How to Learn/Teach as an Adult to Ride a Bicycle

Knowing how to ride a bicycle is one of the most pleasurable, liberating, and fun things you can do. While many people learn how to ride as children, there are always a few who, for a multitude of reasons, don’t learn as kids, but then at some point want to learn as an adult, again for a multitude of reasons, but then become discouraged because they find it difficult, or embarrassing, or impractical, or even dangerous.

I occasionally see people in my acquaintance circle asking on sites like Facebook about tips for learning how to ride a bicycle as an adult. And honestly, it drives me to distraction because so much of the advice that I see and so much of the information that people provide links to is just absolutely terrible if not outright counter productive.

Usually, I’ll just point out that a particular piece of advice is just wrong or that some suggested technique is incorrect, but recently a friend brought this up again, and I was moved to write something a bit more expansive (because I had some time on my hands and was procrastinating). My friend really liked the way I explained it and encouraged me to publish it some place. So here goes.

That is my friend Jenn, who recently acquired this bicycle in the new city she lives in and started this whole thing by innocently posting to her FB page about her various trials and tribulations of learning to ride a bicycle as an adult over the last several years.

Now, before I go any further, some background information. First, I make no claims to being some kind of an expert. I’m just a very back of the pack age grouper who likes to ride and share my passion with others who are just getting started or wanting to learn. That being said, I’m also a keen observer, a good teacher (both of my parents were professional teachers, so teaching comes somewhat naturally to me) and I also have some basic understanding of physics, having been trained as a control systems engineer. Every year, I’m a mentor in a home town triathlon club program called 0-60 where we literally, over the course of a couple of months, teach people who may never have been swimming or ridden a bike to doing their first triathlon, and over the years I’ve witnessed the struggles and challenges that people have learning to ride, and I feel like I’ve learned how to explain and demonstrate things to people in a way that helps them “get it.” I’m always very humbled every year when people provide feedback that what I told them was a help to them.

OK, second, a lot more background information and some examples of some of the usual advice that is so terrible and why.

My friend Jenn posted a link to blog that was by a guy who learned to ride as an adult and wrote a blog that supposedly provided tips for other adults on how to learn how to ride. My friend Jenn, in her blissful ignorance, thought that this blog provided her with “life and hope.” I read the blog and it was a breaking point for me because it was filled with terrible advice and I felt compelled to point out some of the errors lest some other naive person think it contained useful information. Here’s part of my response:

“There is some terrible advice in the this blog which will get people hurt if they follow it. For example, as you are learning to ride, there is absolutely NO REASON "to accept that you are going to eat it." I teach many people to ride every year and no one has ever had an incident like he describes. If they are having the kinds of problems he describes, it just means they are not being taught properly, which is the case because he wasn't being taught at all, but basically just trying to learn on his own through trial and error, which, while it can be done that way, is not the best way to learn. And while finding somebody that you want to ride with might provide good motivation to learn to ride, it is a TERRIBLE way to learn to ride because that person may have no clue as to how to teach you to ride safely. Much better is the advice to find a group/person/program that is solely dedicated to teach you to ride without any other agenda.”

Here is another example of some advice that my friend received from another one of her friends that is also terrible and a perfect example of people who don’t know what they are doing or how to teach others giving people advice:

<BAD Advice>

“Always remember when in doubt, put your foot down, sometimes it helps to combine with braking in cities. I used the foot stabilizer a lot in NYC!“

</BAD Advice>

And here is my response: “Um, no! If you are riding with your seat adjusted at a height such that you can put your foot down with your butt on the seat, then, I'm sorry, but you are doing it wrong! It will be uncomfortable to ride like that, and unsafe, too. If you can't learn to get your butt off the seat to put your foot down as you come to a stop, then you really should not be riding a bike, period. Get a scooter or something else. But better to learn how to ride a bike, properly and safely.”

Now my friend Jenn, being an very inexperienced rider herself was, not unexpectedly, a bit taken aback by my response since her other friend’s advice seemed to make intuitive sense to her. In her own words “I also find this helps a lot for an adult beginner. “

The challenge here is that things that seem to make intuitive sense can also be wrong and even counter productive to the larger goal. So, I was then compelled to provide a fuller explanation of why this seemingly intuitive advise is less than productive.

