Apparently this guys is unaware that pedalless balance bikes for kids already exist, and are quite popular. The idea is to get kids used to doing the hard part--staying balanced--first, then when they get a 'real' bike, they don't need training wheels, or at least, not so much.
> Apparently this guys is unaware that pedal-less balance bikes for kids already exist, and are quite popular.
Author here. This was the point of the post -- but fwiw I did in fact learn about pedal-less bikes shortly after I learned about the "take the pedals off" method. I figured if I went forty years without learning about this, how many of my other peers did too? [1] These bikes were not available when I was a kid, and never came on my radar for any of my three young children until now.
The other point of the post is to make the connection that if this obvious-in-retrospect method makes teaching something difficult easier in this domain, how many other domains am I missing applying a similar method to, no matter how "obvious" ?
I'd say through about 90% of the post I was wondering if you'd really not heard about balance bikes. It was only at the end that I realized the point of the story was the power of looking for more options.
One wonders how many HN commenters stepped out before that conclusion was given. Adopting BLUF[1] may help in that regard!
You might be interested to learn that bicycles initially didn't have pedals or a drivetrain[1].
They were ridden exactly the way you're teaching your kid. Adding pedals later is just following the history of bicycle tech development.
Velocipede, the French word for that vehicle, remained being the word for "bicycle" in several languages.
I guess if there's any moral to this, it's that learning history makes a lot of things far less surprising — and makes a lot of what we have today far more meaningful.
Or: one doesn't really understand something without knowing its history (and the best way to find gaps in your own understanding is to teach or explain the concept to someone else).
Using the metaphor of your post: to find out what are the "pedals" to take off, learn about how the "bicycle" came to be before explaining it to others.
This is the standard way that kids learn to ride bikes in Europe. Apparently the English word for them is "balance bikes". Both my kids could ride one of them when they were 2.
“Training Wheels” are generally called “Stabilizers” outside the US. They exist and people use them.
Balance bikes also exist in the US and have for just as long as they have existed in Europe.
But this is not about either. A real bike without pedals is needed, because the transition from gliding to riding can take as little as 30 minutes. I mean, for sure, get your small child a balance bike and let them use it for fun. In my opinion, a razor scooter-type thing is even better. The key is to get the child to not worry about being slightly off-balance and instead of panicking they steer and/or lean to correct.
Years ago, I paid REI $50 for a learn-to-ride class for my oldest son. They did this remove-the-pedals thing for 100 kids in a group and had every single one of them riding in an hour with just 5 or 10 instructors. I watched the whole thing in amazement and did it on my own with each of my younger kids. It turns out that it is really easy to teach, and my youngest was riding a real bike at age 4.
> In my opinion, a razor scooter-type thing is even better.
I'm 44 and still can't ride a two-wheeled scooter. I don't know if it's harder or different from bicycles (which I have ridden regularly and enthusiastically since I was about 7), but it just won't click for me.
Not sure what I wrote that upset people so much. Do whatever works for you and/or your kids. I apologize for suggesting that there are multiple approaches to solving this problem.
Looking back, perhaps I was offensive for suggesting that Europe and America were pretty much the same on the topic of learning to ride a bicycle. If that was the issue, I do not apologize.
It isn't universal in the US. I had never heard of balance bikes until this thread. All my friends rode tricycles as toddlers then bikes with training wheels gradually adjusted higher until they were removed.
I would always know it as a kick-bike, but yes agreed.
Our child got a kickbike for his 2nd birthday an was proficient in using it within days. From there he moved to a pedal-bike when he was around four or so. No training wheels, and no real difficulty.
If your kid is using a balance bike, be sure to take them somewhere flat like a playground. If the ground is even slightly inclined, the kid cannot coast, and they spend their energy inefficiently pushing themselves and their bike forward.
Training wheels aim to maximise the utility of the bicycle (i.e. gears and pnumatic tyres) for a person of certain age, at the cost of learning how to actually ride a bike.
I feel there are lots of parallels in e.g. Maths education in the more generalised form:
In education, skills that allow you to utilise technology are prioritised and these are often directly opposed to skills needed for mastery.
> Training wheels aim to maximise the utility of the bicycle (i.e. gears and pnumatic tyres) for a person of certain age, at the cost of learning how to actually ride a bike.
I'm not sure this is actually true at all. Kids can go pretty fast on a balance bike. Probably as fast as on a bike with training wheels. And for kids that small, gears are mostly useless anyway.
