It's partially about weight distribution, and partially about confidence. For the most part, biasing your weight distribution towards your front foot, and making sure you lead your steering with your front foot, and you'll be fine. The rest comes with experience. Does your commute contain any downhill sections?
Absolutely correct. On a longboard at speed, you have to keep your weight forward. This is partly to keep the front truck under control, and partly because flex in the board means that the end of the board with most of the weight steers more.
If you panic and lean back, you're effectively only steering with the rear truck, which is not a dynamically-stable situation. Things go wrong very quickly at that point.
Ah, I tend to keep my weight fairly centered at speed so I'm stable if I have to break tuck. Also, I don't ride a deck with any flex, and I ride split angle trucks so I inherently have more turn in the front. But yeah, for beginners, weight on the front.
Good point. A centered stance might be ideal, and may just seem 'forward' in comparison to the typical shortboard stance.
And now I think about it, it might not be board flex that limits front-truck turning when leaning back - rather, the lack of weight on the front truck might allow the outside wheel to lift. Either way, it's a bad situation.
There is a slight downhill for the first 300meters or so, then it's basically dead flat. I don't expect to ever be going super-fast or anything on the commute, more like only when I actually go a seek out a steeper hill.
Right, okay. When you do start hitting hills, make sure you have a helmet, slide gloves and optionally pads. Your first priority should be learning a shutdown slide. Search "coleman slide" on Youtube, safest way to stop a longboard.
