Beginner roller skating
Pizza and Chips on the Grass Before You Touch Tarmac
If you keep straightening up, the fix is not more tarmac time. A certified coach takes beginners onto grass first: practise the pizza (toes out) and the chips (skates parallel) standing still, in a deep knee bend, where the wheels cannot roll away from you. Then the tarmac — and back to the grass the moment you start rising again. Technique from ICP-certified coach Asha Kirkby.
When a beginner keeps straightening up on the tarmac, the usual answer is more tarmac. A certified coach's answer, working with a skating club that was teaching complete beginners, is the opposite: take them off it.
On grass, the wheels cannot roll away from you, so the legs stop bracing and can actually learn the shape. Practise the pizza — toes out, heels in, the V — and the chips — both skates parallel — standing still, in a deep knee bend, until holding that bend is not an effort.
Then the tarmac. And back to the grass the moment the knees start rising again. That second half is the real instruction: the grass is not a stage you pass once, it is the place you return to whenever the posture leaves.
It fits the first-moves order this site already teaches — marching, the duck walk, the glide, one at a time. The grass does not add a move; it takes the rolling away so that the very first one, standing bent on skates, can be learned without the wheels arguing.
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.
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