I'd even go further and say that training wheels optimizing for utility instead of mastery teaches the secondary skill first, so the child can pedal and add power without needing to learn to balance the bike. So, when the training wheels come off, they've got effectively nothing.
And this certainly applies to every other sort of teaching, where learning the mastery-related skills can seem so irrelevant at first.
I was subbing at my old high school for a few days in the fall and they assigned me to my old Spanish teacher’s class with the explicit instruction to make sure students could use their devices to refer to ChatGPT to fill in their worksheets.
There's not zero gyroscopic force, just negligible compared to the moment of inertia (with the tyre/ground interface as the axis of rotation) of the bike/rider system.
Furthermore you will notice a bicycle wheel rolling down the street often won't roll in a straight line (as it starts to tilt sideways, it will turn to bring the contact patch back underneath it), so even with just the wheel, the gyroscopic stabilization is insufficient on its own to keep it upright.
A bicycle is not the same as a bicycle wheel though. I can't just roll down a bike down the street (at least not as easily as a single wheel); it almost always immediately falls over.
At very low speeds, yes, the bike will fall over. But a bike with some minimum amount of speed can roll upright on its own just fine. You can try it yourself with your least favorite bike and an empty parking lot. All it takes is a good solid push. It has to do with bicycle frame geometry and center of mass.
That's not countering the argument that steering is what is preventing the bike from falling over rather than the gyroscopic effect of the wheels. You'd have to tie off the handlebars with a static line before rolling it in order to prove that it was the gyroscopic effect keeping the bike upright.
I actually tried a it a lot when I was young, and it never worked even on a downward slope. Maybe I was too weak back then, but again, the point is that a full bicycle doesn't have the same behavior as a standalone wheel, which is very easy to roll, and pretty much stands on its own until its speed is really really low.
That terminology might not be clear to a non-expert.
If your wrench/spanner is pointed straight up to the sky like a clock hand at 12, rotate towards the back wheel to loosen, and towards the front wheel to tighten. Important! When you put the pedals back on and rotating toward the front wheel isn't working, you've grabbed the wrong pedal. Use the other one.
That is definitely something to watch out for with cars from the 50s to early 70s. Often the studs will just snap and not bend the wrench though, which is fine since it is better to just replace them with right hand threaded studs.
I believe the idea back in the day was so lug nuts would want to screw themselves tighter if they were loose whenever you braked as a safety feature so the wheels don't fall off. In practice it isn't really effective at unless you are doing some crazy hard braking like in a race but they should never be anywhere near loose enough to start with for such a minor force to screw or unscrew them. Your wheels aren't really suppose to be holding you up through the shear force across the studs, but held by the clamping force friction between the wheel and the wheel hub.
The gyroscopic effect contributes little to maintaining a balanced bike ride, contrary to the article claim. An idealized massless wheel/tire wouldn't diminish ridability.
Steering dynamics (steering to counteract bike lean) and trail effect (bike are built to automatically counteract lean), along with rider input (steering, leaning body), are more important components.
Can you ELI5 why I can balance ride with no hands on a moving bike but not balance on a stationary bike? It feels like there's something pushing toward a stable state, and I always thought that was gyroscopic.
While the bike is stationary there's limited options for moving the bike relative to your body. While the bike is moving, you can make small steering adjustments which move the bike left or right relative to your body, which helps re-balance the body-bike stack. The faster forward you're moving, the faster these steering adjustments take effect.
It's the combination of steering and forward momentum the gives the negative feedback. Bike tips left -> steering turns left -> circular path -> (from moving frame of reference) centrifugal force tips the bike back upright.
Without forward movement you miss the centrifugal force that tips the bike back up.
Yeah, if you think about it. If you are moving forward, and your steering tips left, the force being applied from the ground is now on the right side of the front wheel. This force is only being applied while you have forward momentum.
It is primarily the forward sweep/caster of the front wheel forks which makes the wheel turn into any lean and the forward motion of the bike with the turned wheel tries to bring the bike back under the overall balance point. With the steering axis/forks in a perfectly vertical position where the wheel's contact point and steering axis are perfectly aligned, the wheel will not really respond to leans and you would have to actively turn it to balance. And with a negative caster the wheel would want to actively turn away from any leans making the bike fight against balancing.
