The basic skateboard stances were founded in the early years of skateboarding and they formed the basis of freestyle or flat ground skateboarding. The easy freestyle skateboard tricks involve balancing on the skateboard with less than all four wheels, on the edges or tail of the skateboard.



Floating in the air while using a hand to hold the board on your feet or by maintaining constant and careful pressure on the board with the feet is the basis of performing aerial skateboard tricks.

These tricks were first made famous by Tony Alva who invented the front air in empty swimming pools in the late 1970s. This has then spread to include the bulk of basic skateboarding tricks like the Ollie and its variations.

Flip tricks are aerial tricks, based on the Ollie. The most popular of these is the Kick flip. You need to spin the board one or more times, and even rotate in combination several times. These are not easy tricks however they are particularly famous amongst street skaters.

Lip tricks are performed on the coping of a pool or skateboard ramp. Most grinds can be made on the coping of a ramp or pool as well, but there are some coping tricks which require momentum and vertical altitude that can only be attained on a transitioned riding surface. Those include Inverts and their variations as well as some dedicated air-to-lip combinations.

We can combine many types of basic and distinct skateboard tricks to make many new and more complicated tricks, this is what keeps skateboarding unique amongst most sports.

The people who invented those basic, early tricks named that trick whatever they wanted. And most of the time it reflects what that person is thinking about the trick at that particular time. The earliest tricks were often named after the person who invented it. For e.g. Andrecht after Dave Andrecht; Ollie after Alan "Ollie" Gelfand; Elguerial after Eddie Elguera.

Some tricks have more than one name because several people independently invented the same trick around the same time and gave it different names, or because the original name was lost.

Most newer skateboard tricks (basic or easy) are created by combining existing tricks or trick together rather than creating something completely new and unique, and the naming reflects that. Danny Way became the first to do a Kickflip into an Indy, so he simply called it a kickflip indy.