Beginner roller skating
Skating Backwards, Your Weight Still Goes Forward
Everyone leans back the first time, and everyone falls. Rolling backwards keeps the pressure on the front of your skates, exactly as it does going forwards, and that is the part nobody expects. Start in an inverted V with your toes together, and walk backwards by lifting one skate then the other before you let yourself roll. Quad technique, from Najete Kada, a French champion in artistic roller skating.
Everyone leans back the first time they roll backwards, and everyone falls. The body does it on its own: you are going that way, so it feels like your weight should go that way too. It should not.
Rolling backwards keeps the pressure on the front of your skates, exactly as it does going forwards. That is the sentence to keep. Direction of travel and direction of weight are two separate things, and only one of them changes when you go into reverse.
Start standing still, in an inverted V with your toes together and your heels apart. Walk backwards from there — lift one skate, then the other — before you let yourself roll at all. Walking is where you find out whether your weight is where you think it is, and it costs nothing to get wrong.
Once the walk is comfortable, stop lifting and let the skates run. Nothing else changes. The moment it feels wrong, the fix is to press your toes down, not to sit back. Quad technique, from Najete Kada's Tuto roller series. She teaches quad skating and skates it herself; nothing on this page is a claim about inline skates.
Keep going: this is one section of the full Roller Skating for Beginners guide — sizing, gear, stopping, and where to skate, in one page.