The Health Benefits of Skateboarding

Skateboarding is a sport, an art form, a lifestyle, and a culture. People have been skating for decades, and it has even become an extreme sport. We can all benefit from skateboarding, even if we’re not bombing halfpipes and grinding down rails. Not only does skateboarding get us outside, but it is a fun and effective way to get from point A to point B. Here are the best health benefits of skateboarding from Health Fitness Revolution and author of the book ReSYNC Your Life Samir Becic:

• Provides flexibility: Ankles must remain flexible and body should stay limber while skating. The more tense and inflexible a person is, the harder it is for them to skate.

• Offers full-body workout: You’re moving your feet and your legs, you’re using your arms to help balance. You’re twisting your body. All these things must happen simultaneously, giving your body a variety of movements.

• Physical Endurance: Most skateboarders don’t just skate for a few minutes and stop- many find it so enjoyable that they skate for hours a day, getting their physical endurance levels up.

• Teaches Precision: To nail a trick, many motions need to align perfectly, so when you fail, you try again, and again, and again. But each time, you make adjustments.  You place your feet differently on the board, you change your timing, you adjust your speed, you try and land differently. Until you have the motions and timing down to a precise science, you keep trying!

• Improves Coordination: Skateboarding involves a lot of coordination between your eyes, legs, feet, and arms. The more you skate, the better you’ll get at this. Precision and coordination are used throughout your life, whether you skate or not. When you improve these traits, you better your ability to do all sorts of different things from driving to climbing to multi-tasking.

• Calorie Burning: Depending on the intensity of the skate, the average person will burn between 150-500 calories per hour.

• Skills Transfer To Other Sports: including surfing, snowboarding, or wakeboarding. If the waves are flat, the snow is melting, or the water is too cold, a person can help keep their skills sharp and fitness levels up by simply riding a skateboard.

• Teaches consequences, practice, and patience: skateboarding provides a perfect opportunity for a young person to take calculated risks in a controlled environment, with very real and immediate consequences if maneuvers are not executed properly. Similar to martial arts, skateboarding skills and fundamentals must be learned and mastered over time with practice and patience, (unlike the instant gratification provided by television and video games).

• You learn to fall: Prevention of future injuries is one of the most beneficial things that skateboarding has to offer in terms of health. When you skate, you learn how to avoid falling (if possible), and you also learn how to fall correctly. Skateboarders naturally get better at knowing where to place their feet and their hands as they progress with their skating. This is a valuable tool to have in life because it will reduce the chance of freak accidents. You’ll naturally be more able to recover from slips, trips, and stumbles and avoid falling on your face.

• Stress Relief:  Any physical activity is considered to be good for relieving stress. Skateboarding can help you take your mind off things. Alternatively, it can also help you think clearly about things. Skateboarding seems to bring things into perspective and allows you to feel as though you’re more in control of other aspects of your life.

• Overall Health: As with all forms of physical exercise, skateboarding can reduce or eliminate your risk for many health problems, such as high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity. Skateboarding can also reduce your risk for coronary heart disease by reducing your triglyceride levels and increasing your “good” cholesterol.

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