Learn to ride fakie: prerequisites, four stages from standing to controlled backward rolling, typical mistakes and why your head has to turn first.
Fakie means: you roll backwards in your normal stance. The board travels tail first, and your feet stay where they are. You learn it in four small stages on calm, slightly sloping ground, and the key ingredient is not courage but balance.
Fakie is not a trick, it is a riding state. It lives inside rock to fakie, half cab and every ramp line you leave backwards. If you cannot do it, everything after it comes with a question mark in your head.
That balance is the key is shown by an analysis of 45 skaters: static and dynamic balance, leg strength and endurance were the most important factors a model used to separate better from weaker skaters, with about 90 percent accuracy [1]. Fakie is mostly balance training on wheels.
How long it takes is experience, not study: if you push and kickturn confidently, you can often roll a few metres fakie after a few sessions. It only gets relaxed with kilometres.
Stand on the board as usual, knees soft. Now turn head and shoulders a little towards the tail without moving the feet. That is how your body will look when it rolls. Milestone: you stand ten seconds with a turned head without wobbling.
Find the slightest slope you can. Let the board roll one to two metres backwards. You do not push, you just allow it. Milestone: five out of five times one to two metres without stepping off.
Roll three to five metres. The head leads, the shoulders follow. Steering works like forwards: weight on the toe or heel edge, only that your gaze now travels backwards first. Milestone: five metres straight, eyes in the direction of travel, clean 8 of 10 times.
Put one foot down lightly beside the board and brake like a foot brake. Then roll in fakie again, three, four times in a row. Milestone: you stop in two metres under control, 8 of 10 times.
Film check: Put your phone on the ground, five metres behind or beside your line, and film ten fakie attempts. Check two things: does the head turn before the shoulders, and do the knees stay soft? If the head turns first and you roll without wobbling, the technique fits. A five-second clip is enough to talk through with the app's technique check or with a friend.
Fakie takes away your view forwards. A skateboard is also poor at braking and swerving: in a test with 40 experienced riders, vehicles without handlebars, skateboards among them, braked and swerved worse than bicycles and scooters. For skateboards, braking could hardly be described with a simple model because the foot on the ground changes everything [2]. So practise fakie only on surfaces without traffic.
If you fall, you usually catch yourself with your hand: wrist and forearm make up more than 50 percent of skate injuries, from falling onto the outstretched arm [3]. Helmets are hardly worn anyway: across 17 studies the rate was between 0 and 41.7 percent [4]. Skateboard GB explicitly recommends pads and wrist guards for learning, because you will fall [5]. Fatigue counts as a risk factor [6].
This guide explains and motivates, it does not replace supervised training. No descents, no roads, no sloped runs with speed.
Make fakie your warm-up: five times three metres before you practise anything else. The look over the shoulder becomes a habit, and that is what makes ramp tricks calm later. Your hips follow your head like a trailer, not the other way round.
Fakie means rolling backwards in your normal stance. The board travels tail first, and your feet stay unchanged. That is different from switch, where you mirror your feet and ride forwards. Fakie is part of tricks like rock to fakie and half cab.
In four stages: posture with a turned head standing, let the board roll one to two metres backwards, three to five metres with your gaze in the direction of travel, then stop under control. Start on a very slight slope without traffic. Prerequisites are confident pushing and kickturn.
No. In fakie your foot position stays normal and you roll backwards. In switch you mirror your stance and ride forwards. Both are foundations for later tricks, but they need different practice.
Practically yes. In rock to fakie you roll back down the ramp backwards. If rolling backwards still feels foreign, your head stays with the rolling and not with the trick. Ten calm metres of fakie on flat ground first.
Safest via a controlled stop: brake lightly with a foot on the ground, straighten the board and then roll off normally. Changing while rolling with a kickturn is the next stage and belongs in ramp guides like rock to fakie. Only when fakie sits calmly is the change in flow worth it.
Learning to Ride Switch: The Mirrored Stance