Every skateboard you own will roll at different speeds, and to make your skateboard faster, skill and experience have nothing to do with it. Unsurprisingly, the speed of your skateboard largely comes down to the quality of your bearings, and what size of wheel you are using.

To make your skateboard faster, be sure to regularly clean your bearings, keeping them well lubricated to ensure they spin optimally. Opt to use a larger wheel size, such as 55mm+, with a higher durometer between 97a – 99a to help your skateboard pick up and maintain higher speeds.

Now you probably are thinking that you need to buy a new set of bearings and wheels if you want any chance at going faster.

But this couldn’t be further from the truth!

Although your bearings and wheel size do play a factor in your top speed, there are ways to improve the speeds you get out of your current skateboard setup. So let’s break down exactly what all these factors are, and how to apply them to your skating!

How To Make Your Skateboard Faster

1. Keep Your Bearings Cleaned & Lubricated

First and foremost, clean bearings are the key to making your skateboard roll faster. Once your bearings are filled with dust and debris, they don’t roll as smoothly and meet more resistance against the inner and outer race of the bearing. By regularly cleaning your bearings, you ensure that the balls inside roll as smoothly as possible.

Although I covered some tips on how to clean your bearings in another post, let’s break down some of the basics; just so you can see how easy it is!

First, you’ll need to remove your bearings completely from your wheels, then remove the bearing shield with a thumbtack to lift it off the bearing. Keeping the shields and axle nuts in a safe place so you don’t lose them, get a small container and fill it with enough isopropyl alcohol to cover all your bearings.

Placing all of the bearings into the solution, swishing them around in the container. That’s why a container with a lid will be exceptionally useful for this situation!

After a minute or two, take the bearings out and place them face down on a paper towel. Going through each one individually, hit the bearing against the paper towel (the side with the bearing balls exposed) to rattle out any excess dirt.

To finish things off, add a few drops of Bones Speed Cream to your bearings and gently spin them to spread around the solution. Once everything is cleaned and lubed, add the shields back on them pressing them down firmly with your fingers, then add them back onto your wheels.

This is one of the most straightforward ways to clean your bearings and can be done mostly with household items. You don’t need to do a deep clean like this too often, but once every two months at least will make a huge difference in how fast your bearings roll.

Plus you can get some smaller performance boosts just by adding 2-3 drops of Speed Cream every couple of weeks if you so desire.

2. Use Larger Diameter Wheels

Now even with the most spotless bearings, your skateboard will be majorly limited by how large your wheels are. Most street skaters use wheels in the 48mm – 50mm range, which works in their situation since crazy high speeds aren’t necessary.

Now compare that to a bowl skater, they commonly skate 52-56mm wheels, adding some significant size to street skaters.

Taking this one step further, longboarders doing downhill races are riding up to 75mm wheels.

So how exactly do wheel size and speed correlate with one another?

To be totally honest, I am not much of a physics guy but after some serious scholarly reading, I think I can explain this at the most basic level possible.

With a larger wheel size, the wheel has more leverage against the axle, allowing it to gain more momentum quicker to overcome the friction from the axle. This leverage increases as the wheel sizes get larger because the edge of the wheel is further away from the axle, therefore giving it more leverage as it rotates.

Now combining this added leverage with a larger surface area, a bigger wheel covers more distance per rotation than a smaller wheel. So for every revolution of the wheel, it is covering more ground, with less axle friction compared to a smaller wheel.

Because of this, larger wheels allow your skateboard to move faster, without nearly as much effort on your part.

You might now be thinking that you need to get the biggest wheels possible if you want to start bombing hills. In reality, just a slightly larger wheel can make a noticeable difference in the speed of your skateboard.

For example, I was skating 48mm wheels for the longest time, then got 55mm wheels for my bowl setup. From the moment I started riding the new wheels, I couldn’t believe how much faster the board moved, and how easy it was to maintain speed.

If you’re the type of skater who does a little bit of everything (street, bowl, and the occasional hill bomb), opt for a wheel size between 53mm – 55mm. This wheel size fits most skateboards without needing risers or causing a heinous amount of wheel bite.

