Roller skates are shoes with wheels. Instead of walking, the wearer of roller skates glides with the help of the wheels that are attached below the skates. John Joseph Merlin invented roller skates in the middle of the 18th century. It was an invention that seemed to be ahead of its time, since it did not immediately prove to be popular. A few years later, Massachusetts based James Leonard Plimpton took this invention a step further and created wheels that allowed twists and turns. This permitted the user to turn at corners and navigate curves with the new “rocking” skate. With this improvement, roller skates caught the imagination of the masses and soon became a popular pastime. Roller skating has acquired the status of a sport and was included in the Olympics in 1992.
Over time, a number of roller-skating games have evolved including roller derby, roller hockey, figure skating and speed skating. Of these games, roller hockey has become the most popular, with more than 2.5 million players around the world. In the eighties and nineties, roller skating proved popular amongst teenagers in many countries.
Roller skating provides several health benefits which are almost equivalent to jogging. When roller skating, the body gets a full aerobic workout, burning around 350 calories per hour. When roller skating at 10 miles per hour, this increases to around 600 calories per hour. The American Heart Association lists roller skating as one of the sports that should be taken up to keep the heart fit.
There are two types of roller skates: inline skates and quad skates. The inline skates have between two to five wheels aligned in a single line and some models also have a heel stop that acts as a brake. Rollerblade, a company founded by Scott and Brennan Olson, helped popularise such roller skates. The second type of roller skates are quad skates which have four wheels. Quad skates are recognised to be the original version and the design has remained unchanged over the past hundred years.
Buy on Dealtime:
