Flat Light Goggles

Carl_M wrote:

THere is a difference between balancing on a bike while sitting
still
and while pushing the pedals. You can get stabalisers for a bike,
they are designed for kids bikes but should work on any bike with
fairly small wheels.

With an adult they will not work well and even with children they are
much worse than the taking the pedals off method. Children with
stabilisers start by riding three wheeled with the bike leaned over on
one stabiliser or maybe bouncing alternately between stabiliser
wheels. Over time they learn to dispense with that third wheel
dependency.

With adults the weight is much higher than with a child and the centre
of gravity is much higher so the forces on the stabiliser wheels are
much higher than they were designed for and they are too far inboard
for the stability you need. You may get away with it depending on the
weight and height of the adult but its not a good idea.

Tony

On Sun, 16 Nov 2003 03:03:21 -0000, "Pete Biggs"
wrote:

I doubt stabilisers will be necessary and they'd be a lot of trouble to
find and fit and would add to the embarrassment.

Besdies, stabilisers become a crutch that is hard to throw away. When
they are close to the ground the learner tends to ride along on one
stabiliser and so is not learning proper balancing and cornering
tecnique. When they are high from the ground they kick in suddenly and
can be unsettling. Learning without stabilisers is generally much
quicker and more effective than with. The low saddle, pedals off
method is best. Method 2, which is to have someone trot behind holding
the saddle and letting go when they feel the learner is balancing is
not as effective, but is still orders of magnitude better than
stabilisers.

--
Dave...

"Graham Bowers" wrote in message
"Sue" wrote in message
I have an
adult friend who'd like to ride but is deterred by the learning stage,
especially the possibility of falls.
How should he go about learning to ride in a few minutes?
Take the pedals off the bike, lower the seat so his feet easily reach the
ground and ride it like a dandy bike, walking it along and then raising the
feet and coasting when confident.
Add pedals and raise seat as confidence increases.
Cheers
Graham

As you know what I was getting at is not the total time taken to learn to
ride a bike but the elapsed time between the last instance of not being
able to do it and the time at which it is achieved. IIRC in my own case
it was just an instant transformation.

Anyway.
For what it's worth ... I agree. I have seen this method in action,
in the case of a 6 year old, and it seemed to work very well.

I first heard about the method from a book on cycling. It is big and fat
with many pictures and is called something simple like "The Bicycle"
"The Bicycle Encyclopaedia". It is an encyclopaedic decsription of
all things cycling.

Any literate cycling enthusiast will have heard of it. I have had a
quick look on the web and can't identify it sorry.

What would do is:

Assuming that he/she/it was not one of these go-for-it sorts in
which case I guess that you will not be able to do anything but
buy bandages and watch.

Try to make sure that he/she/it is not expecting excessivly
quick progress.

Try to explain that it is not that easy, but that it is achievable.

Consider selecting an area with a soft landing but NOT slippy.

I would start on the flat and aim to quickly progress to gentle
hills.

Start to practice as others have described.

Make sure that they learn to use the brakes at an early stage.
(That's is ONE advantage of stabilisers, you can learn to use the brakes.)


At low speed at least, a bicycle is inherently unstable
and needs to be kept upright with constant corrections. It is a very
similar problem to balancing a pencil on the end of your finger and
I find that impossible.

To offer encouragement I have heard of someone who, as an 18 year
old, got on a bicycle for the first time ever and rode off. He was a
physicist and apparently understood how the bicycle worked, decided what
was needed and.....

As an example of the unconcious nature of the process, when I was about 15
having cycled for a number of years, I decided (no I don't know why) to
try crossing over my hands, i.e. Left hand on right handlebar and right
hand on left. Instant headache caused by intimate contact with road.
It turned out that I didn't 'know' how to cycle with my hands crossed over.

In article , Pete Biggs wrote:
Despite grass being softer to land on, it's relatively difficult to ride
on. Bike will practically roll along by itself on road or pavement -
which is what you want.

With the right slope and fat tyres it will roll along by itself on short
grass too, but suitable tarmac might be easier to find.

Alan Braggins wrote:

Despite grass being softer to land on, it's relatively difficult to
ride on. Bike will practically roll along by itself on road or
pavement - which is what you want.

