Learning how to ride a bike
notebook.wesleyac.com
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With swimming, I did 7 years of lessons and never enjoyed swimming. My legs always got fatigued in a couple of minutes and could not go as fast as others. It did not matter how many good swimmers or instructors I told this to. It was not until a fellow engineer at university told me that your arms are what propel you forward and your legs simply keep you afloat. Such a simple statement did more than all those years of lessons.
It is amusing to think about that, even with the best intentions, sometimes being taught something is the worst thing that can happen for you to actually learn it.
I also struggled with swimming until I was in college and realized that floating is more about filling my lungs with air than anything people told me to do with my arms and legs. My epiphany was that people could float on their backs without moving their arms and legs at all. Now my kids are in a great swimming lesson program, and they start everything with taking a big breath and puffing out their cheeks. I wish someone had just told me that as a kid.
this misperception sometimes comes from watching nba players (like lebron) who are so strong they can shoot primarily from their arms, but that's not most people. steph curry's absurd range, for instance, comes mainly from his legs (efficiently utilized by a tight shooting form).
"The primary reason that certain people cannot float in water is an abnormally dense body composition. A higher bone density combined with a higher muscle mass percentage and a low body fat percentage will result in a natural inclination toward sinking rather than floating."
Yes, but filling your lungs would still make a difference.
It was terrible, it took me forever to learn how to ride because I was focused on turning and pedaling.
My kids on their balance bikes just learned how to propel themselves forward by pushing off then balancing as long as they could.
Learning the easy part of propel yourself forward with pedals was easy then.
Here hard part is the back-front balancing, because it is intimately mixed up with pedaling for propulsion. If you already know how to ride a bi-cycle, then the left-right balancing is so easy, it's essentially free.
But the act of pedalling seems to be more difficult for some. I tried teaching my 2-year-old niece how to pedal on her older sister's bike. She simply could not comprehend it, even though she's excellent on the balance bike. Even after watching others do it and slowly explaining it to her, it was like she was incapable of moving her legs that way. She'll pick it up in time, but she always wants to ride the "big kid" bikes and the pedals get in the way.
Start with balance bike, once they got that put them on a small bike with training wheels (force them to not focus on balance but pedaling), once they’re pedaling well, put them back on the balance bike for like a week and then take the training wheels off and try that.
3 of my kids got pedaling no problem, one got balancing super quick, but has a hard time pedaling still.
Make sure your kid’s first pedal bike is relatively small and light weight. My 4.5-year-old was a balance-bike pro after 2 years’ practice, so we thought he’d be fine on a pedal bike. We got him one that was on the large side (but nominally fit him) hoping he would grow into it and keep riding it for a few years. But it was awkward and heavy and he didn’t want to try enough to really get going.
After 6 months of no progress, the first pedal bike was stolen, and we bought him a much smaller lighter one. He was riding happily within the afternoon.
This is challenge when trying to teach people how to ride a motorcycle. Counter-steering is counter-intuitive.
One of the better explanatory ways I've heard:
* put your hands on the handle bars
* stuck your index fingers out
* if you want to turn right, push/point your right index finger forward in the direction you want to travel†
* to go left, push/point your left finger forward
† Pushing the right handle bar causes the wheel to go left, travel on its 'edge', and cause the two-wheeled vehicle to tilt to the right.
Even experienced dancers who teach will often say what they think they're doing rather than what they're actually doing, which I always find frustrating. The approaches that work best for me are:
1. Describe how it feels to do what I need to do
2. Describe at the biomechanical the principles of what I need to do, which muscles to engage, how my weight should be distributed etc.
I once managed to cycle an entire 2-mile section along that path without touching the handlebars, so it definitely seems like it's possible to initiate steers just by shifting your body weight.
I was responding to notion that you must make physical input to handlebars via hands, and that is empirically untrue. All other discussion on how to initiate turn in principle remains valid.
It's also possible that you are counter steering intuitively without realizing it. It takes very little to initiate a turn; this rider demonstrates it quite well how little it takes and specifically talks about why someone might think they're turning without counter steering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljywO-B_yew&t=198s
That said this is more for motorcycles; the tires are much wider and thus motorcycles must lean over more to achieve the same rate of turn that an bicycle with narrower tires achieves.
What I discovered is that I most certainly do NOT turn right to go left. While I could do what he was suggesting (pushing on the left handlebar) and it would achieve the desired effect of transitioning me from a straight line to a right turn, it is not how I ride a bike (bicycle or motorcycle). I spent a long time experimenting with this, and from what I can tell, my natural way of turning is to shift my center of gravity by leaning my upper body. I truly, honestly do not think that I turn right first in order to go left (normally). I can see why people say this works, but I'm convinced this is not how I ride a bike.
I think the "turn right to go left" is a way of using the bike to force you to lean. As best I can tell, I just skip that and do the leaning myself.
Riders are challenged to hold on to these bars and lean the bike as they're underway. At speeds faster than 20mph or so, leaning has a negligible effect on the bike's lean and direction. You can do some very limited steering this way, but the amount of effort you put into it for the meager return quickly convinces riders that handlebar input it the way to control bike direction.
When you were shifting your weight, were your arms attached to the handlebars? It's impossible to isolate your shifting of body weight from the related pushing or pulling on the bars if you're stabilizing your upper body through the handlebars.
[0] https://superbikeschool.com/about-us/machinery/no-b-s-machin...
If you go to the trouble to tell someone how to start a turn you should then go on and tell them how to maintain that turn.
On a motorcycle, you can add throttle to bring the bank angle back to vertical. On a bicycle, you can steer deeper into the turn to perturb your center of mass back towards the vertical.
