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One of the first questions everyone has is how you position your hand on the board and if you ever search fingerboarding on the internet, sometimes you see people with their hands flat on the fingerboard or maybe with their third ring finger curled. What does it all mean?

Well, in fingerboarding, just like with skateboarding, there is style. So, you can actually do with whichever way is most for you. But, a lot of people choose to get that third finger out of the way or just keep their hand flat. So, it really just comes down to what’s more comfortable and what you see as more stylish.

Another important basic to know about fingerboarding is the speed at which you approach the obstacles. Most people when they start out fingerboarding, they do it quick and choppy and try to hop onto the obstacles very quickly. Really, with fingerboarding, it is all about mimicking skateboarding, trying to create the same flow, trying to do tricks with the same speed, and try to make tricks as realistic as possible.

A lot of fingerboarders when they first start out, always seem to try to go for the ollie or try to land the kick flip right away and they just can’t seem to get it, they get frustrated, and they give up. To that, I say, you have to start small. You have to start with the pop shoving, get control of the fingerboard, learn how to position your fingers in a way that is comfortable. And you have to practice. That’s what it really all comes down to. If you want to learn complicated tricks, like the heel flip, the kick flip, even the tray flip, you have to start with the basics.

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Now manuals in themselves are not difficult tricks. For example, a regular manual is just where you go up and balance on your back two wheels. Nose manuals are when you balance on your front wheels. Now in skateboarding this might be a difficult trick but in finger boarding there is no real balance. Now, the real difficulty with manuals comes in when you start doing flip tricks with them. A great first manual combo to start learning is kick-flip manual. So thats where you would go up, do a kick-flip, and land in a manual and ride away. Manuals aren’t really just limited to kick-flips, you can do any type of flip-trick and land in a manual or nose manual. For example, another variation of a manual combo would be a heel-flip nose manual nollie shove-out. Now it might sound complicated, but really all it is, is a heel-flip landed in nose manual, and then right as your riding out, kick your front finger backwards spinning the board 180 degrees and roll away. So this opens up countless combinations of tricks you can do with manuals. And thats how you do manuals on a fingerboard.

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The Front Finger Impossibleis similar to an Impossible. Except for this trick, instead of it spinning around your back finger, it’ll actually be spinning around your front finger. So the first thing you wanna do is pop an Ollie, then move your back finger out of the way, allowing the board to spin over your front finger. Once it does, you wanna catch it, land, and roll away. Finger positioning for the front finger impossible, it’s really the exact same as a regular Ollie. Except it might help if you put your back finger even closer to the tip of the tail. So as you pop and peek out your Ollie, it’s easier to get your back finger out of the way, allowing the board to spin over your front finger. Variations of the Front Finger Impossible that you can learn are both the fakey Front Finger Impossible and a Front Finger Impossible with a front side reefer. The Front Finger Impossible with a front side reefer is done the exact same way a Front Finger Impossibleis done. Except after you catch it, you land and rotate the board front side. With the fakey Front Finger Impossible, you pop the board going the opposite direction, as you would with a regular Front Finger Impossible. And you actually pop the front of the board, and then rotate the board around your back finger. And that’s how you do the Front Finger Impossible.

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One of the great things about fingerboarding is how much it shares in common with skateboarding. All the tricks are done the exact same way. The only this is, you don’t have the fear factor you have in skateboarding and you don’t exactly have to balance so much. So, it allows you to really experiment with different types of tricks when you’re fingerboarding, figure out how they’re done, how fast the board flips, how quickly you need to catch tricks, and then, you can go out and try that on your skateboard since they’re done, really, the same way. I would definitely suggest someone learning to skateboard first because they you have a general idea of how fingerboarding works. But then, if you want to take your skateboarding even further and learn advanced tricks, it’s very helpful to use fingerboarding as a way to understand those more advanced tricks and apply them to your skateboarding. The similarity between skateboarding and fingerboarding is not only with the tricks, but also with the equipment itself because, with me, I prefer wide skateboards just like, and that actually carried over to fingerboarding because, since I was riding wider and wider skateboards, I figured, ‘hey, maybe I’d prefer wider fingerboards.’ And once I did go to a 32 millimeter fingerboard I really enjoyed it so, I have skateboarding to thank for that.

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Now, transition finger boarding is doing any type of trick on an obstacle such as the one I have in front of me that has transition. This one in particular is called a half-pipe. The key to learning god transition is to be able to mix up your tricks and also have your tricks flow back and forth in a line smoothly. So usually when you’re starting a line, a line is doing a bunch of tricks in a row, you start with the drop in. And from there you can do any tricks that you learn in a row. There’s many types of tricks you can do on a half-pipe. For example you can do rock to fakey where you ride up the wall with your front truck over the coping and back over. You could also do this going the other way switch.
Another trick you can learn is called the blunt stall. Now, the blunt is where you ride up the wall of the ramp with your back truck over the coping and pop an ollie back into the transition.
Another transition trick you can learn is the backside fifty-fifty where you go up and get both of your trucks on the coping and then turn back in. The great thing about transition finger boarding is just like with skating it’s very easy to combine tricks. So you can actually combine, for example, both a blunt and a rock to fakie where you go up in a blunt and then you go to rock to fakey and back in.
So I encourage you, once you learn to do a couple of different styles mix them up and get creative.

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Tech deck terminology is important to understand when you first get into fingerboarding because its helpful to be able to identify all the different parts of the fingerboard, especially when you go and try to find new parts or upgrades to your fingerboard. The first part of the fingerboard, which is the wood part, is called the deck. And on top of that is a grip tape surface. Its either rough grip tape, which feels like sand paper, or this foam type grip tape. We also have wheels. There are 4 wheels on a finger board and 2 trucks, and the trucks can be loosened, allowing you to turn more easily, or tightened based on your personal preference. There’s many companies out there that offer different types of ramps. For example, this ramp right here is called a half pipe. It’s made by tech deck. Its basically a half pipe because it has 2 walls, each with transition on them, and it has couping at the top with a little deck, allowing you to do tricks along the sides of the wall, on top of the deck, on either side. and this right here is called a fun box. Basically, any ramp that’s called a fun box is an obstacle with 2 ramps on each side connected by a flat piece in the middle and typically you’ll see a fun box that either has a ledge going down it or in this case, a rail right in the center.

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One very important thing when you first begin finger boarding, is finding a Tech-Deck, or any fingerboard, thats right for you. The best place to start with that is with Tech-Decks, because they’re relatively inexpensive and they have basically the main types of fingerboards that you would get anywhere, just to get a feel for the different kinds. This is a wooden fingerboard, as you can see, with soft grip tape on the top, its foam grip tape offered by Tech-Deck. And then this one, on the other hand, is plastic, as you can see, with rough grip tape. And this wood one has a lot more shape, theres a more concave and the kicks go up a lot more than the plastic one. Really, you can combine the two, um, you can have a wooden fingerboard with rough grip tape or vise versa. And really just try out different types and find out whats best for you, because in the end it really all comes down to personal preference. Tech-Deck usually makes skinnier boards around 28 to 30 mm, while other companies can even go up to 32-33 mm. As for the price of fingerboard, Tech-Decks can go from, anywhere from $4 up to, I believe, $12, while other fingerboards, especially ones made out in Germany can go up to $150 for even a complete.

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Grinds are tricks where you ollie onto an obstacle, or you can do a flip trick onto an obstacle, and land on either one of your two trucks on the obstacle. There’s many different types of grinds, they all depend on how you land on the obstacle, so I’m going to go over some of the basic grinds. First is a 50-50; it’s definitely the most basic grind you can learn. That’s where you ollie up and land with both of your trucks on the rail. The next grind you can learn is a 5-0 where , instead of landing on both trucks, you just land on your back truck and slide the obstacle. After doing a 5-0, you can learn to do a nosegrind, where you ollie up and land on your front truck. Some other grinds you can learn are Smith grinds and feeble grinds. Now, a Smith grind is where you approach the obstacle, ollie up, and land with just you back truck on and your front truck hanging off to the side. Now, a feeble is where your front truck lands on the other side of the obstacle like that. That’s a Smith. That’s a feeble. Now, just like in skateboarding, with fingerboarding there’s front side and back side. So if you approach an obstacle from this side of the rail and do a grind, that’s called a front side 50-50. If you approach the obstacle from other side and do the same trick, that’s called a back side 50-50. So depending on what side you start at, that determines whether or not the trick is front side or back side. And that’s how you do grinds on a fingerboard.

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Now, slides are any trick where you hop up onto an obstacle, whether it’s by an ollie, or any flip trick, and land on any part of your board, as opposed to grinds, where you land on your trucks. So you can land anywhere in the middle of your board, on the nose of your board, or the tip of your board. So some common slide tricks are you backside board slide you ollie up, and land on the middle of your board, slide and then land. The flip side, where you start on the other side of the rail, ollie up and your back trucks go over the rail and land in a board slide. For a tail slide, you wanna ollie up, do your ollie, turn the board towards you, lock in the tail, slide the length of the obstacle, make sure your front finger’s right at the tip of the board so you have complete control of your board as you go to turn it out and land.
The best way to learn any type of slide trick is to be very good at ollies. If you can ollie, and you’re comfortable with controlling the board in the air, you should have no problem being able to ollie above the obstacle, and then slap the board into any position that you prefer. Now, just like with skateboarding, there is front side and back side to every slide and grind. So, for example, with the lip slide, a trick where you ollie and get your back trucks over the obstacle and slide, that can be done both front side and back side. So this is a front side lip slide because the obstacle’s in front of you, and this is a back slide lip slide because the obstacle’s behind you. And that’s how you do slides on a fingerboard.

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The great thing about fingerboarding is, just like with skateboarding, you can combine different tricks to create new tricks. For example, you can take an ollie 360 flip, add a revert to it, and you have an ollie bigger flip. Or, you can do any trick in any stance, add any type of rotation to it, and you’re almost guaranteed to have a brand new, creative trick to add to your list. Now if you wanna learn to combine tricks, obviously the best way to start is by learning the basic tricks and just master them. Practice them over and over again until you have them down pat. So, if you wanna learn, for example, 360 kick flips, with a full hand rotation, you wanna learn 360 ollies, you wanna learn kick flips, and you wanna learn backside flips, for example. So take any complicated trick, break it down into its different, most basic parts, master those parts, and you should have no problem learning any type of combination.

Another way of creating advanced tricks is to take flip tricks and, instead of just flipping them just once, flip them twice. For example, you could take a kick flip, which flips single time, you catch it and land it, and instead of just flipping it just once, you flip it twice, creating a double kick flip. Add a backside 180 to that trick, and then you have a backside double kick flip. And that’s how you combine tricks to create advanced fingerboard tricks.

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The top tips I would give to anyone learning to fingerboard is first go on the internet and search finger-boarding on YouTube. Even if your not watching specific How-To videos, just watching how other people do tricks is very helpful. Just seeing how they place their fingers on the board, the speed at which they approach the obstacles at, and the types of tricks their doing can even give you ideas for tricks to do on your own. So, thats a great way to be inspired to learn new tricks. Another tip I’d give, um, anyone learning to fingerboard is practice. When you first start out, its very difficult; it’s completely different to any other hobby out there. So it does take a lot of time and practice to learn how to do it. One instance where someone would have a tough time learning to finger board is if they didn’t exactly find the right fingerboard for them to use. I mean, when I first tried it out, I would find fingerboards that I could hardly even ollie on, and then I’d buy a different one and all of a sudden I can do all these tricks. So definitely experiment with different shapes, sizes, grip tape, even try an loosening your trucks a bit, because every little thing makes a difference.

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A hardflip is essentially a frontside kickflip, but without turning your hand with the board as it spins. So, the board still does a kickflip coming at you, but your hand does not follow along for the 180 degrees. Only your board will be spinning during this trick, not your hand. So finger positioning for the hardflip is your back finger square against square against the tail, just like you would for a regular kickflip. And your front finger right behind the front iii. Now, the only difference between this trick and a regular kickflip, for example, is the way you flick your front finger. Now, in this case, your front finger will flick right at you, so it flips the board and spins it towards you. When you’re learning the hardflip, it might be easier if you peel your hand back a little bit more to allow the board to come back with your hand. Um, if you try to stay on top of the board as it’s spinning, it might be a little difficult to get it all the way around. So, by peeling your hand back just a little bit, it lets the board do its 180 rotation. And then you can bring your hand back, catch it, and roll it iii. A variation of the hard flip is a trick called a ghetto bird. This trick is basically a hardflip, catch it, and rotate it backside 180. You do this trick all in the air. So, again, you do a hardflip. And as you catch it, you can even turn your whole body to help you turn your fingers as you’re rotating the trick. And that’s how you do the hardflip on a fingerboard.

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Backside and Frontside flips are a variation of the 180 Ollie and a kickflip. For a frontside kickflip you’ll be doing a kickflip plus a frontisde 180 Ollie. To do that your finger positions should be the exact same as a regular kickflip, the only difference is when you go to pop the trick you want to kick your front finger out towards you rather than straight forward. This will not only do a kickflip but make the entire board flip towards you. Once you do the kickflip, you wanna catch it and continue the rotation with your entire arm until you reach a full 180 degrees. A nice way of learning this trick is to just do a regular kickflip, land it, then do a revert. From there you just do a kickflip and try to revert less and less until you can can kickflip and do entire 180 in the air. For backside kickflips you’re doing the exact opposite: you’re doing a kickflip but turning the board in the opposite direction. Like a backside 180. So to do that you have the exact same position as you would for a kickflip but to do that you turn your entire hand to the left, making your board spin away from you in the backside 180 motion. That’s how you do the frontside and backside 180 kickflips.

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The Impossible is a trick where you pop the board off the tail, move your front finger out of the way, and let the board wrap around your back finger, catch it, land, and roll away. One of the best ways to learn Impossible is just to take your hand and pop the board as hard as you can and get it to spin around your finger like that. That’s the first step. Next, once you can get the board to spin around your finger, you want to bring your front finger back, catch it, land, and roll away. A difficulty many people have with learning this trick is getting the board to spin around their back finger. I think finger positioning plays a big role in whether or not the board will spin around your back finger. If you position your back finger in a way where it’s hanging off just enough, that will help you get under the board a lot more, allowing you to scoop it. Now, during the trick, after you first pop the board, the first thing you do is bring your back finger up and out of the way, allowing it to spin around your back finger. The way to do that is really, as soon as you pop it, just peel your hand back, but not too far because you want to keep the board rotating around your back finger. Also if you put your front finger hanging off a little bit, that helps you get it out of the way during the trick. And that’s how you do the Impossible on a fingerboard.

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Today I will be demonstrating how to do a tre flip on a finger board, also known as a three-sixty kick flip. A three-sixty kick flip is a combination of a three-sixty pop shuvit and a kick flip. Finger positioning for the kick flip is your back finger hanging off just a little bit behind the back four bolts and your pointer finger right behind the front four bolts. But just the tip of your front finger on it. When you do this trick you want to pop and pull your middle finger towards you in a scooping motion. This will turn the board three hundred and sixty degrees while flipping the board, doing a tre flip. Once you have mastered the tre flip, then the next trick you want to learn is the faky tre flip. For the faky tre flip you are going in the opposite direction but your stance is the same as your regular tre flip. The finger positioning for the faky tre flip is exactly the same as the regular tre flip except in this case it’s actually a lot easier because you have momentum to do the faky tre flip. Nailing swiss tres are a bit more difficult. The reason for this is your stance is completely the opposite of your regular stance. For these two tricks I recommend not hanging your finger off the back of the tail. Instead keep it square with the board and to help turn the board three hundred and sixty degrees it’s helpful to turn your wrist with the board. It’s usually a lot more comfortable if your back finger is just square on the tail rather then hanging off. If you don’t turn your wrist with the board it might be difficult to turn the board a full three hundred and sixty degrees but by turning your wrist it’s a lot easier to flip the board. That’s how you do a three sixty kick flip.

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These tricks are really a combination of two basic tricks. The Pop-shove-it and the kick flip and the pop-shove-it and a heal flip. It involves doing a kick flip while doing a pop-shove-it. So you’ll be popping the board 180 degrees while flicking it so it doesn’t kick flip as well. To do the varial kick flip, you wanna pop the board with your back finger in a scooping motion while flicking the front of the board with your front finger. This will make the board spin and rotate at the same time. Once the board is finished rotating and flipping, you want to catch it with your two fingers, land and roll away. And that’s the varial kick flip. Now to do the varial heel flip, the finger position is pretty much the exact same for just a regular heel flip but backwards. So you’ll be flipping the board like you do with a heel flip with your front finger going away from you, making the board spin away from you but at the same time you want to bring your finger around making the board do a shove-it towards you while it’s rotating. A variation of the varial heel flip is a trick called a big heel flip. To do a big flip you want to do a varial kick flip, land, and do another 180. Just like with the big flip, it helps if you land a varial heel flip flat and then re-vert the last 180 and as you get more comfortable with it, you can actually catch the board in the air and do the rotation before you land the board. And that’s how you do a varial kick flip and varial heel flip on a fingerboard.

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The heelflip is a very difficult trick. To do the heelflip you want to make sure you know how to do an ollie and it helps if you know how to do a kickflip. Now, unlike the kickflip where you’re flicking your finger off to the side towards you, you’re actually going to be flicking away from you. This is going to make the board spin away from you rather than towards you. The finger positioning for the heelflip is your back finger right on the tip of the tail, so you can pop it nice and hard against the table. And your front finger right at the back of the front fore bolts. What I like to do when I do heelflips is kind of curl my front finger, just a little bit, right as I begin to pop the board. That helps me pop, and then kind of flick it away from me a lot more easily than if my finger was flat. The way I learned heelflips when I first started is try turning the board towards you, as if you’re doing a front side heelflip. The reason for that is it’s easier to flick the entire board away from you if it’s coming towards you like this. So as you pop it towards you, you can kind of just roll your hand off the side, making it spin away from you. Once you can make the board spin away from you as it’s turning towards you, then just work on, instead of turning it towards you just straighten it out a little bit more and before you know it you’ll go from having heelflips like that, to heelflips that are straight. After you’ve mastered the heelflip you can try a few variations. You can learn to do nollie heelflips, fakie heelflips and switch heelflips. For a fakie heelflip you’re moving in the opposite direction, popping off the front of the board and doing the heelflip. For a nollie heelflip you’re moving in the same direction as a regular heelflip, which is forward, but popping off the nose and doing the flip with your middle finger. For a switch heelflip you’re riding in the opposite direction again, popping with your pointer finger and doing the heelflip with your middle finger. And that’s how you do the heelflip.

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The kickflip is typically the next trick you learn after perfecting the ollie. It’s done much the same way, where you pop the back of your board off the ground, and slide your front finger up. Now, instead of sliding your front finger up to the middle of the board and leveling it out – instead, you’ll be kicking your finger to the side of the board and rotate completely, catch it, and land.

The problem a lot of people run into when they’re first learning to do the kickflip is not being able to rotate the board and get the board off the ground. If this is the problem that you’re running into, you’ll wanna make sure you can get your ollies at least a couple of inches off the ground before you start learning the kickflip. Once you can do that, if you’re having trouble rotating the board completely, you need to make sure you’re kicking the corner of the fingerboard hard enough to make sure it’s flipping.

Once you learn how to do the kickflip, you can start doing it in the three other stances. The switch flip, just like with the regular kickflip, is done the exact same way. You pop the board off the tail and flick off with your middle finger. The only difference is that you’ll be rolling this way, rather than to your left. An ollie flip is done much the same way as a kickflip is done, except you’ll be popping off the front of your board and flipping with your back middle finger. For a fakey flip, you’ll be moving to your right, and popping with your middle finger and flicking with your back pointer finger.

When learning any type of kickflip, it helps if you can pop the board higher into the air because this gives you more time to catch the board. And that’s how you kickflip on a fingerboard.

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Now this is one of the first tricks that people wanna learn on a fingerboard when they first start doing it because it essentially gets you jumping over objects and it also helps you learn how to do slides and grinds. To do an ollie, you wanna place your hand on the fingerboard with your front finger right behind the front 4 bolts and your back finger right behind the back 4 bolts. To get the board into the air, you wanna pop down on the tail while sliding your front finger up towards the front of the board. This motion together will get your board up into the air. Its popping your tail on the ground that lifts the board into the air and when you slide up, that levels it out, and then bring it back down to the ground. Problems most people have with the ollie is not getting it into the air and this is caused by not popping the tail hard enough on the ground. Instead, you want to do a much more fluid movement rather than a quick choppy one. When you first learn the ollie, its helpful if you have an object to jump over, so you can actually visualize something in your way and so you want to pop the board over that object. Like a fingerboard for example. Once you feel comfortable with the ollie, there’s a few variations you can do with it. The first is learning how to 180 ollie. So instead of ollieing straight, you actually ollie and turn the board 180 degrees with your hand. Once you learn to ollie in the regular stance, then you can learn in 3 other stances. Nollie, switch, and fakey. They’re all done the same way as an ollie is, you’re just moving in a different direction and popping off a different tail. For nollie, your popping off the front of your board as you’re moving forward. For fakey, your moving backwards and popping off the front of the board as well, and for switch, you’re popping off the tail of the bored as you’re going backwards. And that is the ollie.

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Shuvit is one of the first tricks you want to learn when you first decide you want to learn fingerboarding because its certainly one of the easiest tricks and it helps you get a lot of control over your fingerboard when you first start. The trick involves spinning the board 180 degrees. Now your hand does not move at all during this trick. In rotation, it stays flat with the board. To do the shuvit, you want to place your hand on the fingerboard with your back finger right on the tip of the tail, and your front finger right behind the front 4 bolts. You want to do a scissor kick motion with your finger, back towards you, and that’s gonna make the board spin 180 degrees. One of the most difficult things about learning the pop shuvit, after learning the shuvit, is how to pop the board off of the ground. Now, like the shuvit, you are still spinning the board 180 degrees, but with this trick, you are actually popping the board into the air, catching it, and then rolling away. A lot of people are frustrated because they can only spin it on the ground and not actually get it into the air. The way to do this is you have to snap the back of your board off of the ground and if you don’t hear it snapping on the table, then you’re not popping it hard enough. The finger positioning for the pop shuvit is your front finger right behind the front 4 bolts and your back finger right behind the back 4 bolts. You can really keep your back finger where ever feels comfortable, but I like to keep mine right behind the back 4 bolts, but some people like to put it all the way at the tip. Once you pop it off the ground, that will get it into the air. You can guide it by turning your wrist slightly as it begins turning, and once it comes around, try to catch it in the air. Catching it means stop it from rotating with your 2 fingers and then bring it back to the ground and ride away. And that’s how you do the fingerboard pop shuvit.