Have you seen, in his MTV show, Ryan Sheckler shirtless? Skateboarding is for bums? Take a good look at the professional skateboarder’s body.
Skateboarding is for bums? Take a good look at the professional skateboarder’s body. Have you seen,
in his MTV show, Ryan Sheckler shirtless? He’s got a well toned body. The guy is stringy but is ripped like Brad Pitt! Imagine that. Take a good guess at which physical activity can be most attributed to his ripped abs: skateboarding. How can skateboarding get you the muscles you want? Read on then to discover the facts and great exercise techniques to get ripped like Ryan Sheckler shirtless.
Keeping balanced is not as easy as it looks. Balancing on a skateboard is much harder because you need to shift your body’s weight left and right, forwards and backwards. Remember that you are supporting a lot of your weight. Therefore, all the work of supporting your upper body in this way funnels down falls to your torso, your abs, then to your legs. Your arms also play some role when shifting your weight. If you are starting to learn skateboarding, you’ll be spending hours and hours supporting and shifting your weight. More so, you are doing this unconsciously. Before you know it, you’re already addicted to the fun of skateboarding and you’ve been unwittingly working out your abs and legs for hours on end. Now, imagine how it would be if you start trying out and mastering progressively harder skateboard tricks one at a time. You’d be spending more and more hours, and you’ll also be using more muscles since these tricks are really hard to do. That’s exactly why those professional skaters like Ryan Sheckler, shirtless and sweating, look like they’ve been working out so hard in the gym.
Here are the best and easiest tricks you can learn that give the maximum workout:
The Ollie
This is one neat skateboard trick which opens the door the so many other skateboard tricks. Learn this one and you are on your way to learning a lot more. This builds your calves and sculpts your butt. Not to mention trains your feet coordination since you have to kick down your skateboard while jumping in the air. The effect being that your skateboard seems stuck to your feet while airborne.
50 – 50 Grinds
Grinds, as with any other skateboarding trick, require so much balance. You will need to use your hands, and your whole body to keep the grind going. Thus, this not only develops your arms, but also tones your torso.
Kickflips
This is considered by some people to be an intermediate skateboard technique. However, if you get this one down, you will reap the benefits of cardio work out as well as a whole body workout. That is, while you are mastering the technique.
So there you have it. Try mastering these techniques and time will fly by so fast before you know it, you’ve already ripped like Ryan Sheckler. Shirtless will no longer be a non option for you. You will take your shirt, be in the nude and get worshipped by the beach bunnies.
* Freestyle tricks involve balancing on some other part of the board than all four wheels, such as two wheels or one wheel, the tail of the board, or the edges on either side. Various ways to flip and manipulate the board in and out of these stances were invented in the earliest years of skateboarding and these form the basis of freestyle or flatground skateboarding.
* Aerials involve floating in the air while using a hand to hold the board on his or her feet or by keeping constant and careful pressure on the board with the feet to keep it from floating away. This class of tricks was first popularized when Tony Alva became famous for his Frontside Airs in empty swimming pools in the late 1970s and has expanded to include the bulk of skateboarding tricks to this day, including the Ollie and all of its variations.
* Flip tricks are a subset of aerials which are all based on the Ollie. The first such trick was the Kickflip. You can spin the board around many different axis, and even combine several rotations in to one trick. These tricks are arguably most popular among street skateboarding purists, although skaters with other styles perform them as well.
* Slides and Grinds involve getting the board up on some type of ledge, rail, or coping and sliding or grinding along the board or trucks, respectively. When it is primarily the board which is contacting the edge, it's called a slide; when it's the truck, it is a grind. Grinding and sliding skateboards started with sliding the board on parking blocks and curbs, then extended to using the coping on swimming pools, then stairway handrails, and has now been expanded to include almost every possible type of edge.
* Lip tricks are done on the coping of a pool or skateboard ramp. Most grinds can be done on the coping of a ramp or pool as well, but there are some coping tricks which require the momentum and vertical attitude that can only be attained on a transitioned riding surface. These include Inverts and their variations as well as some dedicated air-to-lip combinations.
