New! New! New!

We've been working hard over the winter period to prepare ourselves for the new summer season. New lessons; a new look, both for the skateinstructor.com web site and our instructors in the park; and we've added online booking of group lessons, an Atom feed, and a Facebook Group.

We've recruited a few new instructors:

• David Whitehead, of Club Blue Room, joins us to take on our more advanced courses.
• Matthew Denner teaches our weekday afternoon and group sessions, and takes over the skateinstructor.com website.

We hope that all of these changes will help you enjoy both your skating experience and make it easier for you to interact with us. We think the skateinstructor.com website is pretty cool: do you like it? You can always provide feedback by contacting us.

Safety Policy Change

Inline skating is an extreme sport and injuries can occur. Normally these are minor falls and usually involve more of a bruised ego! However, there is a chance that serious injury can occur and we strongly recommend that you do everything possible to protect yourself. Thousands of students have passed through our courses and injuries have, thankfully, been extremely rare but that does not negate the chance of it happening.

With this in mind, and a desire to make our teaching environment as safe as possible, we have decided to change our safety policy. The key change to our policy is that we now require all students to wear knee, wrist and elbow pads and a helmet. You should familiarise yourself with our safety policy, especially if you are a new student.

We have, in the past, had students attempt to debate our safety policy. We hope that you understand that we are doing this for your safety and so the topic is not open for negotiation.

If you have any questions regarding this policy change you are more than welcome to contact us.

Paris skate - May 2008

Following three years of successful skate trips to Paris, 2008 will see Skatefresh and skateinstructor.com, two of the UK's highest qualified ICP skate schools, going to Paris to skate the famous Friday night Pari-Roller street skate and enjoy a weekend of skating in one of the world's most skateable cities.

We're going to skate the famous Friday night Pari-Roller street skate, which can have over 15,000 skaters participating each week, see the city on skates on Saturday, and then complete another street skate on Sunday. Most of all, it will be lots of good skating fun!!!

Click here for more details

Private Lessons

We have begun offering week day private lessons, for you individually or a group of your friends. For those of you who are more advanced skaters, David Whitehead is available to teach more specialised skating skills (like slides, jumps or stair riding). These lessons are available on request.

If you wish to arrange a private lesson for yourself, or a group of your friends, please use the contact us form on our website or call Mark on 07753 489669. At some point in the near future we will be offering the ability to book, and pay for, private lessons directly using our online booking system. Prices for private lessons can be found on the private lessons page.

Course changes

After getting some feedback on how people want to learn to skate we've decided to do a big change in our courses. Obviously we cannot please all of the people all of the time, but we hope that most of you will find these new courses far more interesting and useful to yourselves.

The first change is that we've decided to extend the Sunday Drop-In Session into a more complete course for people wanting to learn to skate, and so it now becomes the Sunday Beginners. The complete course covers everything you will need to get started in skating (going, turning, stopping and dealing with pavements) and costs £20.00.

If you've bought your skates from Club Blue Room and bring along the receipt, the first hour is FREE and you'll learn to skate forwards and stop. You don't have to choose to continue with the rest of the course but, if you do, it will only cost you £20.00.

From the first Sunday in May (4th), we'll be moving the time of this course from 13:00 to 12:00. This is being done to make room for some more courses we're planning to run on Sunday afternoons.

We were a little surprised by the feedback we received but it seems that after you've got past these skills you then like to learn specific areas of skating. So, we've brought in a couple of courses that focus on individual parts of skating:

Our 4 ways to stop in 2 hours covers stopping without using a heel brake, and 3 ways to turn in 2 hours introduces different types of turns.

And when you're comfortable going forwards, why not try out our 2 hours of backwards course, where you'll learn to transition to backwards, skate a bit, and turn corners. From there you could go on and try 2 ways to stop backwards.

We are working on putting together a course that will take you from beginner to street skater, so you can get out on the Sunday Stroll and we'll, hopefully, be announcing something extra special about that course in the near future.

Club Blue Room Skates

Like us, our friends over at Club Blue Room are getting ready for the 2008 summer skating season. They've got in new ranges of skates, from beginners all the way through to speed skates, and they've rearranged their skate display to make it easier to find stuff.

These are the beginner level skates from Rollerblade, currently priced at around £100 in Club Blue Room. They come with a heel brake, necessary for beginners to learn to stop safely, and have a aluminium frame.

K2 have beginner skates at a similar price to the Rollerblade ones. The frames on the K2 skates aren't aluminimum but they still come with a heel brake. K2 skates tend to fit a slightly narrower foot.

The womens version of these skates, on the right in the picture, wear the pink ribbon of Breast Cancer Awareness, a charity that K2 donates to.

A lot of people ask "What are the best skates to get?" This is a bit of a tough question for us to answer as it depends upon what your skill level, what you want to do, foot shape, body weight, and personal opinion. Our advice is to try on lots of different styles of skate and find the ones that feel the most comfortable for you. Listen to the advice of the sales staff who, in Club Blue Room, have had an amazingly small returns rate, because of ill-fitting skates, over the last few years.

To help answer this question we'll be running a mid-May newsletter that will be dedicated to not only reviewing some of the skates available, but also working through choosing the right skates for you. We're looking for some help with this so if you have a friend who wants to take up inline skating and doesn't have skates yet please contact us. We'll come with your friend to Club Blue Room, spend time with them choosing the right skates, and then each of you will get a FREE private lesson.

Sk8School Information

Our colleagues down in Eastbourne, Sk8school, have some great courses coming up for those of you wanting to skate by the sea.

They are complementing their usual weekly lessons this month with the Sk8 Streetwise, a half day intensive course that will enable you to use your skates as transport! Additionally they have news on Sk8 2 Ski, some interesting news links, and a challenge on their blog! Look forward to hearing from you soon!

Find out more by visiting their London Newsletter page.