Beginner roller skating
Find Your Weight by Putting Your Hands on Your Navel
A simple way to feel where your weight actually sits: put both hands on your navel and move it over one skate. Skate, navel, upper body in one line, and that is the whole check. It works for transitions, for rolling on one foot, for anything that asks you to load a single leg. Looking down at your feet tells you nothing. Quad technique, from Najete Kada, a French champion in artistic roller skating.
Here is a way to feel where your weight actually sits, which is not the same as knowing where you put it. Put both hands on your navel and move it over one skate. Skate, navel, upper body in one vertical line. That is the whole check.
It works because the navel is close enough to your centre of mass to stand in for it, and because your hands can feel where it has gone even when your eyes cannot. You are not aiming at a position you have seen. You are aiming at one you can locate on yourself.
The same check covers more than one move: transitions, rolling on one foot, anything at all that asks you to load a single leg. If a one-legged move keeps failing, run the check before you change anything else, because an unloaded leg is the usual reason.
Looking down at your feet tells you nothing, and worse, it moves your head forward and takes your weight with it. Keep your eyes up and use your hands. 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.