User:Darbotron/sandbox

Frontside and backside

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Skateboarding
Frontside and backside in skateboarding are often misunderstood and misused terms, as whether a particular trick is 'frontside' or 'backside' is not always intuitive. This issue is further complicated by the issue of a skater's 'natural' skating stance ('regular' or 'goofy' stance), and whether the skater is skating 'switch' stance or not (i.e. in the opposite stance from their natural stance).

As frontside & backside come from surfing and refer to the way the body is facing for the direction of travel across a wave, the extension of these terms into naming of skateboarding tricks comes from ramp (or half-pipe) skating which grew from pool skating, which in turn grew from surfing and follows the same rule; it also - though perhaps occasionally unintuitively - applies equally to all tricks whether travelling or rotating.

When skating on a ramp, turning in one direction - frontside - will rotate the skater's front toward the coping (at the top of the ramp), and in the other - backside - will face the skater's back toward the coping.

Turning either frontside or backside like this will naturally move the skater across the width of the ramp; and this natural direction of travels whilst turning is the name given to all travelling tricks (i.e. grinds and slides) which travel along the coping in that direction.

[insert diagram]

When thought of in this context the correct naming for a trick is always apparent.

Unintuitively, this means that:


 * for some travelling tricks (slides/ grinds) the name of the trick is the opposite of the direction the skater's body is facing relative to the direction the trick is moving
 * for rotating tricks done skating fakie (i.e. backwards) the name of the trick is opposite to the intuitive direction of rotation of the skater's body