How to Carve On Your Longboard
Carving on a longboard is one of the best feelings going.
If you’re a snowboarder or a surfer, a love of carving is probably the reason you’re looking at longboards in the first place!
Carving it up on a longboard skateboard is a very familiar feeling to carving the snow or a wave, and you’ll be immediately familiar with it if you’re from a boardsports background.
Carving a longboard is also a really good way to keep your speed in check. Just like on the snow, once you get carving dialled you can tackle suprisingly steep paved slopes with a little width. You can also carve at very high speeds to slow down a little bit before footbraking or sliding into a corner – it can go hand in hand with airbraking to scrub a bit of speed off.
The key to carving is sliding your wheels slightly in each turn, which slows you down a little and keeps things under control. With practice, you’ll find that you’ll be able to vary your carves to control how much speed you loose with each turn quite considerably.
In fact, learning to carve will eventually open the door to the world of standup sliding, so if that’s something you want to get into, start off by carving first.
All you need to carve is a bit of a hill with some width, and a longer, lower board that turns a lot.