Private Skate Practice - What's Next

I always knew there was a step between Skate Basics and what came next. I even built an iteration of one. At the Skate Lounge I created, I started a practice session, and for a while I believed that was the answer, but deep down it felt off. I built it the way the skating world has always built anything. You came when you felt like it, and you were left to work it out on your own. It was just another place to skate. It was not the next step.

You weren't asking for one more open skate session to show up to. I was starting to recreate the same model the skating industry always had, the one that left you stuck in the first place, the one that always ended at the same question. What's next? What was needed was the opposite of what I built. First, consistency, a plain word and the one that matters most, for your brain and body as much as your skating. Then a coach in the space, not to run a session but to be there to support your progress. And privacy, which matters more than almost anything in the space and time right after the foundation is set. The answer was never another version of what already was. It had to be built from the ground up.

And to understand why it had to be built this way, you have to look at what Skate Basics actually is.

Skate Basics was built to make starting easier, to make walking through the door to something new as close to barrier free and supportive as possible. It's six weeks, and when you add up the actual time on skates, it comes to about eight hours. I say it in every training. If you can master anything in eight hours, somebody come tell me, so I can go make my millions and we'll all have a good laugh. You get the message, and the weight of having to master roller skating in six weeks is lifted. It takes more than eight hours, and it was always supposed to. Skate Basics is not the finish line. It's the foundation, the part that isn't glorified, the part no one sees. It is not there to impress anybody, and it is not a test you have to pass. It is there to give you something solid to stand on that everything else gets built on.

When you finish those six weeks and you still have to think your way through a crossover, lean, step over, turn your head and shoulder, that does not mean you're behind. It means your body is still learning. The foundational skills are not automatic yet. What my team and I built gets you there in a fraction of the time it would take on your own or through unstructured skate lessons, but it can't skip the work. Your muscles and your ligaments are still conditioning to a way of moving that's been so far removed it now feels foreign. That takes time, and time is the one thing the old rink model never gave anybody, at least not without interruption or criticism.

There's only one way it becomes automatic, and it isn't a marathon. Not three hours once a month, not the cram session before the annual family skating party. What I share with all trainees is just one more hour a week. Sixty minutes, the same time every week. Add that, and you'll be surprised how far it takes you. Consistency is the key. Repetition is what turns skating from something you have to think about into something your body naturally does, without you talking yourself through every step of it.

Sometimes trying new things as an adult comes with a steep learning curve, and that part is normal. But when it comes to roller skating, it doesn't have to be one of those things. Learning to roller skate is never the real problem. What gets in the way is everything piled on top of it, the fear of falling, the pressure to nail it perfectly the first time. There's this idea I oppose, that grown people are done learning new things, that by a certain age you should already be the expert, and if you're not, it's too late. So you walk into a skating session full of people who have skated for years, you're the one visibly working something out, and somebody is quick to tell you you're doing it wrong before they've helped you understand a single thing. That is what makes it feel impossible, and none of it is the actual skating. It's enough to make most adults quit before they ever really start.

And here's what I've come to understand about that. At our big age, basic skating is more technical than it was when we were kids. There are real mechanics to it, things that are genuinely safe and dangerous. But we are not adults training to be performers. We came to have fun, to build real skill, and to keep living our lives without getting hurt doing it. A lot of the people handing out pointers mean well, but they miss that. They miss the individual, and push every skater toward the same one-size-fits-all way of performing. We came to do this for ourselves, not to be seen. When the first thing somebody does is grade you on right and wrong, it doesn't matter that they're correct. Leading with what you're doing wrong is not how you make a person want to stay. It just makes them want to leave.

It's the familiar coaching you had in training. We know you. In our training sessions the coach is split between everybody in the room, and even with our small training size, a session is still paced for the group. In Private Skate Practice, if you want to spend your hour working one thing with your coach, you can. You can ask the question you didn't want to ask in front of the group. You can get it wrong, try it again, and work it out.

Most open skate sessions don't offer any of that. The music comes on, everybody moves, and you're left to figure it out alone and keep up. That creates the potential for bad habits to become part of the foundation.

My own house is a hundred years old, and the joists under the floor have sagged over the years. When I went to put in new wainscoting, the floor wasn't even true anymore, and I had two choices, neither of them good. I could build around the problem, level everything by hand so it looked right, and live with the real issue still sitting underneath. Or I could open the floor and fix the joists, which lasts but costs far more. Bad skating habits are the same. Once they're in the foundation, you're left choosing between working around them forever or paying to tear them out. Practice is where you and our coaches catch them before they ever set in, so you never have to make that choice.

That's why Practice sits where it does, between group training and open skating. It doesn't replace either one. It supports both. It runs right alongside everything you learn after Skate Basics, the backward skating, the transitions, the crossovers, the rhythm, the control. You don't graduate out of it. You keep coming back to it as you take on more.

And you are not doing any of it by yourself. The people next to you are working through the same things you are. Somebody there is at your exact level. Somebody is a step ahead, somebody a step behind. One person has the crossover down and is fighting the transition. You've got the transition and can't find the crossover. Someone next to you both finally figures out how to shift their weight, and now all three of you know something you didn't walk in with. You start trading what you know. Two people working the same problem almost always get there faster than one working it alone.

That's the social part of this, and it was never a separate event you get invited to later. It started back in Skate Basics, the first time you worked something out next to someone else, and it builds every week you practice. And by the time you get to Social Eight, where we skate out in the open together, it isn't new. It's something you've been part of all along.

Skate Basics builds the foundation. Practice is where that foundation becomes yours, on your own time, with guidance, with nobody judging you, next to people doing the same work you are. And what starts there, the consistency, the conditioning, the people, is what carries you into everything that comes after it.

What's next?

This is the answer.