Now for a lot of background information:

“OK, I don't have time to write a whole treatise on how to teach adults to ride a bicycle, but let me a least share the three fundamental fallacies that people get wrong when learning or when amateurs try to teach others. 

The first fallacy is thinking that going slow is safer. NO! A bicycle become more stable the faster it goes (Thank you rotational inertia), and is most unstable at low speeds and that's why they get the wobbles and when you see people becoming unstable and crashing a low speeds. 

The trick to teaching some one how to ride is guide them through the steps to get from them from a dead stop through the low speed/unstable phase, to the faster/more stable state. 

The second fallacy is thinking that being low on the seat so you can put your foot down is safer is, again, incorrect. Why? Because a bicycle, from a physics perspective, is essentially an inverted pendulum, and the stability of the inverted pendulum is most dependent on a) the length of the pendulum and the b) mass at the top. 

Stability of an inverted pendulum:

The longer the pendulum, the easier it is to control because the time constant of the feedback loop is longer, making it easier to control and with smaller control inputs. A larger mass helps, too, but you can't vary your mass, so the point is to have your seat as high as your proper pedal stroke allows (basically, your knee should just barely be bent - not locked out - at the dead bottom center of your pedal stroke with your foot level, provides a good first order approximation of appropriate seat height. 

For the vast majorities of bicycle geometries, this means that if the height of your seat is properly adjusted you will not be able to put your foot down on the ground while sitting on your seat, and trying to do so while you learn is actually counter productive because then you won't be learning the skills you need to ride your bike properly. 

The third fallacy is that you need to turn your handle bars in the direction you want to go to turn. A bicycle is not a car. Again, the physics is a bit complicated, but once out of the instability phase of starting from a stop through low speed, a bicycle actually turns through the process of "counter steer" which actually means that to turn in one direction, you actually turn the handle bars in the opposite direction, which forces the bicycle to lean in the direction of the turn, which is what causes the bicycle to actually turn in that direction.

While counter steer might be fairly subtle on a bicycle (because the mass of the bike is much smaller than the mass of the rider) and is a bit of a more advanced topic, you can easily see it in practice by watching a motorcycle race, when you see a rider leaning way over in a turn with their knee scraping the ground you'll see that it looks like the front wheel is actually pointing in the opposite direction of the turn. That's counter steer. 

You can easily demonstrate this for yourself on a bicycle simply by unevenly weighting your hand on the handle bars. Put more weight on one hand and that will essential push the handle bar in the opposite direction of the weighted hand, and that will cause the bicycle to lean and turn in the weighted hand direction. When done at higher speed, counter steer of the handlebars needs to be accompanied by counter weight on the peddles where the outside foot is down and weighted, which when done in combination with the inside hand being weighted, make the bicycle much more stable in a high speed turn. But that’s getting a bit ahead of ourselves in terms of teaching a beginner to get going.

Be that as it may, this counterweighting issue also raises what could be considered the fourth fallacy of beginner cycling which is so commonly done incorrectly which is evenly weighting the bicycle

This finally, in turn, concludes the introductory information which, TLDR is all really irrelevant to the beginner but also finally brings us to lesson 1 of how to learn how to ride a bicycle as an adult. Yeay!!

Step 1:

So, step 1 of learning to ride a bicycle. Start with one foot on the ground and the opposite foot on the pedal at the bottom. Learn how to push with your foot several times and then stand on the pedal with your leg fully extended while gliding (no pedaling) and leave your other foot just hanging while you stand on the pedal. Use the brakes to slow down until you can comfortably put your hanging foot down and come to a stop without having to take a step. 

If the bike has a top tube, then you can actually let the top tube rest against the inner thigh of your leg which you are standing on the pedal on. If you have a ”step-through” type frame like my friend Jenn’s bike, then the upper tube may need to rest against your inner calf of your lower leg.

This is the fundamental task that you have to learn to do on both sides with confidence and control before ever sitting down on the seat or taking a pedal stroke. 

The reasons for this are rooted in the physics which I explained above, but it all comes down to this fundamental skill. This will teach you balance, control, and the fundamental dynamics of riding a bicycle. Once you have mastered and internalized this skill set, everything else will be a piece of cake, because everything else follows from this one set of capabilities. 

