I am going to answer the meaning of life. The answer that everyone is waiting to hear. Should I skate Flat or should I skate Anti-Rocker?
Spoiler alert! I’m not going to answer that question! Because I can’t, it’s your personal preference as to what you dig!
What I will do however is;
explain what is Flat and what is Anti Rocker;
Ill break down the pros and cons of both;
Then ill sum it all up and let you know what I have decided after this soul searching journey that I have taken over the last month.
What is flat and what is Anti - Rocker?
To understand this we need to take a trip back to the 90’s when the frame was riveted to the bottom of our boots and there were no such things as replacement frames and definitely no such thing as UFS. If you skated all large wheels, you couldn’t grind (unless you were John Pollard, who invented the Shifty Royale, but that’s a different story for a different day.
So there were a few options, 1 skate 4 large wheels and don’t grind or skate 4 tiny wheels and suffer because they were too slow, remember the skate parks were not nice smooth concrete back then, they were chunky, rough as guts and brutal if you ate shit.
Because this wasn’t ideal, there was a third option, large wheels on the outside and small wheels on the inside. We have anti rocker. And if you are wondering why they call it anti-rocker that is because there was another set up that was called “rocker” that was the opposite, this was when the centre 2 wheels would protrude more than the front and rear wheels. This would make it easy to turn like a figure skater because only the middle two wheels were touching. The skates actually had plastic spacers that would sit in the frame and you could position them in various ways to set up your skates for the type of skating that you preferred. Side note, these things used to break all the time and when you would rotate your wheels the pieces would crumble out like a melting moment.
Anti-rocker was so good because you could get lots of speed from your large cozmos and still bust out a grinds down a hand rail. So it was perfect right, end of video.
No, the sport kept evolving and we started coming up with more grind tricks that involved using parts of the skates that we didn’t think of using previously. We started bending our ankles in ways that the skates were not designed to flex. We started doing tricks like fish brains and various topside tricks.
The Skates also evolved and they started making the grooves bigger in the skates and incorporated UFS frames (the Universal Frame System) so you could switch out your frames quickly and customize them to your liking.
This is where things get interesting, we now have so many choices and we can set our skates up with lots of different options but at the end of the day, you are still either skating on the 4 wheels touching or just the two touching (anti-rocker or rocker).
That was a big chunk of history so now that we have that out the way, let’s get into the nitty gritty, the good the bad and the ugly. I’m focusing around grinding here because if you’re not grinding, then you would be silly to ride anti-rocker, end of story. Unless you want to look bad ass!
I just want to explain what this nasty little thing called wheel bite is: It happens when a wheel (usually a soft one) comes in contact with the grinding surface. Then the wheel grips up and bites! You’re momentum keeps going and your shin is going to connect with the rail or ledge. So Wheel bite is bad news.
Some Pros for flat:
Faster
Smoother
More responsive
Less stress on wheels, hardware, frames, bearings
Skating to places is better ride and don’t bottom out
Flat cons
Wheel bite
More difficult to do grinds
What have I decided? Will I ride flat or anti rocker? As much as I loved riding anti-rocker and how it made my grinding ability so much better, I love skating flat! I love the speed and I love the responsiveness of the 4 down. So I have actually purchased a new set of Kaltik Flat V2 frames. It is the best of both worlds, they have designed frames that have more space for grinding and no wheel bite and I get to ride flat. But this video isn’t about them, it’s about the journey that I went on to make sure that I was riding the right setup for me. I will probably take this journey again in a couple of years and test out new gear that has been developed.
To put a bow on this topic, I can’t take that journey for you, you need to take it yourself and I recommend trying both for at least a month each. You might be surprised with what you find out. Get out there and skate for fun and enjoy what ever feels better for you, you can even take advantage of UFS and switch up your frames each time you skate depending on the location. It’s up to you!!
Thanks for watching!
Over and out!.2