If you practice you can do it no-hands on a stationary bike as well. Taken me a few weeks to learn, but cool to stop at a red light and do a no-hand trackstand ;)
It's easier if you can find a sliiiight incline to do it against. So for instance if the road slopes a bit to the right (more elevated on the left side), I turn my front wheel to the left, "up" the small incline. Then I can push the pedal to go a cm forward, or release it a bit to roll a cm backwards. So it kinda simulates a unicycle, except you use the slight incline to do the backpedaling you would do on a unicycle. The better you get at it, the flatter you can go, and when you find the balance you can lift your hands. Good luck!
Once you see how a trackstand is done it breaks the gyroscopic myth immediately.
The easiest bike to trackstand is a fixed gear, you turn the front wheel about 45 degrees to one direction or the other, then find the balance point, with the cranks leveled out. Pedaling forward leans you one way, pedaling backwards leans you the other way.
The next difficulty step is a conventional bike, if you have a slope to point your wheel up, that replaces the ability to pedal backwards.
The final difficulty level is replacing the slope with just brake modulation and body weight.
> The ideal bike for learning to ride, whether for a child or a deprived adult, is a bike that is "too small" for efficient riding. For learning purposes, the rider should be able to sit on the saddle with both feet flat on the ground and the knees slightly bent. The bike can then be used as a hobby horse or scooter, with the feet always ready to stop a fall. It may even be useful to remove the pedals at first, so that the feet can swing freely. (In case you are new to all this and haven't read the pages about pedals on this site: the left pedal unscrews clockwise!) Ideally, a bike for this approach should have at least one handbrake, so that the child can stop while using both feet for balance. A good place to practice is on a grassy field, perhaps with a slight downgrade.
> Unfortunately, it is often difficult for parents to justify the expense of a smaller bike that will be outgrown shortly, so there is a constant temptation to buy a bike that is a bit too large on the theory that the child will "grow into" it.
For older kids and adults, put the seat down to the point where they can push it on the ground, and preferably have them ride it on grass. They can push the bike for a while, then start pedaling once they get the hang of balancing.
It doesn't work well for young kids because their legs aren't strong enough - it takes a lot of leg strength to pedal a bike effectively when the seat is that low. (the classic "adult on a BMX" posture, with your top knee level with your ears)
I taught a 10-year-old to ride in about an hour or two that way, using my 6yo son's bike, and the next day the 10yo and her mom were off riding all afternoon on rented bikes.
The threads are different in their direction per side so that the rotation during forward pedaling further tightens the pedal.
Another related interesting fact is that on a unicycle, especially one used by someone who can ride backwards, needs to be checked often to ensure the pedals don't back themselves out due to pedal rotation in the opposite (loosening) direction.
No -- don't take off pedals -- and definitely don't grab the bike. Run after the kid, and nudge their shoulders one way or the other, first for balance, then for turning. They just need to not fall over for half an hour or so.
The trouble with training wheels is that they are exactly backwards to really riding a bike. You turn the handlebars like you'd be driving a car, not like you do to affect balance. You can lean to the outside of the curve to go around, rather than leaning in.
This technique didnt work at all for my kids. Having any sort of "safety net" at all seemed to prevent any teachable moments. The most important factor in teaching my kids to ride a bike was how long they spent on the bike trying to ride it. I have three kids, and my youngest is too young to learn, so I have one more chance to test my theories.
How long though? I learned the hard way too. It’s worked for lots of people the hard way. But I think there’s lots of evidence now that balance bikes are faster to learn on average. Taking the pedals off is what removes the fear. Steering just happens naturally. Lots of adults who know how to ride bikes don’t even know or believe they’re steering differently than a car, I’ve even had debates with some of them.
I have two kids, taught one with pedals and one without. The pedal-less was immediate in a single day, and the training-wheels pedal bike kid struggled for days until we took the pedals off. Pretty sure my training wheels experience took multiple days, though I can’t remember it clearly.
> Bicycles achieve balance through the gyroscopic effect, something with angular momentum and physics or whatever
Bicycles achieve balance because the rider counter-steers to prevent the bike from falling aside.
Destin from SmarterEveryDay had a friend build a special bike where the actions of the handlebar are inverted: when you turn it to one direction, the front wheel turns in the other direction.
It's impossible to ride such a bike.
Well, not exactly impossible: you have to completely re-learn riding, like you never knew before. Which shows that steering is the core (only?) skill to riding.
What's fascinating to me about that video is that when he learned to ride inverted, he LOST the ability to ride directly. There's some switch in our brains that can get flipped
More on the physics of how bikes work, Derek Muller from Veritasium demonstrated what happens if you lock the steering of a bike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cNmUNHSBac
I saw that SmarterEveryDay video and it's a crazy thing to do but fun to watch.
