Why does the kickflip spin backside?

Is it because of your foot placement?

I've seen so many people have this problem that their board spin backside, making it flip like a sort of a varial flip. The same thing happened to me and initially, I thought its because of the foot placement.

But I was also sure about these:

• I knew i was NOT scooping my back foot.
• I was popping my backfoot straight down.
• It felt just like normal pops in ollies.

So why does the board spin?

I think I watched literally every tutorial in youtube. But no one seemed to have had clear answer for that saying these:

• You should NOT pur your backfoot in the pocket.
• You should NOT open your shoulders.

I'm not saying those tutorials are wrong, it was just giving me this impression.

Are we missing something that really causes the problem?

Because if aligning shoulders pararell to the board really matters, how come Luan Oliveira can kickflip with his shoulders opened at like, 90 degrees?

How come some people say you should put back your foot in the other pocket like Mike mo does? I mean, why does it not do the hard flip?

Misleading triangle

Statistically, it's safe to say the heavier you are, the higher you can jump.

Truth is, when we grow up, compared to when we were just babies. Correspondingly, we become heavier and we can jump higher.

The Spurious relationship referrers to a misleading correlation between two elements while in reality it's a third underlying element that really causes the correlation. And that's exactly where we are standing in the world of kickflips today. Between the problem that your board spins and traditional advises like you should not put your back foot in the pocket, there must be a third element that really causes the problem.

Unintentional varial flip type.

In this case, The board starts spining right after flicking. This means your board virtually makes a varial flip rotation when you are not even trying to do so.

Unintentional backside flip type.

In this case, you wind up rotating after catching your board. This means the flip itself does not seem to have any problem, but your feet turns backside and make it look like a backside flip.

There are 4+ elements that could cause the spin.

• Foot placement
• Angle of shoulders
• Swing of backfoot
• Overflick/pop

Is foot placement really the reason?

According to the existing tutorials, you should not put your backfoot in the pocket in kickflips because doing so makes your board spin backside.

Let's simulate it using this 3D model.

• The skateboard weighs 5kg. 30inch long, 8inch wide.
• The ball here weighs 5kgs and 10cm in diameter.
• The green line indicates the ball's trajectory.

If I let the ball free fall right in the pocket of the tail, the board obviously pops straight up and comes back straight down.

This is because it is the furthest edge of the tail that has the final contact with the ground as the board gets into the air. So whether you pop the center of the tail or the pocket, as long as you pop it straight down, it doesn't make much of a difference in terms of the direction of the board to go.

This is just my opinion but I personally think you don't really have to try to put your backfoot right in the center of the tail. It's rather important to put your foot somewhere you feel comfortable including even the pocket, because popping there itself doesn't spin the board after all.

Should we not open our shoulders?

I can assure you, you can still kickflip with your shoulders open, which does not mean I recommend it to you though. Before going into the details, it is important to understand why we want to open our shoulders.

In kickflips, we place our front foot with our heels hanging off. So we don't fall to the heel side, we want to compensate it by putting our backfoot to the toe side, especially when you ride loose trucks like I do.

As a result of placing your feet like so, it becomes natural to open your shoulders. And opening shoulders itself is not a source of the problem since doing so does not generate any horizontal momentum as long as you don't swing your shoulders.

When we open shoulders, we move our backfoot to the toe side, which further, leads to tilting your body axis and too much distribution of your weight to the toe side.

With the body axis leaning to the toe side, even when you try to pop straight down, since the direction of your pop will also be slanted along with the body axis, you will wind up popping slightly to the heel side.

These contents are NOT all

How hard you pop and flick may also affect the spinning problem. Please check out the next post, too.