The Strength Gap: 4 Muscles Every Adult Skater Neglects

A lot of the instability adult skaters feel and quietly blame on age has a more specific, correctable explanation available: strength and mobility deficits in four muscle groups that deteriorate fastest in sedentary adult life — long before skating enters the picture — and that most general fitness routines never directly target. That’s not the only possible cause of balance changes, and it isn’t the one to assume by default. If imbalance is new, sudden, or getting worse rather than a familiar “I’m wobblier than I used to be,” get it checked by a doctor first — vestibular, neurological, medication, and joint issues can all produce the same symptom, and this routine isn’t a substitute for ruling those out.

With that said, once anything more serious has been ruled out, or if this is the familiar, longstanding kind of wobbliness rather than a new development: I see this constantly in the clinic and on the board — someone in their 40s or 50s feels less stable than they expect and never connects it to years spent mostly sitting, which is exactly what wears down these four areas, whether that shows up as weakness or as chronic tightness. The good news is that all four respond quickly to targeted work. You don’t need a gym membership or an hour a day — you need to know what to target and do it consistently.

Why these four specifically

Skating asks your body to do things ordinary adult life almost never asks of it: absorb impact through a bent ankle, stabilise a moving platform through your hips, and hold a low, athletic stance for sustained periods. Sitting all day — at a desk, in a car — does close to the opposite. It shortens hip flexors, lets glutes go quiet, gives the tibialis anterior almost nothing to do, and lets deep core stability atrophy in favour of the bigger, more visible abdominal muscles.

The result is a skater whose “balance problem” is actually a strength-and-mobility problem in disguise — weakness in three of these areas, and the opposite issue, chronic tightness, in the fourth. Here’s what to do about each one.

1. Glutes

Your glutes are the primary stabilisers of your hip and pelvis while you’re moving on a board — carving, absorbing a landing, staying balanced through a turn all rely on them firing properly. Years of sitting teach your glutes to switch off and let other muscles compensate, which is part of why so many adults have technically strong legs but still feel unstable at the hip.

Try: glute bridges and single-leg glute bridges, 3 sets of 10–15, most days of the week. Add a resistance band around your knees for a lateral-band walk to hit the glute medius specifically — that’s the muscle most responsible for keeping your hips level while you’re balancing on one edge of the board.

2. Hip flexors

These get the opposite problem: chronic shortening rather than weakness. Sitting for hours holds your hip flexors in a shortened position all day, and tight hip flexors restrict how far you can extend your hip behind you — which matters directly for pushing off the ground and for the low, athletic stance skating requires.

Try: a kneeling hip flexor stretch, 30–45 seconds per side, ideally daily rather than only before sessions. Pair it with standing marches or straight-leg raises a few times a week to build strength through the full range you’ve just stretched open — stretching alone can loosen a tight muscle temporarily but won’t keep it that way.

3. Tibialis anterior

This is the muscle running up the front of your shin, and it’s almost certainly the most neglected muscle on this list. It controls how your foot comes down and how well you can control the angle of your ankle — which is exactly what’s happening, hundreds of times a session, every time you adjust your weight on the board. A weak tibialis anterior shows up as ankle instability that people often misattribute to their ankles themselves rather than the muscle that controls them.

Try: toe raises (standing, lifting just your toes and the front of your foot off the ground while your heels stay planted), 3 sets of 15–20. You can do these anywhere — waiting for coffee, brushing your teeth — because they need no equipment and take under a minute.

4. Deep core (transverse abdominis)

Not the six-pack muscles — the deeper, corset-like layer that wraps around your midsection and stabilises your spine before your bigger muscles even engage. This is what actually keeps your torso stable while your arms and legs are making constant small corrections on a moving board. Most adults who “do core work” are training the visible abdominals through crunches and sit-ups, which barely touch this deeper layer.

Try: planks done correctly — ribs pulled down, no sagging through the lower back — and dead bugs, which specifically train your deep core to stabilise while your limbs move independently, which is a close match for what skating actually demands. Start with 20–30 second holds or 8–10 slow reps per side, and prioritise form over duration.

How to actually fit this in

You don’t need a separate hour-long gym session to close this gap. Ten minutes, three or four times a week — one or two exercises from each category, rotated — is enough to see a real change in how stable you feel on the board within a few weeks.

Do this work after a session, on a non-skating day, or at some other point in your day entirely — not as part of your pre-skate warm-up. Our warm-up routine for adult skaters deliberately skips held static stretches and fatiguing strength sets right before skating, because they can temporarily reduce the power and reaction speed you need the moment you step on the board. The hip flexor stretch and the fatiguing sets of planks, bridges, and toe raises above are strength and mobility work, not warm-up material — keep the two separate and you get the benefit of both instead of undercutting either.

This also pairs naturally with the broader work covered in our cross-training guide and the balance case made in why skateboarding is the best balance training after 40 — that post explains why skating itself builds reactive balance so well; this one is about making sure the specific muscles behind that balance aren’t the weak link.

The honest framing

None of this is about becoming an athlete. It’s about recognising that “I feel less stable than I used to” is often a solvable strength-and-mobility problem, not a permanent fact about getting older. Ten minutes of targeted work on these four areas, done consistently, tends to close more of that gap than people expect — and it’s a lot more encouraging to hear “your glutes are undertrained and your hip flexors are tight” than “you’re just getting old.”