How to improve your BMX Flatland tricks:
My experience and advice about BMX Freestyle riding
If you read the description under my YouTube video, these lines will be familiar to you. I copied the here for the keeping the picture whole and for those of you who found my blog about BMX Flatland riding first. So, here it is, with a slightly different composition because I do not want Google search bots think that I am plagiarizing my own writings, LOL J
If you wanna skip this part, hit CTRL+F, type: ’note’ and click on second search result to jump to the sections not included in the video description, or, keep it ol’ skool and scroll down! J
Unfinished trick links and combos in my BMX Flatland riding
This is not the most viral, spectacular BMX Flatland video on the internet. Many dudes pull more dangerous and more difficult tricks than me. I did not want to lower the standard of extreme bike videos by uploading my creation, obviously I had other reasons.
When I was watching the footage recorded between 2012. March 17. and 2017. November 11. I realized a few valuable ideas to apply in my BMX riding. These long forgotten videos reminded me of some of my tricks, combos and switches I practised during the years. It was great to see how far I have gotten with them. Some tricks I had almost forgotten to practise again, so they will soon be added back into my BMX Flatland riding routine. The reason why you can see many tricks cut somewhere in the middle is because this is how far I got with practising them at the point of recording. I tried to fit the moves to the rhythm of the songs a bit as well, but surely this was not the reason why there are som uch cuts, as you could have read above.
I drew the conclusion from them, which you can read bellow. It might be good advice as well to improve faster in BMX Flatland riding. So here it is:
1.: Stop overpractising a trick when you cannot improve in it:
If you get to a point in a BMX Flatland trick where you can’t get better after a while, let’s say, a few weeks for example, depending on the quantity of your daily riding (I hope you are lucky enough to ride every day), put a pause in practising that trick for a while. For me it is very frustrating to have a great switch between two tricks you know perfectly well even in your sleep, and you can not pull it (I mean get it done flawlessly in the Flatland rider-lingo). ¡Ay, caramba!, I have such ’boogeyman’ tricks as well.
2.: Start practising a ’long-forgotten’ trick again or start with something brand new:
I bet you have cool stuff in your repertoire of Flatland tricks to get back on to practising again. You know, those that your could not imporve in the past. Speaking for myself, works like this: if I take a pause with a trick for a while, I can perform it better when I return to practising it again. Maybe not pulling it flawlessly, but doing it better than in the past. This process can be repeated: if this trick gets to a plateau as well, pause the practise, set it aside, maybe take a note of it somewhere either on paper, or in your calendar, mayba adding some visual to it in the form of a short video or picture.
Starting to practise a brand new, maybe some ol’ skool Flatland trick is also a great idea. Even an easier one for you to have a sense of achievement and feeling of success after the harder-to-learn tricks. Each rider has better skills for different types of tricks. Some ride slower, some ride with bigger speed. Some are better at rolling tricks, some at spinning and pumping. Some riders are masters of decades, jumps, scuffing-type of Flatland moves. I gotta say peace to them young BMX Ninjas who can do anything on any terrain, no matter how shitty the concrete is, like my friend Tamás Varga for example. You have all my respect! I am the exact opposite of you: with my 20 years of age (the other 20 is the experience, you know my steez :D) and I can - okay, maybe I only wanna – practise and get my tricks done right on a nearly perfect surface, preferably only on my spot. I only ride this spot by the way as I do not (want to) and can not travel to keep my little freetime in check.
Having paid my respect to them young Padawans – or rather, Masters of the Flatland Force, I also gotta shout out to those gentlemen in their 40’s still riding and basically can do any type of trick. They represent very unique styles and ways of riding and in many cases it is them who come up with new tricks and combos for copycats like me to practise after them. These BMX Gods are the pioneers of Flatland, like my Hungarain homeboy Márton Szilágyi, Viki Gomez, Martti Kuoppa, just to name a few.
On the world wide web you can also come across amazing riders from Asia spinning at lightning-speed doing amazing unique front and the rear wheel combos.
Do not compare yourself to other riders to the point of having an inferiority compley! Watch them, learn from them and find peace with the abilities you have.
Remember: perseverance can make up for the lack of talent (at least to a point, for sure)
Being very happy to see new BMX talents appearing in the scene and the Fathers of Flatland still ’punishing’ with their tricks, sometimes I am pretty hard on myself for not being able to improve with bigger steps. The happier I am for them, the more frustrated I can get when I compare myself to those much ahead of me. It seems like that almost everyone is learning more, better and harder tricks than me. This is partly because I am not that active in the past few years like I was 10 years ago. The
other reason is very simple: they are more talented than me, or have a better Flatland practise strategy, or both. I always realize when I slip into such an unhealthy mindset, and if nothing else helps, I do not watch BMX videos.
Not being able to ride your bike makes you sad? Do not torture yourself then with watching rider videos!
If I cannot go riding for any reason and if this fact makes my mood bad, I do not torture myself with
watching others ride. I’d better drown my sorrow into work. I don’t mean working a second job. No freaking way! I’d rather focus on my online medicinal mushroom coffee business instead. My goal with this is having unlimited freetime for the things I love to do, including riding BMX Flatland whenever I want to and as long as I want to, not having to adjust to anything or anyone.
Of course I intend to upload better quality vids with the new tricks I will have learnt, simpler and more complex as well. The reason why I decided to share this not-so-pro video footage was that I didn’t want it to sink into oblivion on my hard drive. Hopefully it’s gonna give you some value.