The more you practice and drill this take-off and touch-down skill, the more confident you will become because it teaches you to have control and balance at low speeds where a bike becomes less stable. 

Just as an example, I live in the great city of San Francisco, and you can see this issue everyday on the Golden Gate bridge where you have inexperienced tourist riders going slowly on a bridge lane that is narrow with two way traffic. The tourists are the bane of local riders because they wobble all over the place since they don’t have control at low speed, and you are constantly in fear of your life that one of them is going to wobble right into you causing a head-on crash, and the problem is exacerbated because of the frequently high side winds that make them even more unstable. Even if you are an experienced rider and have a deep dish rim on your front wheel, a sudden gust can cause a slight wobble in even a relatively shallow 404. (OK, I realize that’s going to go over the heads of a lot of people.)

Anyway, It sounds more complicated than it really is, and it's much easier to demonstrate, and once you see it being shown properly, then you will immediate grasp how to do it. 

Then is just a matter of practicing this skill until you've mastered it before moving on. 

The mistake that most people make is that they try to soon to sit down on the seat and start pedaling, but they are going to slow and they down't have the skills yet to be in control at low speed. That’s why you see beginners wobbling and frantically turning the handle bars back and forth at low speed. They have not yet mastered the dynamics of stability (balance) at low speed, so they panic.

You need to practice this manoeuver to learn how to get the bike up to speed so its stable first before you try to sit on the seat and start pedalling. 

Step two is then graduating to putting your hanging foot on the other pedal while gliding with control and still just standing with your weight just on the one foot and the other foot just lightly resting on the higher pedal. And then from that position slowing, taking your unweighted foot off the pedal, letting it hang until you are going slowly enough to put it down and come to a complete stop, all with control. The progression is hard to describe, but easy to see when demonstrated. Step four would then be learning to sit and then stand again (without having peddled) and then coming to a stop again. Once you’ve finally got that down, then you can start thinking about starting to pedal, but by that time, it shouldn’t be an issue since you will have already mastered the art of dynamic stability at low speeds.

Maybe I just need to record a video. Anyway. hope that helps.

The Republican Party's policies on issues ranging from education to the economy to health care are extremely unpopular among the American people. Yet Republicans continue to defeat Democratic candidates. Mr. Trump is a bigoted, ignorant, clownish political thug and professed sexual predator. Yet, with the help of Russian interference, James Comey's meddling and Democratic ineptitude, he was able to defeat Hillary Clinton. The Republican Party and its media machine have created an alternate reality of fantasies, lies and delusions to appeal to their voters. Yet the Democratic Party has consistently been unable to craft a compelling counternarrative. Reason, sanity, facts and empirical reality are insufficient to rebut the cult-like levels of delusion and devotion found among some supporters of Trump and the Republican Party. This challenge is made even greater when the mainstream American news media legitimates the magical thinking offered up the Republican Party as reasonable positions to be debated under the rubric of "fairness" and "balance." The Democratic Party's failures are also exemplified by its relationship with John McCain. Democrats and the so-called liberal media lionize and respect him, fawning over his superior character and declaring him a "maverick." But on Tuesday, as many times in the past, McCain sided with his fellow Republicans and against the American people. Even as Democrats cheered McCain's return to the Senate, it should be clear that he is no friend of theirs. Unfortunately, the Democratic Party continues to treat its enemies on the other side of the political aisle with respect and to hold out a pathetic expectation that bipartisan compromise and negotiation are possible. For years, the Democratic Party has been in a fight to the death with the Republican Party. Yet the Democrats keep bringing hugs and handshakes while the Republicans show up with knives and guns. Who will win in the end? The answer is obvious. The question is really just a formality.

Chauncey Devega, Salon 7-26-2017

Thus a painful truth for those patriotic Americans who oppose Donald Trump: He will not be impeached. His son’s emails basically admitting collusion with Russia will ultimately mean little if anything. Why is this? Because there is likely no amount of empirical evidence or facts that will turn the Republican Party and its supporters against President Trump. He is a tool for accomplishing the Republican Party’s goals of giving more money to the very richest Americans, punishing poor and working-class people, destroying the commons and the social safety net, creating a Christian theocracy, undermining the middle class, giving corporations full control over the country, destroying the environment, taking away women’s control over their own bodies, abusing Muslims, and denying the civil rights, freedom and equal citizenship of African-Americans and other people of color. In all, the Republican Party, its voters and the right-wing media have chosen political power over loyalty to country. In that context, Russia’s meddling in our presidential election to put Donald Trump in the White House is but a means to an end.

Chauncey Devega, Salon 7/13/2017

But this week in politics should raise a troubling alternative possibility: Trump is not an outlier in his party, but is simply an inevitable outgrowth of years of Republicans wallowing in bigotry, replacing proper policy analysis with half-baked ideological posturing and promulgating hyper-partisan conspiracy theories. Trump’s paranoia and proud ignorance have worked for him because those qualities have come to define the 21st-century Republican Party. . . .  One can spin out a million theories about Nunes’ cartoonishly unctuous behavior, but perhaps the most likely explanation is also the simplest one: Nunes is sincere about being a Trump sycophant. After all, Trump has managed to convince millions of Americans, mostly Republicans, to buy into his self-mythologizing about how he’s a dealmaking genius businessman. Why shouldn’t their congressional representatives be wowed by the same nonsense? It’s not like being a right-wing nut presents any real obstacle to holding office in most Republican-leaning districts. If anything, as Trump’s election proved, being a kook can actually endear you to the conspiracy-minded conservative masses, who can feel even more validated in their false beliefs by elevating one of their own to office. . . . The second example from the week, of course, is the disastrous rollout of the American Health Care Act, the Republican bill meant to gut or replace Obamacare. The entire debacle has been an object lesson in why Trump’s indifference to functional policy concerns reflects the attitude of the Republican Party more generally. Speaker Paul Ryan has long been held out as the exemplary Republican policy wonk. With this bill, he’s made it quite clear that he’s far from the crafter of innovative solutions that he’s supposed to be. Ryan had all these years that Obama was in office to work on a workable replacement for the Affordable Care Act, should the opportunity ever arise. What he’s produced reads like what a high school student would come up after spending a weekend overdosing on Ayn Rand novels. The slapped-together feeling of the Republican bill has only worsened since its initial unveiling, as Ryan and his fellow House Republicans have hastily rewritten the bill with a grab bag of provisions chosen to appease congressional holdouts, with little concern shown for whether these ideas will pass legal muster, much less work as policy. The result is that a vote will apparently be held — whenever it finally happens — on a bill that has less thought and care put into it than your average person’s weeknight grocery shopping list. . . . But really, is the Obamacare repeal any better? It seems to be born out of the same impulse as Trump’s Mexican wall: Republicans liked promising they were going to repeal Obamacare because it was a popular applause line with right-wing audiences. Now, rather than admit that they were blowing smoke that whole time, they’ve coughed up a bunch of non-policy (and tax cuts) and are trying to pretend that was the plan all along. It’s the same thing Trump is doing, except this time the blame can be spread out among the entire Republican congressional coalition. . . .

Amanda Marcotte, Salon 3/24/2017

NYTimes: Debt, Diversion, Distraction

Yes, there's a "rigged election": The one that ensures a Republican House majority via @Salon

Calling Donald Trump a domestic terrorist isn’t even a metaphor. A terrorist seeks to provoke a society’s worst impulses and expose its hidden weaknesses, and Trump’s terrorist assault on our so-called democracy has done that brilliantly. He’s like a funhouse-mirror reflection of America’s overweening pride and vanity, deadly sins for which we are now being punished. He is the ugliest possible American caricature, made flesh. We told the world we were a free-enterprise meritocracy where talent rose to the top, and that guy became rich and famous. We told the world we were the exemplar of democracy, a light to all the nations, and that guy almost became president. We deserve Donald Trump, and we have an opportunity to learn from him. But if we believe that stopping him just short of the White House can make the problem he so vividly embodies go away, we will deserve whatever comes next.

