Beginner’s Guide to Tricking: Essential Moves

Jumping into tricking might feel overwhelming at first—so many moves, no obvious beginning, and figuring out the right sequence to tackle them. While there’s no magic formula, this guide is packed with useful advice, key tricks, and pointers to get you session-ready.

Launching Your Tricking Journey

Getting into tricking and aiming for a strong start means focusing first on acquiring certain skills. These skills are not just any; they significantly enhance your trick combinations due to their flexibility and ease of incorporation into routines. Rather than immediately tackling complex maneuvers like a back full-twist—a substantial leap that demands extensive knowledge—beginning with simpler, highly adaptable moves offers a smoother progression to more challenging techniques.

Consider the hook kick: it’s straightforward yet exceptionally versatile, allowing for seamless integration into virtually any combination or enhancing individual tricks, exemplifying an essential foundational skill. Mastering a variety of these basic, widely applicable skills greatly expands your capability to explore and excel in the intricate aspects of the sport. Here are some ideal starting points.

the Hook

The Hook is a martial arts kick characterized by its sweeping motion. Turn sideways, lift your leg parallel, and swing it in a hook arc toward your target. It’s a foundational move that helps build coordination and flexibility.

Cartwheels

A Cartwheel involves rotating your body sideways, with alternating hand and foot ground touches, mimicking a wheel. It’s great for developing balance, coordination, and spatial awareness, serving as a building block for more complex acrobatic skills.

the Scoot

The Scoot, similar to a one-handed cartwheel, starts in a lunge and uses one hand to push off the ground. It’s used to generate momentum and transition smoothly into more complex tricks, enhancing flow and creativity in combinations.

Butterfly Kick

The Butterfly Kick features a leap and horizontal body spin, legs kicked out, back arched, and arms swinging for rotation. It’s a visually impressive move that lays the groundwork for understanding rotational dynamics.

The Tornado Kick

The Tornado Kick begins with a turning step, then a jump into a spinning roundhouse kick. It boosts rotational speed and control, often a gateway to spinning and twisting tricks.

The Front Tuck

The Front Tuck involves a jump, a knee tuck, a forward somersault, and a feet-first landing. It’s fundamental for learning aerial awareness and precision in flipping techniques.

Back Tuck Basics

The Back Tuck is a backward somersault from standing. It requires a high jump, tight tuck, and a careful landing spot. It’s crucial for mastering back-flipping movements.

Gainer Flips

Gainer Flips are essentially backflips performed moving forward. The trick involves taking off from one foot, flipping backward while traveling forward, and landing on the opposite foot. It’s challenging and helps develop an advanced understanding of flipping mechanics and spatial orientation.

Raiz & TDR

• Raiz: The Raiz begins with a scoot, leading to a sideways flip, an arched back, and one arm reaching down. It combines elements of a cartwheel and a backflip, emphasizing fluidity and grace.
• TDR (Touchdown Raiz): adds a mid-flip ground touch for support and style, enhancing stability and control. It’s a popular move for linking together complex combos and enhancing the flow between tricks.

Self-Taught Tricking: Is It Possible?

Most trickers will find themselves training alone at some point, a phase often seen as challenging due to the lack of community support and motivation. Despite this, progressing and even excelling solo is entirely achievable with the right approach. The key to success is implementing structure and planning in your training sessions. Without external motivation, it’s crucial to set clear goals, outline how long to spend on each activity, gauge the energy expenditure for the session, and schedule the next training period. This disciplined approach not only compensates for the absence of communal inspiration but also ensures consistent progress and skill development.

While these strategies are applicable even when training with others, solo training in tricking introduces a unique aspect, emphasizing the importance of a clear vision for progression. Resources might seem scarce, but the online community is always eager to support fellow trickers. Expanding your network and connecting with others in the community can significantly enhance your training, offering advice, motivation, and shared experiences that facilitate growth and improvement in your tricking journey.

Being self-taught in tricking is not a disadvantage, yet it’s wise to utilize the plethora of free online resources available for direct coaching. While some may take pride in learning entirely on their own, which is commendable as a personal achievement, attempting to prove this to others can be an empty endeavor. Most people are primarily concerned with their progress and skills. Leveraging every resource at your disposal can accelerate your learning and enhance your technique, making it a practical approach to improving in tricking. If you don’t know where to start Johzuke on YouTube is the best resource for free tricking tutorials.

Timing Your Tricking Training: A Realistic Timeline

Don’t expect immediate mastery in tricking; instant success is rare. However, focusing solely on progression misses the point—the essence of tricking is to enjoy the journey. While it might sound cliché, having fun is genuinely the most crucial aspect. Achieving all your desired tricks and being truly satisfied is hard to come by, if you haven’t enjoyed the process, reaching those milestones probably won’t suddenly fill you with happiness. There’s always more to learn and achieve, emphasize the importance of finding joy in every step of your journey, not just the final achievements.

