Hello everyone !
I know I don't consider myself old either, but rather old in my skating years. I have been skating since 2007, when I was 14. I'm currently 31 years old, and I wanted to ask this... Have you, like me, lost a lot of tricks with time and age ? I never stopped, but my skating style changed of course. Lots of gap younger, and now a lot more flats, banks, mannys.. However, I'm quite desperate to have lost many tricks that I did during my first 6 skates, specialy flip tricks, for example like half cab heel or backside heel, backslide flip , and today, I can no longer throw them as easily and above all no longer have any coordination in my legs.. (The worst is that I feel like I no longer know how to pop correctly and have the power.) .And yet, for example, a switch flip that I learned 5 years ago , I have no difficulty whereas a kickflip or heelflip is a constant battle.. I know that it is all about muscle memory, does this really have consequences over time ?
For a good year now, I started seriously training myself, doing stretching, working out, eating well and stop alcohol, but it sometimes gives me a bad morale boost to no longer have the impression of to be able to "do everything" and throw everything into the tricks.. I have never taken the time to work on them without stopping, but I remember well before that to throw a heel or a flip, the coordination and movement of the trick was there! There is also the fact that I started to worry about the equipment and go into a kind of madness for some time, believing that this or that size of board or brand of trucks was going to help me.. after trying different sizes, different trucks, I simply realized that it didn't help at all for tricks. But maybe there's the fact of asking a lot of questions, whereas before I didn't ask myself as many questions... Do you know what I mean ? This kind of vicious circle...
Finally, I always try to keep in mind that skating is still fun, that I will never be a pro of course, but sometimes, I don't understand how I could have lost confidence and ease..and, I have the BIG fault of comparing myself to others and sometimes feeling "bad" and even more so having lost certain tricks.. All this is stupid perhaps, but I know that your help will be useful among old skaters ahah