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon 10-22-2016

The danger of the right's noise machine: Years of misinformation led to Trump's rise via @Salon

. It is hard to decide who should bear themost blame if Trump wins, but I’m willing to suggest that we put Clinton herself at the top of the list. Let’s face it; after we weed out the hateful misogynistic rants about her annoying voice and castration complex, Clinton has made some really bad decisions.The long history of conflict of interest issues is real. When Bernie asked her to release her transcripts from her Wall Street speeches, he had a point. But there’s more. Clinton also really can’t give us a reasonable explanation for her personal email server. That means there are legitimate reasons to question her judgment. She has repeatedly conducted herself in ways that appear to lack integrity and good judgment. It gets even worse. Her collusion with Debbie Wasserman Schultz has incensed many in the public who thought that she should distance herself from Wasserman Schultz in the wake of emails that suggest that the DNC was biased towards Clinton from the start.Rather than issue a statement condemning Wasserman Schultz, she gave her a position in her campaign and has been stumping for her. For many Sanders supporters all of this amounts to a clear and undeniable pattern of elitist cronyism. As I’ve said before, the problem with Clinton is that she has refused to take seriously the valid critiques of her leadership. She has lumped it all into mean-spirited, ad hominem attacks that come from rabid right-wingers and Bernie bros. But the reality is that there are a lot of reasonable people out there who think she does not represent the core values of the left in this nation. And they also think she has acted like she is above the law, having created a vast network of oligarchic associations that have given her both money and power. So, if Clinton loses, she has herself first to blame. After that I say we throw in the DNC.

Sophia McClennan, Salon 8-15-2016

The Perfect G.O.P. Nominee

Here's what he (Trump) said during one of the early GOP primary debates: “The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right?...The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives, we don't even have it. Iran is taking over Iraq with the second-largest oil reserves in the world...So George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistake. But that one was a beauty. We should've never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.” This is the most accurate statement Trump has made as a candidate. Bush invaded Iraq without a plan, not Obama. Bush disbanded the Iraqi army and imprisoned the very people who later created ISIS, not Obama. Bush “destabilized the Middle East,” not Obama. The man who made the above statement knows who dug the hole out of which ISIS crawled. 

Sean Iling, Salon 8-12-2016

America's great mistakes: Has everyone forgotten that the Vietnam and Iraq wars were unnecessary, stupid and destructive? via @Salon

Cease all Trump sanctimony: Republicans want to disavow a monster they created because it is devouring them alive via @Salon

But Democratic cluelessness troubles me greatly. I’m not sure the Clinton-Obama-Clinton leadership of the Democratic Party has the slightest understanding of the physical and psychological dislocation of so much of America, the loneliness and desperation that has found its voice, for the moment, in Donald Trump. Why would they, since they are every bit as complicit in the political economy that made all this possible as the Republicans are?

Andrew O'heir, Salon 8-6-2016

A look at his business record suggests that as long as the money keeps coming in, Mr. Trump will fight, and if he loses, he’ll litigate. He is already talking about a rigged system, cherry-picking voter registration laws that don’t favor him as proof. It is also highly unlikely that there will ever emerge a “better” Mr. Trump. We are far more likely to witness an even worse one. His support isn’t contingent on exhibiting “presidential” behavior, or shifting his energies to lofty discussions of public policy. In fact, it is contingent on the opposite. Lacking workable ideas or intellectual ballast, Mr. Trump’s candidacy thrives on his refusal to be “politically correct,” a term he deploys to give license to declarations that should be called bigotry, or cruelty, or verbal battery. That behavior is what many of his supporters most admire. He is speaking to people who disbelieve conventional politicians, who detest a Washington they think has betrayed them. He promises nothing of substance to ease their pain, but he gives voice to their rage.

The NYT Editorial Board, 8-5-2016

The Trumpification of the G.O.P. didn’t come out of nowhere. On the contrary, it was the natural outcome of a cynical strategy: long ago, conservatives decided to harness racial resentment to sell right-wing economic policies to working-class whites, especially in the South. This strategy brought many electoral victories, but always at the risk that the racial resentment would run out of control, leaving the economic conservatives — whose ideas never had much popular support — stranded. And that is what has just happened. So now the strategy that rightists had used to sell policies that were neither popular nor successful has blown up in their faces. Trumpism is basically a creation of the modern conservative movement, which used coded appeals to prejudice to make political gains, then found itself unable to rein in a candidate who skipped the coding. If some conservatives find this too much and bolt the party, good for them, and they should be welcomed into the coalition of the sane. But they can’t expect policy concessions in return. When Dr. Frankenstein finally realizes that he has created a monster, he doesn’t get a reward. Mrs. Clinton and her party should stay the course.

Paul Krugman, NYT, 8-5-2016 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/opinion/no-right-turn.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article