From personal experience, most people transition out of the beginner phase in tricking within 2-6 months. At this point, you can often start integrating lower-level single flips and twists into combinations and may have mastered a few vertical kicks. After 1-2 years, many progress beyond intermediate tricks, possibly executing multiple double moves like double corks, double b-twists, and variations from different setups. In the broader tricking community, reaching an elite level typically requires over 5 years of dedicated training. Elite trickers commonly perform dub-dubs, triple fulls and corks, and sometimes even quads, showcasing the depth and progression achievable with sustained effort and practice.

It’s crucial to understand that timelines for progressing in tricking are entirely arbitrary and based on generalized observations. There are no “ranks” in tricking, nor is there a correct timeframe for achieving specific tricks and levels. The key is to focus on safely progressing with your tricks, allowing skills to develop naturally over time. Take pride in your progression and avoid comparing yourself to young prodigies. Everyone’s journey in tricking is unique, and personal growth and safety should always come first.

Overcoming Self-Consciousness: Training Alone in Public

Going to a grass session alone can be quite nerve-wracking, a sentiment many trickers share. The challenge arises from the eagerness to demonstrate tricking skills against feelings of insecurity about one’s progress and skill level. This insecurity often underpins the apprehension about performing in public. Yet, it’s important to recognize the value of your achievements and understand that most onlookers find tricking fascinating and impressive. To help overcome these nerves and become more comfortable with public training, here are three tips:

Public Tricking Tip #1: Own the session

• Tip #1: To make the area where you practice tricking feel like your own domain, consider placing personal items like your car and bags around the session space. This act of marking your territory can psychologically enhance your comfort level, as it becomes “your” space. Adopt the mindset that you are the sole performer on this patch of grass or gym floor, essentially claiming it as yours. This approach not only boosts your confidence but also subtly shifts the dynamic, making others feel like visitors to your domain. Embrace the thought, “I own this floor,” and let that confidence reflect in your tricking. This strategy works surprisingly well in both outdoor and gym settings, helping you to feel more at ease and focused on your performance.

Public Tricking Tip #2: Reps, Reps, Reps

• Tip #2: To distract yourself from the trivial concerns of onlookers’ judgments, setting clear goals before your session can be incredibly effective. Don’t half-heart your training; instead, build trust within yourself. If you’re uneasy about training alone, challenge yourself to perform five repetitions of a specific trick—quickly and efficiently—before you allow yourself to leave. Committing to completing these five reps is crucial. Often, once you’ve achieved this initial goal, you might find yourself motivated to continue training longer. If not, you’ve still kept a promise to yourself, which is a victory. This approach helps you gradually set higher goals, encouraging you to extend your sessions and step further out of your comfort zone with each visit.

Conquering Fear in Tricking: A Mental Game

Tricking can feel daunting, especially when you’re on your own without the safety nets equipment provides for progression and overcoming fear. Mental tactics to psych yourself up for a trick vary greatly, depending on the individual athlete’s emotional landscape. However, incorporating simple tests into your tricking practice can effectively reduce fear. Practicing the elements of a trick separately or in less daunting settings can make the overall trick seem more approachable. This method helps you slowly gain confidence and get comfortable with the movements, easing the transition to tougher tricks and reducing fear.

Firstly, never attempt a trick unless you feel confident about landing it; it’s natural to feel scared when trying new things. However, it’s crucial to possess a level of confidence that convinces you of your ability to perform the trick. If you have any doubts about your ability to perform a trick, it’s safer not to try it. Attempting a trick with doubt is a common way injuries happen. Ensuring you have confidence and belief in your ability is key to safely progressing in tricking and avoiding unnecessary risks.

Slight changes Tricking method

Before moving from a cork to a double cork, an athlete must have a solid cork foundation. If you’re not confident in landing a cork consistently well, it’s premature to move on to a double. The focus should be on perfecting your current skill level. Instead of jumping straight to entirely new tricks, like adding a double leg variation to the cork, the suggested method involves gradual increments.

Over ten attempts, you can start with a cork, then add slight increments (e.g., cork & 1/8, cork & 2/8, etc.), gradually working up to the full double cork. If you reach a limit in how far you can push these small changes, work your way back down from that peak. This technique ensures comfort and familiarity with every increment between a single and double cork, making the transition to attempting the double cork feel less daunting and more achievable.

variations Tricking Method

The variations method focuses on exploring as many variations of a single trick as possible before increasing the difficulty level. Using the cork as an example, you could try variations like cork D-leg, cork shuriken, ice cork, cork rodeo, cork hyper, and cork turbo, among others. The goal is to become as comfortable as possible with these variations, which enhances your overall understanding of the trick and how to adjust your setup for each variation. This approach broadens your skill set within a particular trick, deepening your mastery and preparing you for more advanced progressions by building a versatile foundation.