You're a LOT more likely to notice this on a mountain bike than a road bike. If you start throwing a road bike around like you do a mountain bike in a tight section among trees, you're likely to end up using your helmet.
This video demonstrates rather clearly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNRJNwXljUo&t=285s Guy's head is upright the whole time. This rider demonstrates it as well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUUY5xn2p2s
You have to keep in mind how counter steering works. Take a pencil and try to balance it upright in your hand for a split second, then jerk your hand to the right. The tip of the pencil falls to the left, correct? Like wise, if you're trying to keep it upright, you move your hand into the direction the tip of the pencil is falling towards to get the bottom underneath the tip.
That's what basically happens when you counter steer; the front tire turning is kicking the bike out from underneath yourself as it steers to the right, and it forces the bike to lean left. It's the leaning of the bike's tires that causes the actual turn to the left.
The beauty of it the way the bike's frame and front wheel design, the front wheel naturally will want to turn back into the direction of where it's leaning in an attempt to stabilize itself. You preventing controlling that behavior, along with brake and throttle, is how a turn is maintained and how you exit a turn.
That's not to say that COG doesn't affect the turn rate / radius, it absolutely does. It's also possible to turn the bike by just shifting the COG. But counter steering at most road speeds has a much higher maximum turn rate with better control over getting the bike pointed where you want to go and typically with less physical effort to initiate, maintain, and terminate the turn. And why I urge you to try again with counter steering (not necessarily push turning, you can pull to achieve the same effect). It's something easy to practice every time you make a turn and can very easily be the difference between swerve and a crash.
find a reasonable long grass hill - not to too steep, but steep enough to allow a kid to go down the hill riding the bike with out pedalling.
and then goto the top of the hill and let them go down the hill on the bike. Once they master the balancing part of going down, they seem to pick up the art of turning the pedals at the end of the hill to keep going (if not, explain what to do)
advantages: doesn't hurt when they fall off, gets them used to rough terrain. it becomes fun once they start to master the balancing bit
[1]: https://collectiveiq.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/how-doug-engel...
I eventually figured out (through trial and error) the actual technique to maintaining balance: if you feel yourself falling to the left, turn the handlebars slightly to the left, and if you feel yourself falling to the right, turn the handlebars slightly to the right.
I suppose kids these days learn this intuitively with balance bikes but it was a real lightbulb moment for me and I suspect I would have learned much more quickly if someone had explained it that way.
Bicycles are one of the greatest devices ever invented. A relatively simple machine that enables humans to efficiently propel themselves much further and faster than they’d otherwise be able to. Everyone deserves to ride one!
Tom Scott learned to ride a bike in this 30ies, it didn't take long [0].
Interestingly, "training wheels" aren't called "training" wheels in Germany, but "supporting wheels" (Stützräder), and when I was a kid, nobody used them to "train" their children to ride a bike. They were used to transform the bike into another kind of vehicle the kid could use until it was old enough to learn to ride a bike.
My oldest daughter was more cautious and insisted on training wheels, which she saw other kids using, depsite already mastering the balance bike, so she didn't fully learn until age 4.
Anecdotally, I notice a real difference in my neighborhood between the families trying each approach, with the balance bike kids "getting it" significantly earlier.
Perhaps you (and other Germans) transition away from the training wheels with younger kids than is more common in the English speaking world?
First - you throw out your main idea.
Then - you stop, put a period, and hit publish.
If only all web content was like this post!
OT, the longer I work in technology the more amazed I am at the capability of biological systems.
There's a nerve that goes up and down your neck (and the much longer neck of the giraffe), just because evolution hasn't found a way to remove its loop around your collarbone. Or: the nerves and blood vessels in your eyeball are in _front_ of the light sensors and obscure our vision. Doesn't make any sense, but there doesn't seem to be a gradual [0] way to fix that.
[0] Gradual in 'gene' space, that is.
So thanks HN. You changed my daughter's like ... maybe in a small way? but still.
Riding a bicycle is certainly one; the earliest velocipedes had no pedals at all, and are essentially the "balance bikes" mentioned here.
Mathematics and computer science is another one -- no matter how elegant it can feel to construct a world from teaching in first principles first, the historical pedagogy is much more intuitive and effective, IMO.
For eg math you don't have to pick between historical development or axiomatic approaches, you can make up a new order of presentation from scratch.
Take category theory. The historical approach requires lots of advanced maths [0], and the purely axiomatic approach is basically way to abstract for anyone to get any intuition of why this is useful.
By comparison, it's relatively easy to teach someone some basic programming, and then go more abstract from there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_category_theory_an...
I was sceptical of the balance bike method. She didn’t need it. I remain highly skeptical that it offers any advantage whatsoever.
Away from kids, when I watch adult riders, a high proportion (30%+) have the seat far too low, maybe 3-5 inches too low. If you can flat foot sit, add 2 inches.
Reading this thread you'll see a lot of the balance bike proponents saying the same thing: that their kids were riding normal bikes by age 3.
I did try her on a balance bike. She wasn’t interested and just ran everywhere. Within 2-3 months of hopping on a pedal bike she had no training wheels.
I don’t doubt your or other commenters experience at all. I am just adding my data point. It feels like ‘proponents’ claim some proven superior method. I wonder if there are any blind studies that actually prove the notion? How large is the effect?
This is obviously not a competition, but the faster your kid learns the more fun they will have. If you are ok with training wheels that's fine too.
That's still way too low. If you want good bio-mechanics, try putting your seat so high that you can comfortably reach the pedal with the balls of your feet.
Though if you want to get a good leg workout, having your seat way too low might be beneficial?
When I grew up in Germany in the late 1980s, early 1990s, scooters were more common than balance bikes for young kids. They also taught some balance, I guess.