The goal of Skateboard WOD is simple.  Help people get better at skateboarding while having fun.  I firmly believe, based on my experience and all of the skateboard related content I’ve watched over the past 25 years (it’s 2020 right now – COVID, ugh!), that I could have been a much more consistent and better skateboarder if I followed a routine.  The routine should also have purpose with reason.  This is what Skateboard WOD is about.  It’s about making you a better skateboarder so you can add your creative flare, all while having loads of fun. First, I’ll explain a little bit about myself.  I started skateboarding when I was a really young kid.  I couldn’t tell you my age at the time.  It was some time in the late 80’s or early 90’s.  I got an old school skateboard for a birthday, or Christmas, or something.  The ones with a big hunk of plastic on the huge square tail, no nose, and slide rails on the bottom of the deck.  It had a skull on it.  I didn’t skate it much, but I do recall learning how to kind of ollie up on to a curb from the street on to grass.  A few years went by without stepping on that board again (probably close to 10), and I purchased my first “new school” skateboard in 1996.  My dad was either going to pay for me to go through driving classes and get my drivers license for my 16th birthday, or get me a skateboard.  I’m thankful I chose a skateboard.  It was a Santa Cruz.  The first real pro model style skateboard I ever rode, and I fell in love with the sport the day I purchased that skateboard.  I continued to choose skateboarding over driving for another 9 years, spending most of my hard earned cash at my minimum wage job buying decks every other week after breaking them doing inward heelflips off of stuff – not to mention the insane number of $20 Fila, Nike, Adidas (Stan Smith, at that), or Reebok shoes I went through every other week. To sum my skateboarding “career” up, I was kind of sponsored by a local skate shop, but I wouldn’t really call it a sponsor, since the guy really hadn’t seen me skate, and I definitely didn’t feel worthy of a sponsor.  But, I was pretty good compared to a lot of the other kids skating at the time.  There were a lot of other skaters that were much better, especially in the next few years to come, so it made me chuckle.  Really all I got from the “sponsorship” was 3 decks and a t-shirt that was too small.  The skate shop closed its doors soon after this, and I ended up injuring my knee pretty badly, so I never ended up getting much better than the skills I reached at that point. During this time there were these two kids that were getting really good at skating.  They were the prodigies of my city.  I worked in the same mall as one of the guys, who ended up getting a sponsorship with Billabong I believe.  The other had a sponsorship with Girl, and the Girl team came to skate my city in a series where they toured their amateur skater cities.  I’m in the background of the “Yes we Canada” Girl video, found on YouTube.  I got to skate with my idol, Eric Koston, so it was dope.  Anyway, one of these prodigy skateboarders from my home town told me stories about how I was skating with him when he landed his first kickflip.  I may have been helping him, which I liked to do with kids just starting to skate.  I loved seeing kids getting into skating.  I don’t remember the story completely, and I, unfortunately, am sad to say that I will never know, as he passed away after being hit by a car (not while skateboarding) not that long ago.  I’ll leave his name out of this for now, but I definitely dedicate a lot of my thoughts and reasoning behind starting this SkateboardWOD movement based on stories I heard about these guys. From what I was told, these guys would go out and skate every day.  Not only that, they had a routine that they stuck with on the daily.  They perfected their basic tricks every day, methodically.  I remember skating with one of them a few years later, after I was kind of getting back into it once my knee healed.  The guy went around and did a bunch of ollies over things.  Then did a bunch of kickflips over things.  Then loads of 180’s.  Then he did it all switch.  He probably landed 50 tricks in a row, and just kept going, before he started working on some tricks that he was learning.  When looking back, I recall losing some tricks, getting better at others, and never feeling fully comfortable with some other tricks, but these guys were always on point with their tricks.  Some of these tricks that I was losing were the very basic tricks that I feel every skateboarder should probably feel comfortable doing.  For example, I have always had a tough time with frontside 180’s, but I could inward heelflip or 360 flip with ease.  I sucked at frontside 180’s because I didn’t have the foundation for them, and I didn’t practice them.  I also never learned regular nose-slides or tail slides.  I learned fakie to nose, fakie backside tail, and switch frontside tail, and some nollie noseslides, but I could never slide them really far or well.  I feel if I had a better foundation, these tricks would have been much easier. This is where the idea of SkateboardWOD comes from.  It’s a daily routine that changes every day to keep it interesting.  It’s designed to keep you moving forward on the foundation so your more complex and interesting tricks can get better and better. I came up with the idea to do a CrossFit style Workout Of the Day (WOD) and apply it to skateboarding; hence, SkateboardWOD.com.  The idea is to do a warmup followed by a WOD, which is a set of tricks, or a line, or something like that.  You can do your own warmup or the one I have outlined on this site.  After the warmup is done, the idea is to do the “Workouts”, or WOD.  Each of the WOD’s can be done by almost every level of skateboarder out there.  The only exception might be the absolute beginner that still isn’t comfortable moving on a skateboard.  Every single trick can be related to one or more basic set of tricks.  So, if you can’t do the WOD tricks suggested, you can always drill down to find trick you can do.  For example, if the WOD calls for a 360 flip in a line with a nose manual after, then a backside 180, but you can’t do any of these, you can do a 360 shove-it (or two shove-its), a kickflip if you can, an ollie, a small nose manual on flat, then a nollie backside 180 pivot.  This way you’re still getting used to the core of what makes those three tricks.  Someone that is really good might do a 360 flip into a nose manual with a nollie backside revert out.  The WOD’s still keep the creativity aspect of skateboarding, but introduces challenges, and keeps you from getting stuck doing the same tricks over and over, like what I used to do.