Get Padded!

That young skaters don't wear pads continually amazes me. Not least because pads and helmets could be a valuable revenue stream for hardware manufacturers. Surely manufacturers could increase their sales simply by adding a protection line to their output. I guess the whiff of the uncool lingers over padding. After all, Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen wear pads, Tony Trujillo and Bam don't, and I guess we all know who sells the most boards.

I hear that in some competitions in the US, skaters are marked down for wearing pads, the implication being that their tricks aren't as dangerous as those done by non-pad wearing contestants. All I'd like to say is, try doing a run with pads and then do the same run without - you'll find that it's actually harder with pads than without, as the padding restricts movement.

And another thing: you need your body to be in good nick to skate, and the best way to make sure this happens is to wear padding. You will be able to skate for longer and you won't ache as much.

There is a downside however: when I arrive at a park, the first thing I do is pad up. This takes about 5 minutes, and during this time, other park users start to form the impression that I must be pretty damned good. Once I set foot on the board however, they know how wrong they were. Once I had someone shout out at me: "my sofa has more padding than you!". Good shout kid, let's hope your knees are still working when you hit puberty.