Here we're going to explain the many styles of skating we can help you to learn.
There are many different styles of skating in both inline and quad skating groups. some are tricky, some are fast, some will give you a few bruises, but you'll still look amazing doing them. Let's jump straight in and check out all our different skate styles!
Rink Skating:
Rink skating is our most common and social skating style. put simply rink skating is all about meeting other skaters indoors, on a nice smooth surface for you to practice your moves in a relaxed space. Rink skating can also involve a sub-style known as a roller disco. This can have dancing but is mostly just about skating to music with a bit of rhythm.
Jam Skating/ Dance Skating:
Jam and Dance skating can be very fun activities. Jam is mostly about taking hip hop, break dancing and gymnastics moves and making ways to combine them with skating! Dance skating is very similar but is much more choreographed and synchronised. Both styles are great for quad skaters due to the enhanced turn speeds of the skates compared to inlines. Both styles can actually go to competition level and can win you great prizes. They're also great content for skating tiktokers!
Speed Skating:
Inline skaters are all about speed so naturally, this one was bound to come around. Speed skating is an official world games sport and Olympic recognised sport all about going as fast as humanly possible on inline skates. Quad skaters do also speed skate but not in any official sporting competitions. Speed skating is usually taken on by athletes in the skate community hoping to make a career in skating. They use very specific skates with very long frames usually with 4 to 5 wheels with high diameter to increase speed.
Slalom skating:
Slalom skating is similar to dance and jam skating but is almost exclusively an inline style due to the complex wheel tricks and sharp turns. Slalom is a specific type of freestyle dance skating where normally a soloist will skate around a set of small cones. In competitions, there are small medium and large cone gaps with small being the hardest, giving the lowest amount of space to complete a trick. Slalom skaters use special wheel setups known as Rockers to help them gain more manoeuvrability. this comes with a sacrifice of speed. Some of the hardest tricks in slalom are butterfly, one wheel manuals (wheeling tricks) and the toe footgun spin.
Derby Skating:
Roller Derby is an intense Contact quad skating sport. In roller derby, two teams compete to score the most points before the end of the match. Each match is split into two 30-minute halves and each half is split into 2-minute jams. In roller derby, each team has a Jammer and 4 blockers. Jammers will wear a star on the helmet to signify their role. The blockers jobs are to stop the Jammer from getting through and scoring points. for every blocker that the jammer passes they gain a point but a blocker can hit a jammer anywhere above the legs or below the neck (Except for the spine). A team of blockers will have a pacesetter called a pivot who wears a stripe on their helmet and can become the jammer if they need to swap out. The blockers can hit, slow down and block a jammer or can also run or hit them out of bounds. The team with the most points at the end of the hour is the winner! fighting is strictly forbidden (though happens on occasion) as well as hits to the spine head and legs as this can cause dangerous injuries.
Aggressive Skating:
Aggressive skating is listed as an extreme sport, although was taken out of the x games in the early 2000s. Aggressive skating is a type of inline skating involving flips, spins, park skating and grinding. Aggressive skaters use super small wheels in special frames that have a grinding block that they use to grind edges. A substyle of aggressive is known as vert skating which will sound familiar to skateboarders. Vert skating is a specific type of aggression that shows a skaters abilities using a half pipe. Some of the best aggressive skaters in the world are the yasutoko brothers from japan who competed in the last x-games that invited aggressive inliners.
While we don't practice every style of skating at the DMU roller society we encourage you to try some yourself and ask for help and support when you need it!
Now get your wheels, get your friends and get rolling!