Beginner roller skating
Hands on Your Knees Until Staying Low Becomes a Habit
Telling yourself to bend does not work while you are moving. A certified coach uses physical targets instead: touch your knees, or rest your hands on them in a ready position, and run constant knee-bend checks while marching and gliding. If your hands can reach your knees, you are low enough; if they cannot, you have popped up. Technique from ICP-certified coach Asha Kirkby.
"Bend your knees" is the most repeated instruction in skating and one of the least effective, because a sentence in your head does nothing once you are moving. The body needs something it can feel.
A certified coach uses physical targets instead: touch your knees, or rest your hands on them in a ready position. The hands turn the instruction into a measurement. If they reach the knees, you are low enough; if they cannot, you have popped up, and you know it before anybody has to tell you.
Run the check constantly, not once. While marching, while gliding, during the basic drills — hands to knees, hands off, hands to knees again. The habit being built is not the touching, it is the height, and the touching is just how the height gets checked until it no longer needs checking.
This site already has a check for where your weight sits — hands on the navel, moved over one skate. This one is for how low you are, and the two go together: navel over the skate, hands reaching the knees, and the beginner stance is complete.
Technique from Asha Kirkby of Skatefresh, an instructor certified by the Inline Certification Program. She teaches inline skating, and that is the discipline this page is about.
Keep going: this is one section of the full Roller Skating for Beginners guide — sizing, gear, stopping, and where to skate, in one page. Free, no sign-up, nothing to buy.