5 Reasons to start skating aside from the pure joy
If you want 5 reasons to start skating or feel good about skating more, read on!
The best reason to start something is for the fun of it. Skateboarding is fun, and it’s also pointless.
It probably won’t help you get a job, look impressive on your CV, secure you a home loan, or get you a promotion at work, and that’s exactly why it’s so fun.
It’s not tied to the serious world of adult life and therefore remains distant from the confines of social pressure and keeping up with the Joneses. Heck the Joneses quit skateboarding years ago, right before they became rich and boring.
So skate for skateboardings sake. For it’s fun, pointless, joyful sake and feeling of freedom. If you do, you’ll find a heap of hidden benefits amongst it. Here’s a few to whet your whistle:
Beginners Mind/Humbling - Is there anything better than learning a new skill as an adult? Humbling yourself to an experience you’re new to, that you will fail at? Sometimes we get so wrapped up in what we know, and sticking to our ‘expertise’ that we forget what it’s like to be a beginner. We forget how incredibly eye opening the experience is.
Fresh Air - Fill your lungs with fresh air as you whizz down the street. Not in a car or on a bus. Not slow and pedestrian by foot, but fast and free on a skateboard. Get outside, away from the screen and into the fresh air.
Fitness/Core Strength/Stability - Hard to ignore the fitness aspect of skateboarding. Even harder to ignore the day after your first long skate session. Muscles you never knew you had aching, sore ribs and tired thighs. It’s variety of movements make skateboarding an amazing overall fitness workout. If you’re looking to improve overall fitness, core strength, stability and co-ordination then it’s hard to find something more suitable outside of a gym.
Socialising - You’ll meet different people to your normal crowd and some people you just wouldn’t expect. One of my favourite things about growing up skateboarding was the creative talent I was surrounded by. Many of my peers and older friends were successful media professionals working in film and design. It helped me learn skills I wasn’t learning at school or through other team sports.
Resilience - Skateboarding has such a high failure rate that it can take hours, days, weeks or even months to learn new tricks. That’s a level of resilience very few bring to the workplace. We just don’t learn to fail at work and we don’t feel comfortable with it. Skateboarding is a great way to interrupt that pattern and teach yourself that failure is a good thing, you can learn from the mistake, get over it, and eventually succeed.
I kind of went against my initial statement there didn’t I. Whilst skateboarding in itself probably won’t help you get a job, buy a house, and get a good life, the lessons and skills you will learn through skateboarding certainly will. It’s no co-incidence that Rodney Mullen, the godfather of skateboarding, was one of the first Ted X speakers. Rodney was shocked to find himself requested at the side of the worlds greatest scientific and knowledgable minds, wondering what it was he had to add, but he had skateboarding. Skateboarding and it’s incredible lessons to help build stronger people.
I highly recommend watching some videos of Rodney Mullen speaking over at Ted X and on The Berrics. If you’re wondering whether to take skateboarders seriously or not as a potential for education, just watch and see.
I put so much of my happiness and success in life down to what I’ve learn’t from skateboarding and I hope you can get some of that knowledge too. See you at the skatepark.