With the right slope and fat tyres it will roll along by itself on
short grass too, but suitable tarmac might be easier to find.

That's true - although the slope would have to be steeper.... could be
alarming for the newbie when the speed picks up :-) I still think a
very slight gradiant on tarmac would be better.

~PB

(AnyBody43) wrote in message . com...

As an example of the unconcious nature of the process, when I was about 15
having cycled for a number of years, I decided (no I don't know why) to
try crossing over my hands, i.e. Left hand on right handlebar and right
hand on left. Instant headache caused by intimate contact with road.
It turned out that I didn't 'know' how to cycle with my hands crossed over.

When I was a junior I was out training one day with two others.
Fancying ourselves as 6-day track stars we decided to practice Madison
style hand slings. Suffice to say that if Post and Sercu were secretly
observing us they would not have felt unduly threatened. We eventually
worked out that you were less likely to crash if you placed your
steering hand in the centre of the bars.

With this principle firmly established, someone then volunteered the
useful information that it was impossible to ride with your hands
crossed on the bars. On the face of it this seemed unlikely, and we
demanded some proof. Being both co-operative and immensely stupid he
duly crossed his hands for us and, sure enough, down he went. Shortly
after we had dusted him off and resumed our ride my other companion,
being no brighter, decided to have a go himself with remarkably
similar results.

Now you might think that in any sample of three juniors you would find
at least one with a modicum of common sense. Not in our group. As soon
as we got going again I immediately demonstrated that my own stupidity
was at least a match for theirs. I'm still not convinced it's actually
impossible, but it's certainly not easy. However, I have never been
tempted to repeat the experiment.

--
Dave...

In the Days of my Youth I taught myself to ride a bike with hands crossed.

I really should have got out more.

Dave Larrington - http://www.legslarry.beerdrinkers.co.uk/
================================================== =========
Editor - British Human Power Club Newsletter
http://www.bhpc.org.uk/
================================================== =========

Dave Larrington wrote:
In the Days of my Youth I taught myself to ride a bike with hands crossed.

I really should have got out more.

This reminds me of a cycling entry in one of the Colemanballs
collections, where some cycling luminary said of cycling's benefits to
yoof that "it keeps them off the streets"...

Pete.
--
Peter Clinch University of Dundee
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Medical Physics, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/

Dave Larrington wrote:
In the Days of my Youth I taught myself to ride a bike with hands
crossed.

I'd like to see you try that on Cosimo ;-)

--
Danny Colyer (the UK company has been laughed out of my reply address)
http://www.speedy5.freeserve.co.uk/danny/
"He who dares not offend cannot be honest." - Thomas Paine

Sue writes:

I have an adult friend who'd like to ride but is deterred by the
learning stage, especially the possibility of falls.

How should he go about learning to ride in a few minutes?

Whooh! Tricky!

Riding a bicycle is all about letting go. When you sit on a bicycle
with your hands on the handlebars it looks as if you steer with your
hands, but (except at very low speeds) you not only don't, you
mustn't. Above a certain speed (which varies according to the geometry
of the bike) the bicycle is dynamically stable if you don't mess with
it too much, and is steered by small and subtle shifts of balance. The
problem is that this is not at all instinctive - at least at first
(for those of us who learned to ride as children, it is so deeply
embedded that it _seems_ instinctive - but it isn't).

Most things you do, the faster you go the trickier it becomes. With
more or less everything you do, the faster you go the more crashing
will hurt. So beginners tend to do things slowly. But riding a bicycle
slowly is really tricky, and, what's worse, it's actually different to
riding a bicycle fast. That's why riding 'no hands' is easy on most
bikes at about twelve mph, but horribly difficult at four.

I think the thing that most beginners do wrong is that they hold the
handlebars too rigidly and try to steer; and that they try to go too
slowly.

I also think that if I was trying to teach an adult beginner to cycle
I'd start on a large smooth area of short grass with sufficient slope
that the bike will roll at about 10mph without pedalling. Then the
learner can learn about balance and steering before they have to
co-ordinate with pedalling action.

--
(Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

;; better than your average performing pineapple