Terminology: balance is from steering (not counter-steering aka push-steering) which is to get the bike (usually motorcycle) to lean faster which allows taking a corner sharper. To balance upright, one steers the bike in the same direction the bike would naturally steer (as it's falling to one side) by the way the forks are raked/offset.
>Bicycles achieve balance because the rider counter-steers to prevent the bike from falling aside.
This is only partially correct. A rider can compensate for road irregularities to keep the bike upright, where an uncontrolled bike would topple over, however an uncontrolled bike is stable when rolling on flat terrain. That there exist bikes that, by making countersteering impossible are unridable, doesn't support the proposition that countersteering is the primary mechanism by which a bike stays upright, it just shows that countersteering can have a much more powerful effect that the dynamics of angular momentum.
At some point I saw someone put a counter spinning wheel on a bike to negate the gyroscopic effect and they were still able to ride fine. I'm not quite sure how to describe it, but there is something about the geometry of a bike that is sort of self correcting. You can ride a bike without touching the handlebars at all, and you can even steer some amount.
Here's what I originally typed out before googling:
The "something about the geometry" is called caster, and is the same effect that makes the front casters on a shopping cart go straight: the point where the steering axis intersects the ground is ahead of the contact patch of the tire. On a bike, this is mostly determined by the angle of your head tube when looking at the bike from the side (if the fork is "bent" from the side view, this would also contribute to the caster effect).
But I've now googled, and found a paper that says that a bike can be stable without gyroscopic or caster effects [1]. It seems like the specific mass distribution of the steerable mass (front wheel, fork, handlebars, etc) vs the rest of the frame matters, and of course all of these variables interact in complex ways. They do agree that caster plays an important role though.
Vehicle dynamics is notoriously tricky stuff. I can say with experience that it doesn't get easier when you go to four wheels.
> but there is something about the geometry of a bike that is sort of self correcting.
Yup. Plenty of videos on youtube where they send a bike down a hill with no rider and as long as there is forward motion it will self-correct and stay upright.
Bikes in motion are self-balancing, and with no rider on, will continue indefinitely until the forward momentum has been exhausted.
This is because gyroscopic forces are not significant except at high speed, and most of the forces relevant to cycling and which direction the bicycle goes are generated between the front tire and road surface. Turning the handlebars to change direction is also only relevant at low speed for the same reason.
Maybe the description the author found was describing a tendency of a riderless bike to stay upright? Counter-steering is involved there but I’m not sure it’s the most significant bit. That is a good video though!
As a motorcyclist, counter-steering is a very pronounced and useful feature. I've tried employing the same technique on my bicycle and it had no effect. I'd be keen to understand others experiences of countersteering on a bicycle.
I too am a motorcyclist (and now, mostly, a cyclist) and think I may have misspoke (steering vs counter-steering).
When I learned to ride a motorcycle I was taught to push the handle bars with the hand on the side I wanted to turn (so, if trying to turn right, push with the right hand); this causes the bike to "fall" on the side of the turn, and follow the turn.
This is what I meant by "counter-steering" but 1/ it only works at relatively high speeds (above, say, 20 mph, which isn't high on a motorcycle, but pretty high on a bike) and 2/ it doesn't "prevent" the bike from falling, it makes it fall, which is what we want.
Following the same principle, staying upright on a bicycle involves steering, not counter-steering: when a bike starts falling to one side, turning the wheel to that side makes it want to fall to the other side; and if done fast enough and often enough (as all riders to), maintain the bike upright.
> This is what I meant by "counter-steering" but 1/ it only works at relatively high speeds (above, say, 20 mph, which isn't high on a motorcycle, but pretty high on a bike)
Can you clarify what is it exactly that you consider counter-steering?
My understanding is that it means "briefly turning the handle-bars to point the front wheel in the opposite direction of the intended turn, causing the vehicle to start tipping over in the direction of intended turn", which is exactly how you steer both motorcycle and bicycle.
Training wheels are terrible. Both of my kids learned how to ride on balance bikes, basically in under a day. When switching to pedal power, there IS a transition period where learning how to pedal AND balance at the same time is challenge. But it's a lot shorter and less frustrating than trying to learn how to pedal AND balance at the same time.
I hear this sentiment all the time. But as a kid, I first rode a bike with training wheels. The day my dad removed them, I went outside before him, hopped on the bike, and just started riding. There was no "learning to balance" or drama. I remember my parents were surprised but... maybe training wheels aren't so bad for everyone?
