Anyone have the secret sauce on heelflips? I can kickflip consistently but I can't for the life of me do heelflips.
1) board rockets and 1/2 flips, almost credit card myself
2) board doesn't pop off the ground
3) board pops and I'm 1/2 a foot in front of the deck
I had shitty ones in my youth, nothing substantial or solid enough to try down gaps or in SKATE. I think I've landed more fluke Switch Heels than regular heelflips in the last year.
EDIT: jeremy wray actually does a really good heelflip explanation above your post
works best when i treat it like a one foot and for some reason i find them easier down small stuff. so my flickfoot toes hang off and my pop foot is a little towards my back. a little bit how you would set up for a fs shove, but i pop more or less straight, slight bs tilt maybe.
for 1) it might work to actually drag your flick foot up a little earlier than for an ollie or kickflip so the board doesn't really come up as vertical anyways. and focus on flicking off over the nose to further level it down.
2) that dead pop probably comes from the backfoot placement. i think it's harder to pop a heelflip like an ollie or kickflip. gotta be really on your toes for the pop. something about the way of the flick and how you set up for it can make the setup weird and wonky since you most likely only are flatfooted with the flickfoot and on your toes with your popfoot and all tension evaporates the moment you want to pop off and then you hippy jump off basically. i would experiment with backfoot placement and weight distribution. you probably lean forward a bit too much in those cases, too.
3) probably didn't catch much surface dragging the board forward with your flick foot and focus too much on kicking it out to flip it.
my first goal would be to get them to flip em leveled slightly in front of me. don't even commit, just try and flick em like you pretend you are neen a little bit. the cool thing is you can't really get credit carded this way. i think it's way more important to get the level flip down, even if it's too slow at first, just so it doesn't fuck with your head cuz of the credit card thing. i'd rather land a leveled heelflip primo than get credit carded. what also helped me is basically aim for something to flick it at if that makes sense, even if i had to imagine that thing. helps with flicking off the nose. and tilting my pop bs slightly helps me personally to avoid it to wipe out into a half assed varial heel. if you get it to flip nicely and basically have no rocketing anymore, it should be super easy to commit. i sometimes have days tho when nothing goes and i have all these problems, too.
my basic trick that pisses me off is the regular fs 180, which i dislike compared to sw 180. takes me a lot of effort to do a good one. sw ones are way more fun and feel more natural for whatever reason. i am trying to get better at fs ollies to finally(!) learn fs flips, but i don't really enjoy doing them. maybe they become more fun when i do them up and over stuff, i should try that maybe. i only fs ollie to change stance mid skating basically, but would probably rather bs nollie in a line.