Nothing in Skateboarding Is Intuitive — And That’s the Point

The first time you step on a skateboard, everything in your body tells you not to. Your knees lock up, your weight shifts the wrong way, and your brain starts calculating how close the pavement is to your teeth. It’s chaos — and that’s before you even try to ollie.

Skateboarding doesn’t make sense. Not physically, not mentally. You’re told to lean forward when every survival instinct tells you to lean back. You have to pop down to go up. Every trick starts with failure, usually in the form of a loud slam that echoes through your bones. And somehow, that’s what makes it addictive.

In most sports, intuition is your friend. In skateboarding, it’s your enemy. You have to unlearn everything — balance, fear, comfort — and build your instincts from scratch. You start training your body to do the exact opposite of what it wants to do. You’re literally rewiring your brain for the sake of a piece of wood and four wheels.

But when it clicks? When all the counterintuitive mechanics line up for one perfect second, and you land clean — that’s when it makes sense. That’s when you get it. That’s when you realize: skateboarding isn’t supposed to be easy. It’s supposed to be earned.

That’s the magic of it — nothing about it feels natural, and that’s what makes it feel so human.