Note: this sections was not in the YouTube video descriptopm from now
on:
My other reason for putting a lot of hours of editing this BMX Flatland practice video of mine is that I do not want to live with any more regrets. No need to think of any drama here, I will explain: for many-many years, it might be 10 years, I did not make any videos, rarely even pictures of me riding my ’kid’s bike’. I do not want to blame technology for this, but it is a fact that comparing to today’s mobile devices that can embody a whole video studio in our pockets we had to make a bigger fuzz about recording some video footage or shooting some photos. Think about just the size of the gadgets. I regret not having recorded a lot of my ol’ skool BMX tricks and combos. I could do a lot of them. These tricks were scuffin’ tricks mainly, or used a few scuffs in almost every one of them.
What is a ’scuffing trick’ in BMX Flatland? How do you ’scuff’ in BMX Flatland?
It is a move I make with my foot on wheels of the BMX to make is move forward, backward on a circle or straigth in line in a rhytmical way, blocking, braking and making it move. It is kinda like shuffle dancing, if I had to compare it to something.
Why did I stop practising scuffing tricks on my BMX Flatland bike?
I got fed up with scuffing tricks after a while because of two things as far as I can remember:
First reason: the shoes.
Scuffing tricks are shoe-killer. ’’All shoes must die” – like Chase Gouin said in one of his videos, I believe it was in some of the Dorkin’ series.
BMX Flatland is a shoe-killer extreme sport.
Scuffs put a lot of pressure on the front part and on the sole of the shoes. These moves make the sole of the shoes wear thin in a very short period of time. Back in the day when I was practising an average of 3 to 6 hours on my BMX daily, I had to buy shoes in 2 or 3 weeks. No matter I had a job and earned money, it was an extra expenditure and it was sad to see that those great skater shoes I bought had not a single problem on their top part if one looked at them, except for one: the sole had holes in it and was really thin, to the point that it was uncomfortable especially if I walked on stones or uneven surface. My right-foot shoes, as I was doing scuffing tricks mainly with my right foot first, were affected by this BMx Flatland ’disease’. It sucked also to limp a bit because of the thinner sole of my right foot shoe. I wore the shoes to work after they were of no more use to me in BMX riding, because, let alone, the thin sole with a whole, which no one saw were in a very good condition on their top and other parts. I did not want to throw them away after having just bought them 2-3 weeks ago.
Does one need to buy expensive skater shoes for riding BMX Flatland?
I also experienced with cheaper shoes and football shoes, but they did not work. They were not comfortable and some of them literally fel lapart in one day. These cheaper versions of skateboarder shoes did not pass the test. Basketball shoes were – and still are – fine, but it was sad to see them get ruined as well.
I remember destroying an almost brand new Nike Cortez street shoe in two days as I had to put something on my feet in emergency as my rider shoe died and I did not have anything else to go riding my bike in. The Nike Cortez was a great shoe to walk the streets as an everyday-wear, but it was not designed for nearly anything as hardcore as BMX Flatland riding.
Luckily I found my favourite shoe for riding BMX Flatland: it is Kipsta Strong 500 and can be purchased in Decathlon stores. I am not getting paid any money for advertising these shoes, I am wrinting about them simply because I am satisfied with the price and value and they are very comfortable for walking and playing some basketball too, as they are originally basketball shoes.
Second reason for no more scuff-trick practise: a new style of BMX Flatland riding.
I saw a whole new style of BMX Flatland riding emerge in the world of BMX. I contribute this to two amazing riders, fellow Hungarian Adam Kun and the French Flatland-God Matthias Dandois.
These guys used no or just one or two step-in or scuffs in their extremely difficult and spectacular BMX trick combinations. They use ’pumping’ instead to make the bike move. I decided to forget scuffs as I love the way they ride. I have never thought before that Flatland could exist without scuffs. The older videos I saw were packed with scuffing tricks, which made the riding a bit discontinuous
some time comparing to the much more fluid flow of new-skool BMX Flatland riding.
Before the older, preferably riders of my age start casting stones at me, I have to tell you that I totally
respect and admire the awesome tricks of the earlier years and I know how much effort, time and energy is in those combinations. It is that I am just more keen on the Flatland style without scuffs and using momentum to make the bike move, roll and spin.
I think I am not going to practise my old trick-lines anymore. I want to learn other tricks. It would have been very good to record my old BMX Flatland tricks because of this.
To make up for my laziness for recording videos for so many years, I decided to put some effort into
immortalizing my moves. It is great to watch back.
There are many (yet) unfinished move, combos and tricks in my BMX Flatland riding video. Some of them I have been practising for years and got stuck with it. It can be and it is pretty frustrating, but I found out a way to deal with such situtations when I can not move on or improve in a BMX trick: I stop practising it for a while and get back to it later, maybe months later. It ensures that I am not flogging myself with how clumsy I am for not being able to improve and postponing practising a bike trick also ensures that the probably wrong or just partially good movement pattern does not get memorized in a nervous level. I read that a move practised often is memorized by your nervous system and can elicit instantanious reactions in certain situation. I think the most common and effective area to think of here is self-defense and martial arts, but I believe it is true in any sports or everyday life moments such as cooking, cutting vegetables thinner or to a certain shape and faster is.
Footage recorded between 2012.03.17. - 2017.11.11. Contains yet unfinished trick links and switches.
My experience and advice:
Pause with tricks you cannot move on with and find those that work for you. Get back to the harder tricks after a while. For more thoughts read video
description. Peace y’all!
All music by Your Memoria:
For a fistful of euros (album:
Buddy)
Your Africa (album: Buddy)
I don’t belong to your fucking
nation (album: Buddy)
Without title (album: My Policy)
More great grooves:
