I Learned How to do a "Rocket" Ollie

In this challenge, I attempted to learn an ollie. The ollie is perhaps the most fundamental trick in skateboarding and the gateway to learning more complex tricks like the kickflip.

The ollie is a skateboard trick that allows you to jump in the air with a skateboard, which opens up a whole world of possibilities.

You of course are not connected to the skateboard, so you have to use a clever trick to accomplish jumping in the air with a skateboard.

The ollie basically involves stomping on the back tail of the board, which pops it off the ground, then jumping and leveling out the board with your front foot, and landing back on it with both feet. This is much easier said than done.

I have spent hours trying to learn the ollie, but still have not figured out how to level out the board in the air with my front foot. An ollie without the kick-out motion necessary to level the board out is called a "rocket ollie". You can still jump over objects with a rocket ollie, so it still a functional movement, but your back wheels don't get nearly as high off the ground without the kick-out leveling motion. It also doesn't look nearly as cool or athletic.

The process of learning to ollie has been a totally foreign experience for me that is unusually frustrating. It is a weird thing to learn to manipulate something with your feet while jumping. I’ve never done a sport or activity that required your feet to orchestrate something with precise control and timing like this.

The world of skateboarding intimidated me growing up. I had a skateboard (and even had a phase of wearing skateboarding shoes in middle school), but I never learned how to do any tricks with it. I grew up loving to play the Tony Hawk Pro Skater videogames, but never learned how to even really ride the board with much confidence or skill, much less do varial heelflips, nose manuals, McTwists, and other funny sounding tricks featured in the game.

I remember going to a skate park as a kid and being scared to try anything risky. I watched some of my friends go flying up and down big ramps while I just stuck to going slowly around easy flat ground areas. The skate park was in an indoor warehouse kind of space that was dark and dingy, with graffiti on the walls. It intimidated me.

My adolescence had quite a few moments like this, where I refrained from taking risks while sitting on the sidelines and choosing not to participate. That can be smart in some cases, but I also feel like I severely limited my opportunities for growth and development of real world experience and skills.

I also feel like I lacked a growth mindset growing up. I didn’t have the mindset that you can fail at something but then learn and grow from it. I think I felt like any failure was proof that I couldn’t do something and that’s how it was forever.

That’s a big reason why I’ve started working on this blog and learning skills like skateboarding tricks. I think I’m not alone in living perhaps too sheltered from failure and growth opportunities. Now I want to do hard things that require leaving the comfort zone.

The ollie is listed by Tony Hawk as the first skill to learn in his “21 Levels of Skateboarding” video by WIRED. He calls it the foundation to almost every skate trick in his list of tricks to learn from easy to complex:

To learn how to do an ollie I went to Youtube to find tutorials. There are tons and tons of tips and tutorials available there. I really like this one that explains the many aspects of doing an ollie and some of the common mistakes people make when learning them:

Here is a video of me performing a rocket ollie:

I am getting the skateboard in the air and landing on it. My ollie doesn't level out at all as described in the above tutorial video though. So, as she describes, I am still in the rocket ollie phase of learning how to ollie.

It hasn't clicked for me yet how to level out the board by flicking the front with my left foot. Even when I make a strong effort to exaggerate a kick-out with my left foot, my body just doesn't seem to want to cooperate. The ollie happens so fast that I can't really tell what's going on. I honestly can't even tell that I'm doing an ollie or kicking out, and I have to check it on camera to make sure I'm doing it because it happens so fast and it's hard to tell what's going on.

I will keep working on this. I will continue to work on the timing and movement of getting my left foot to level out the board properly.

As she mentions in the video, ollies can be really difficult and can take some people many months to learn. Tony Hawk of course makes his ollie look like a breeze in the WIRED video, but it is a tough skill that can take people (including herself) months to get down.

She recommends learning some other tricks and skills before the ollie, which I've seen advised by many other skaters on Youtube also. I am going to work on some easier and even more fundamental skills and then come back to the ollie in the future.

This is the first challenge on the blog where I didn't meet my goal I initially set out to hit. But I'm happy that I've at least learned how to flick the board up in the air and land on it for now. I've learned a lot in the process of trying to ollie. It is something that feels extremely foreign to me, so I know it is a great opportunity to really explore and learn something new.

I will keep working on the ollie and get it down soon!