Tips & Tricks for Learning How To Do a Half Cab Roll
Tara Mikacich is back with at teaching the basic steps as well as offering helpful tips for doing a half cab roll on your wakeboard. Whether you're a new rider just starting out or a seasoned wakeboarder, give her tutorial a watch to find out how you can land or improve your half cab roll.
Video Transcript
Hi everyone. I'm Tara Mikacich and this instructional video is for all the people that ask me how to learn half cab roll. Half cab rolls or switch roll to reverts usually come one of two ways, either very naturally or like the most awkward rotation you have ever tried. There's not many people who fall in between those two things.
A prerequisite to this trick is definitely strong switch riding. Spending your time, making sure that you have a floaty and controlled half cab 180 and even switch wake to wake jumps will pay dividends as you go to learn a half cab roll. I feel like the approach to this trick is very similar to a half cab 180. It's just a little bit more condensed. I start a touch narrower and I accelerate with a bit more intensity as I get closer to the wake.
The key on the takeoff is to lead the nose of the board up and away from the boat. This is what makes the 180 part of it fall into place really naturally. If you don't do that, you're just going to have a switchback roll, which is also cool, but not the point of this video. So as you rise up the way, can you get nice and tall? I want you to watch the nose of your board drive up in this direction and you're going to follow it with your shoulders in your head so that everything stays together. I think a good point to also make is that if your elbows can stay close to your torso, it's going to help you control the line tension throughout the whole trick. You're trying to figure out how quickly or slowly the rotation of this trick needs to come around. You can think about doing half of the trick on the way up and half of the trick on the way down. Even just having that in your head will help you pace out the trick in the air. If you're under-rotating a lot, usually you need to stand up a bit more through the takeoff. You need to really rise and set the trick higher. If you're over-rotating a lot, you're probably scooping and tilting on your way up the wake and you just need to stay more over your front foot as you cross the top of the wake. As you come around for your landing, I want you to spot where your board is going to touch down and then look where you're going to keep riding. Another key point of this is that you want your shoulders to be closed off to the boat. That's going to keep you on your toes and not slipping out on your heels like you might if your chest is too open.
These are the main keys for learning a half cab roll. I would say feel free to slow the boat down and try these one wake first. You'll get the feel for it and you'll get more comfortable before you take them wake to wake and then please comment and let me know how your progress is going and tell me what the next trick should be for the Monster Tower instructional videos.
Comments