How to Choose Your Scootering Foot Stance
Choosing the right foot stance for you is key to learning tricks and becoming a stunt scooter rider.
Your foot stance will directly affect how you ride and handle both tricks and obstacles in the skate park or on the streets.
There are two main types of foot-stance in scootering, these are called regular and goofy.
Now before we get into the specifics, I’m sure you want to know why these stances have their names.
Regular is nice and easy, the majority of people ride that way.
Goofy gets its name from the cartoon character. A popular episode of a TV show depicted the character riding his surfboard with the right foot forward and thus the term riding goofy was born!
A lot of the time you will work this out by yourself as having one particular foot at the front will feel much more natural than the other.
A common misconception is that foot-stance is linked to whether or not you are left or right-handed. This doesn’t actually make a difference.
So how can you really determine which of your feet should be the one at the front?
There are a couple of methods that can help with this:
- The Fall Test – Simply lean forward until you overbalance yourself and need to step out to regain your balance. The foot that goes forward is your go to balance leg and should probably go the front of your deck.
- Kick a Ball – If you have a football handy then this trick could work for you. Whichever foot you naturally want to kick the ball with would be your dominant foot and should be placed at the back of the deck.
- The Push – In a tie breaker situation you can have someone that you trust gently push you. This works best if you have your eyes closed and aren’t expecting it. The foot that goes out will usually be your dominant foot and will tend to be the one that goes out instinctively when you are about to bail or fall while riding. This should be your back Of course, this should only be done in a clear, safe environment, by someone you trust.
As said before, there is no real concrete method in determining foot-stance, but a mixture of intuition and the tip above can help guide you to a well thought out conclusion.
Foot-stance is totally on its own when it comes to working out how you ride and is separate to things that would imagine would be intrinsically linked to it such as ‘which way should I spin / rotate?’
Hopefully this Stegga quick guide has helped you on your way to becoming a better scooter rider, we look forward to seeing the tricks and skills that you take from Stegga to the Skatepark!
Ben Wilkinson