How to Toeside Slide
Once you’ve got the Coleman down, the next longboard slide to learn is the Toeside Slide, or “Backside Pendulum Slide.” If you’ve been sliding for a while, but can only slide heelside (like you do in a Coleman slide), you’ll quite quickly realise only being able to slide in one direction is quite limiting.
Learning the Toeside Slide will enable you to deal with 99% of longboarding situations that happen to you – traffic, other skaters, corners in either direction – you can handle it all. Plus, in our opinion, the toeside slide feels way cooler than the heelside version!
This may appear to be a completely different thing to the Coleman Slide, but it’s actually a very similar slide, just with a different body position. the initiation, road position, steering and hookup are exactly the same – just the other way round. This will seem counter-intuitive to start with, but do enough of them and you’ll see what we mean.
Some skaters find the Toeside Slide less intimidating than the Coleman slide – you may find that this is a better thing to learn first. One thing to be aware of is thatif your wheels suddenly grip up in the middle of the slide – what’s known as a “high side” – you’ll be landing on your head rather than your knees like the Coleman. Helmets are good – wear one!
Lush Teamrider Jorge Pernes is demonstrating this one. It’s worth noticing that Jorge is goofy (right foot forward) – if you’re regular stance (left foot forward), you’ll need to reverse this, but it’s still your back hand that goes down on the road, and your front that does the swinging about.
There is some controversy about whether it’s best to learn this by grabbing rail, as demonstaed in the How To Backside Predrift tutorial. Just like the Coleman slide, it might feel “safer” and easier to grab the nose of the board to help you start the slide, but in our opinion it’s actually harder and more dangerous. Grabbing rail gives you more braking power by keeping your weight over the board – but it also increases the chance of high-siding, and reduces your directional control, as it’s your free arm that does the steering.
If you don’t grab you can get push the board away from you with your feet, reducing the chance of the dreaded high-side, and allowing you to look around and see where you are going more easily. So just like the Coleman, we strongly suggest that you man (or woman!) up and learn this without the grab. You can always add the grab if you need the extra braking power, or if you’re sliding really fast into a toeside corner. Oh yeah, and it feels way cooler without the grab!