Tip Tricks - The Back Roll
by Kyle Touhey

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Naish Airtime Boardsports Skypilot Kiteboarding

Back rolls are one of the first tricks that you are going to learn and are actually quite easy - you may just need to get over the mental block of spinning around in the air. The rotation is very natural because you flow with the forces from your load & pop takeoff. It is also a foundation trick because a lot of later tricks are based off of this one. You can also do it both hooked-in and unhooked with almost as much difficulty level as you like.

Kite: Easy - keep it at 45°. Plain and simple - you don’t really want your kite to move while you are doing your trick. If you either send it back for a bit more air, or keep it too high, chances are that you will over-rotate. That being said, when you are first learning, you might want to keep it a big higher. NOT too high though - it actually makes the trick harder (and can look awkward for those of you who really care).

Setup: Like most tricks, speed is everything. Commit! Commit! Commit! The nice thing about backrolls though is that if you start too slow - it’s not the end of the world. Bad things probably won’t happen - you’ll just get a little wet.

Unhooked: You don’t want to just unhook and ride around waiting to do a back roll. That’s a sure-fire way to tire yourself out and get in to a poor position for liftoff. You want to unhook right before, or even as you are setting up.

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