Beginner roller skating
Bring Your Skates Side by Side Before You Transfer
The single most important habit for rolling on one foot happens before the interesting part. Bring both skates level with each other, set the returning skate down underneath your hips, and only then move your weight across. Put it down anywhere else and the transfer fights you. Do it in the right order and one-foot rolling stops being a balance trick. Quad technique, from Najete Kada, a French champion in artistic roller skating.
The single most important habit for rolling on one foot happens before the interesting part, which is why it gets skipped. Bring both skates level with each other first. Only then does anything else happen.
The full order is three steps. Bring the skates side by side. Set the returning skate down underneath your hips. Then, and not before, move your weight across onto it.
Put that skate down anywhere else and the transfer fights you. Too far forward and your weight has to climb onto it. Too far out to the side and you have to throw yourself sideways to reach it, which is exactly the lurch that makes one-foot skating feel like a balance trick.
Done in the right order it stops being a trick and becomes a step, and it stays reliable when you are tired, which is when a trick stops working. 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.