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How to Frontside Powerslide

After you’ve nailed the fronstide standup 180 slide, the next step is a frontside standup slide or “standie.” Like the frontside 180, it’s easy to learn, and easy to bail out of if you get it wrong. You can learn them on the flat at very slow speeds, but it’s easier on a steeper hill. Try it to stop at slow speeds first, then step it up little by little until you are going flat out into corners with them like Jorge does here.

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Get Ready

Approach as you would most other slides – weight centered, relaxed posture, knees slightly bent, ready.

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Setup

Carve into the slide slightly, keeping your weight on your heel edge, and bend your knees to get yourself nice and low. The setup for this is really the same as the frontside 180 – the lower you get, the easier it will be.

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Initiate

To get the board to slide, carve hard whilst straightening your legs suddenly to pop up and unweight the board. Swing your front arm up to accentuate this, and kick out with your back foot. This is all in the pop up, so the lower you got in your setup carve, the easier you’ll find it.

This is where the similarity to the frontside 180 ends. You want to kick the back of the board out without generating the rotation that you did for the 180. The 180 is initiated with a swing of the back arm, whereas for the powerslide you need to initiate with the front arm to stall any rotation you’ve made by kicking out with your back foot. Make a big shape with your body and focus on straight legs if you’re having trouble.

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Control

At first you might find that you can only get the back wheels sliding. Keep your weight centered, and push with the front foot, and you’ll find that all four wheels will start to slip. Imagine that you are leaning against a wall, and balance by leaning back into the slide. Keep your knees a little bent and relaxed to ride out any chop in the road surface – this will allow you to hold the slide out for longer and lessen the chances of being spat off.

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Hookup

To hook back up again, bend your knees to sink your weight down back into the board and drop your front arm. You’ll find that the deck comes back round under you quite naturally if you pay attention to dropping your body and front arm down. You can use your feet to pull the board back in underneath you too.

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Next Steps

Go faster and hold them out more!!! This is a great way to dump a lot of speed very quickly, so once you have them on lock, it’s great for braking into corners. If you’re not worried about exit speed, then see if you can slide all the way round a heelside corner. When you get them really big, make sure that you hold the board slightly off 90degrees to prevent flatspots.

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    Jorge is the master of getting sideways and staying there...