One thing I think gets lost in the discussion of training wheels: people act like you have four wheels flat on the ground, with no opportunity to balance. But proper training wheels should have two or three wheels on the ground, depending on if the rider is balancing or not. In other words, the training wheels should be lifted slightly up: https://www.twowheelingtots.com/training-wheels-faq/
I have seen kids learn to ride with training wheels. Basically the training wheels are raised relative to the rear wheel and the child learns to balance the bike on the tires, with the training wheels only touching when the bike leans over. But that only teaches them how to balance the bike when riding in a straight line. Not start, turn, or stop.
You might have been older, though. So with a balance bike you could've learned to bike years earlier. If you already had mastered balance, learning to bike isn't a big leap.
Agreed. We didn't get onto the balance bike tip until my older kid was a little older, but my younger one started on their older sibling's balance bike as more-or-less a toddler and was riding a bike with pedals by age 4. With basically zero frustration.
Watching peers of theirs who used training wheels, I've realized they're a trap. The mechanics of how a bike actually steers are completely different when you put training wheels on it. Whenever a third wheel is touching the ground (something that seems to be hard to avoid while turning, from what I've seen) it starts to steer like a trike instead of a bicycle. So transitioning from that to riding without training wheels is doubly difficult, because you also have to un-learn the instincts and muscle memory you developed with training wheels.
Transitioning from a balance bike to one with pedals is much easier because the main instinct they'll be taking from it - putting a foot on the ground when you get into trouble - remains useful. It naturally helps prevent skinned knees during the transition period.
Exactly this. The article has the right conclusion but invents a nonsense explanation. The truth is that bicycles counter-steer at any reasonable rolling speed - to go right, you nudge the steering to the left, which causes the bike to start falling to the right and then steer into that fall. People often find this hard to believe, even experienced riders, but it is easily tested. The problem is that training wheels turn a bicycle into a tricycle, which steers in the opposite way - to go right you steer to the right. So kids learn that and then you take the training wheels off and the first attempt to steer immediately causes a nasty fall because of steering the wrong way. I made this mistake teaching my first to ride, and she hurt herself and never really liked bikes after that. Seeing it happen, I had an epiphany (eventually) and just took the pedals off that bike for my second, who had the experience described elsewhere in this thread and loved bikes thereafter.
Funny enough, this is probably how the very first bicyclists learned how to ride - since they would've ridden velocipedes and other pedal-less proto-bicycles before even pennyfarthings (let alone modern "safety" bicycles) existed.
My kid used a push bike. When it came time to start pedalling, it took 5 minutes with zero falls. He already knew how to balance and turn (most of the biking skills), it was just a new way to move the bike forward.
Not sure if it helped, but we had a Strider-brand push bike which you can and add pedals to when ready. He was already familiar with that exact bike.
Mine too. But it only happened when he decided it was time to do it. Once he decided, we went out and he was cycling independently by the time we reached the end of the street.
I like this step by step approach to things. When my dad first taught me to ride a bike it was a disaster as he tried teaching me to run with the bike then jump up on the pedals and onto the seat in one swift action, like some sort of professional cyclist. I couldn't get the hang of this silly method and he gave up, leaving me to figure out how to do it from stationary.
All my kids learned to bike on pedal-less balance bikes (or kickbikes or whatever you want to call them). We had "Puky LR" models, but there are others.
By the time they were ready to switch to a real children's bike, didn't even need to temporarily take the pedals off, they just picked it up more or less instantly.
Agree with the point of this post. I'd never heard of balance bikes, and then my wife did some research when we had our first kid and found out about this.
We've now taught both of our kids to bike by starting with a balance bike, and the comparison with their friends who learned with training wheels was amazing - the balance bike kids were zooming around earlier, confidently, and with many fewer spills than the training wheel cohort.
Also, you can get a balance bike with a handbrake, which sets them up well for getting a bike with handbrakes instead of coaster brakes. Kids bikes in the US have to be sold with coasters but there are several manufacturers (like woom) who make it really easy to remove the coaster and have front and rear hand brakes.
Also also, most kids bikes in the US are too heavy: they're tough and cheap but it makes it hard to control them. Woom and Isla and probably a few others now make aluminum frame bikes for kids that are much more appropriate weight for their sizes, though at a bit of a cost.
