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A great way to learn how to do fifty-fifties on the rail, is first to bring it to a transition
where there is a rail in the form of coping on the top of the transition, or mini-ramp.
This is a good place to get used to grinding your trucks against a metal rail, and also
locking into that position, but doing it in a safe way. If you're already familiar with
skating a mini-ramp, then you should be able to have small kick turns already dialed. What
you want to do is go a little bit faster, and then hit the coping and grind across the
top of the coping, and come back in. The feeling of grinding metal to metal with your trucks
is very similar to when you end up finding a street rail or a flat bar to grind on. So
the more comfortable you get doing fifty-fifties on a mini-ramp, this is a feeling that not
necessarily will be exactly the same, but will help you learning how to stay on a fifty-fifty
grind. So what you do is, you kick turn up to the top of the coping, and you want to
imagine that you are going to lock this part of your truck into the grind on the coping.
Your wheel acts to keep you from coming outside of the top of the ramp. When you first start
doing these, you'll probably find that you don't grind that high up on it yet. You're
going to be on a semi-vertical plane when you start fifty-fifty, but as you fifty-fifty
more you'll start noticing that you start to slide up, and you'll be able to lock this
wheel in, and you'll actually become on the top of the ramp, or transition, and this feeling
will help you learn how to do fifty-fifties on a rail.