3. Try Using Ceramic Bearings

If you just aren’t happy with how fast your skateboard is even after you clean your bearings, then it might be time to look into ceramic bearings. Unlike steel bearings, ceramics are faster, smoother, and quieter, but they come at a price point to match.

Although it may seem like the entire bearing is made of different materials, it’s mostly the bearing balls that are different. In ceramic bearings, these balls are ceramic, often with a ceramic lining on the inner and outer race to reduce friction.

In a nutshell, ceramic bearings perform better under load than steel bearings. This allows you to move faster without causing friction within the bearing to slow you down.

These bearings are also made with superior lubricants and are lighter weight, further helping reduce the amount of friction.

In general, ceramic bearings are about 4x more expensive than your standard steel bearing. However, maybe you can justify this extra cost based on the pure joy you’ll feel bombing a hill faster than you ever could before. From what many of my friends have skated and what I have tried myself, Bones Ceramic Super Reds are my favorite ceramic bearings if you aren’t sure where to start!

4. Choose A Wheel With A Higher Durometer

Wheel durometer is how hard your wheel is, typically ranging from 75a to 103a, going from softest to hardest in rating.

For example, a 75a wheel will be very soft, allowing you more traction, better vibration absorption, and an overall smoother ride. This durometer is perfect for cruising around town or carving big S turns down a hill, but won’t roll exceptionally fast.

An easy way to explain this is like trying to ride a bike with a flat tire versus a well-inflated tire. With a flat tire, you’re battling constant resistance against the low tire pressure absorbing your momentum.

Compare that to a well-inflated tire that has less resistance against the ground, it wants to roll faster and will be easier to maintain your speed. Skateboard wheel hardness is the same sort of idea.

So going to the other side of the spectrum with a 103a wheel, you have an extremely hard wheel that will power slide with ease and have very little rolling resistance. However, you sacrifice vibration absorption and grip making it less than ideal for high speeds or skating somewhere that doesn’t have perfectly smooth pavement.

Because trust me, a hard wheel durometer on a bumpy piece of concrete is not very enjoyable to skate.

Instead, opt for something that meets in the middle. I like to skate 97a – 99a wheels that also have a larger diameter to match. In this range, you can still pivot tricks easily, but you also have reasonable traction while going fast. Not to mention you aren’t losing out on speed by having too soft of a wheel!

5. Find Smoother Pavement

Besides spending your hard-earned dollars to make your skateboard faster, the free solution is to simply find smoother pavement. If you have only ever skated around on the street, you’ve likely been skating rougher concrete. Since there are a lot more bumps bombarding your wheels, it adds to the amount of resistance limiting your top speeds. By finding smoother concrete, your wheels will roll as smoothly as hot butter on a baked potato.

So whether you’re skating the streets or a local park, try to find somewhere with smoother concrete and you’ll see some immediate improvements in speed. Best of all, you don’t need to buy or clean a thing.

6. Learn To Pump

Lastly, if you’re skating transition or rolling around banks at a skatepark, pumping is going to be the biggest help in making you go faster. Pumping is essentially the act of bending your knees to absorb or extend through transitions. Similar to the reason you lean forward and back on a swingset, pumping will increase your momentum without needing to push.

Pumping is actually very straightforward once you have the timing correct. The goal is to have your knees bent while on the bank or quarterpipe, extending your knees through the transition.

This downward force from your legs helps to give you a sudden speed boost that carries you out of the transition and into the next one. Now you just have to repeat this for every transition you go up or down and your speed will gradually begin to build.

Getting the right timing for pumping can take a lot of practice so you’ll want to make sure you’re comfortable on your board before trying this. Before going straight into a big quarter pipe, try practicing pumping through the transition of a bank. This will give you a feel for it before going to something bigger (and faster) like a bowl.

With these six tips, you can make your skateboard faster with or without paying for some new gear. From this list of tips, keeping your bearings clean and choosing the right wheel size will be the biggest factors above all else. If you’re looking to find some new wheels, you can find a large collection on Amazon, or check out your local skate shop!

Happy Shredding!

Brendan 🙂