How To Avoid Over-rotating Your Spins & Spot Your Landing

Today’s reader question:

I’m trying to learn 180s, but I keep over-rotating my spin past 180. Any tips?

A simple trick to help stop over-rotation on spins is to spot your landing the correct way. I’ll be referring to frontside, backside, cab and switch backside in this blog, so if you’re not familiar with spin directions, I recommend checking out our freestyle spin definitions blog before reading this.

Why does spotting the landing help stop over-rotation?

This works because when you spot the landing correctly, your head stops continuing to look in the direction of the spin. When your head stops rotating, it stops your shoulders from turning, which helps to stop your lower body from continuing spinning.

This means less over-rotation.

How to spot the landing

Every spin trick is made up of 180 rotations. Think of it this way, a 360 is simply two 180s. This is key because you should spot your landing differently depending on the final 180 rotation of the trick.

So to expand on that, a backside 360 is simply a backside 180 followed by a switch frontside 180. Similarly, a frontside 360 is simply a frontside 180 followed by a switch backside 180.

Now that we’ve covered that, we also know that there’s 4 ways to spin a 180. Frontside, backside, switch frontside (cab), or switch backside. So let’s go over how you need to spot the landing for each of these rotations:

Frontside 180 - spot the landing in the direction of travel. So look forward and spot your landing in front of you.

Backside 180 - spot the landing behind you. You’ll be looking backwards in the final 180 rotation and the landing is mostly blind because you can’t actually look forward and spot the landing until you’re right above it.

Switch frontside 180 (cab 180) - same as frontside 180.

Switch backside 180 - same as backside 180.

Now how do we use this:

Look at the final 180 of any trick that you’re trying to land and match the final 180 with one of the 180s above.

For example, let’s take a backside 720. We see that a backside 720 is simply a backside 180 + switch frontside 180 + backside 180 + switch frontside 180. This means the final rotation is a switch frontside 180, which means we spot the landing by looking forwards in the direction of travel and seeing the landing in front of us.

Hope that helps answer your question. Let me know if you need me to clarify anything (I know it gets a little bit complicated when we start talking about 180s and such).

- Jed

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