accessible to Australians, an online store was opened in April 2024 with the aim of stocking freestyle goods that didn’t cost a week’s rent in Sydney at much more affordable domestic shipping rates. The shop now carries 29 products, including skid plates, offset wheels, hard-as-rock bushings, and freestyle decks, most of which have never graced the shelves of a Fast Times store.
We’ve shared parts from freestylers who have inspired us all. There’s the usual suspects like Mullen, Kevin Harris, Per Welinder, but we’ve also featured Isamu Yamamoto, Denny Riordon, Marcio Torres, John Sawyer, and more.
And with the help of the international community, we’ve published fresh thoughts from the likes of Hibbs Arshad, Witter Cheng, Paolo Virgilio Demurtas, Tony Gale, Denham Hill, Sarah Park-Matott, Sean Robinson, Azzam Syafiq, and Kevin Wessels.
What’s next?
The work that we’re doing has attracted some positive feedback from locals and internationals, but we’ve still got a long way to go before Australian freestyle is at the level of its overseas counterparts.
In 2025, we’d like to unearth more Australian freestylers, make trick tips for intermediate/advanced skaters, create freestyle-focused lesson plans that can be used by skate instructors, interview more freestyle manufacturers, and find ways to financially support skaters participating in competition.
We can’t do it alone though. If you’re an Australian freestyle skateboarder and you’d like to get involved with the above and more, please let us know. Also, don’t forget to like, comment and share our content on the blog, Instagram, and YouTube channel.
Walk-the-dog is a freestyle fundamental that can be hard to learn at first. The board will shoot out from under you. Clean 180 rotations seem insurmountable. Your legs cramp up after one too many attempts.
Before the frustration sets in, consider working simultaneously on k-walks.
A Melbourne freestyler tries k-walks for the first time.
K-walks are attributed to Tara Kaylor:
Tara Kaylor, a 1970s freestyler from California, is who it is named after, according to Bob Staton. Bob was a longtime skateboarder who is now deceased but he tried hard to promote freestyle from 2001 until his death. He shared that bit of history with me once.
Terry Synnott, Mode Skateboards
Kaylor isn’t as well remembered as some of her contemporaries. Thankfully, there is a post about her and her freestyle skateboarding career written by Womxn Skate History. There’s no video footage, but it does reference photos and text from National Skateboard Review, Skateworld Journal, etc.
To some, k-walks may seem pointless. ‘You’re not really achieving or doing anything,’ Tony Gale once argued. ‘I’ve seen some people do it where they’re basically moving sideways, and “maybe” there’s an argument for that, but most of the time it’s a stationary tap-tap-tap which doesn’t move or link to anything else.’
And yes, he is correct from a contest judge’s point of view. Doing too many k-walks at competition is on par with too many pogos or shuffling your feet around on your board. It is the freestyle equivalent of too many ‘ums’ during public speaking.
However, not every trick is learnt with the aim of showcasing it in a contest run. K-walks deserve your time and effort because they help you safely explore the balance adjustments needed for walk-the-dogs. Not many other pieces of footwork use the same stance and require the lifting of the front heel in the same fashion. So give k-walks a go, your doggies will thank you for it.
Board prerequisites
This trick will work on both popsicle and freestyle decks. However, groms and smaller riders might find something with a shorter wheelbase easier to manoeuvre.
Rider prerequisites
You don’t have to have mastered walk-the-dogs to give k-walks a try. However, a basic understanding of walk-the-dog mechanics will make it easier for you to comprehend k-walks.
You will also need to be comfortable pushing and being able to tic tac with your feet closer together than what’s usually required. So make sure you’re solid with these, and if not, work on these skills first.
Being able to do multiple single-legged calf raises on a cushion or foam block without losing balance is another must. If you can’t, add these to your off-board training until you can comfortably do more than 30 in a row.
Breakdown of the trick
Set up in the same way you would for walk-the-dog:
ball of the front foot should be in the centre of the board
toes of the front foot should be pointing towards the nose of the board
the chest/torso should be facing the nose
Once in position, your front foot stays like this for the entire k-walk.
Your back foot then moves to the pocket of the tail kick. Press down on the kick to do a small backside tic tac. As you tic tac, lift the heel of your front foot a little to allow the board to move underneath.
Your back foot then moves to the pocket of the nose kick and presses down to do a small ‘frontside’ tic tac. That tic tac will feel awkward since your front foot and your chest will still be pointing towards the nose. Don’t forget to lift the heel of your front foot with this tic tac also.
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.
Mitchie Brusco explains his tree jumps exercise.
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. 🙏