I remember coaster brakes fondly. As an American kid, all of my bikes had them. What was great about them was that you can engage them so suddenly and forcefully that you instantly lock the rear wheel. If you did that on wet asphalt at high speed and jerk the bike just right, you could spin the bike around 180 degrees or more. It was a great day when I (accidentally) found that out. You can also do that somewhat on dry pavement, but your rear wheel is going to have a reduced lifespan.
I think that coaster breaks (and maybe steel frames) are better suited to kids who want to be rough with their bike. My wheels were never very true, and they would have rubbed awfully with rim breaks. (Disk breaks were unheard of on kids bikes then, and I think are still pretty rare now.) The main downside is that if you loose the chain, you loose all breaking power. That happened once to me, but thankfully there was a nice dirt ditch close at hand.
It's very true! (about locking the wheel with coaster breaks)
I broke my jaw this way when I was 6 or 7. :-) Tried to do a 90 degree skid going down a steep alley and did an endo, landing on my chin. Do not recommend.
I mean, I probably would have broken some bones anyway with the way I biked at that age, but this particular one might not have happened without the coaster breaks.
We haven't quite gotten to that stage with my 7yo yet. 12yo wasn't too rough on her bike but 7yo is, um, er, let's say he doesn't have the wisdom of being older yet.
You can even do 360s with coaster brakes. We wore out many tires at the park down the road from my house. It had a gentle slope that got you up to the perfect speed for coaster break fun on the smooth asphalt entrance road.
I prayed for long stretches of dry days during the summer when I was a kid, because we had a tree-lined trail with an incline leading to a back field. The trees were such that there was little to no grass on the house side of the trail, so when it dried up nice it would become dusty and loose. My siblings and I would spend all day taking turns ripping down that trail then locking up the brakes to go sliding into the dirt patch, sending up dust clouds and competing to see who could make the biggest.
We kept this up into our teens (bc we were rural way outside of town and our parents were luddites about the internet so we had little else to do after playing all our video games to death) and I got to the point I could drift down the latter portion of the trail and right the bike and ride away without touching the ground. I had moved on to a regular "mountain" bike by my teens so I had to tighten my rear brake and true my wheel so it didn't rub to get enough stopping force to lock out the rear wheel. At one point I was using that move as a core workout lol. (That and side flips on the trampoline.)
Isla discontinued selling in the US. Frog is another UK company that makes cheap and light. Also look at Prevelo or Cleary (slightly heavier). These bikes all hold up well, other than replacing tires and occasionally brake pads.
They also hold value well. I’ve been buying/selling used kids bikes on FB as my kids outgrow them, and so far been averaging about $15/year to keep my kids on primo bikes.
Isla has folded, sadly (though they're still selling replacement parts for now). A shame: their machines really were magnificent. We have also been running through them (mostly second-hand) and selling them on, and it's been a cheap and excellent means of primary transport.
The ins and outs of that coaster brake rule provide a lot of wiggle room. My kids started on balance bikes and have moved up to a 12" and 24" ( wheel size ) from Cleary with hand brakes. They missed the regression of coaster brakes and training wheels. Geometry for kids bikes mainly comes down to the scale of the cranks. Small cranks are needed to lower the foot position and center of gravity enough to be 'in scale' with how we tend to consider bike geometry to work, but the shorter cranks also limit the suitability to a shorter leg length, so my kids' Cleary Gecko is pretty small on my 4yo, but she's ridden it for two years.
Small kids need smaller components, but it's hard to make small components reliable and cost effective. I really appreciate the folks who took the time to translate the same darn brake levers used all over the world to a size suitable for a 2 year old's hand. They're the cutest thing and they're the first thing I had to teach my son how to use after he was cooking it down hills on the balance bike. They get banged up first on a fall, they get merciless treatment, and they perform the same way I expect mine or any other to perform.
Oh good god can we not reference random videos by name? If there’s a point to be made then make it and reference the video as a source. I will not do your work for you
But that's the effort that has to be duplicated by all readers of that comment, and reader/commenter ratio is ~10, so.. might as well include the link in everyone's interests..
Yep, silly old law written by people who don't cycle. It might have had a place 40 years ago, but modern bike brakes are so easy to use (and keep adjusted) that it's at best an anachronism and at worst now a safety hazard in it's own right.
> We've now taught both of our kids to bike by starting with a balance bike,
I looked at the balance bike, thought "what a waste of money" and told my kid "just scoot up and down this level pathway while I fix the pool pump. don't worry about pedaling." and 5 minutes into the pump repair he was balancing just fine.
I'm not buying a toy that gets used for 5 minutes only. Whether I can afford it or not is irrelevant.
Usually people get balance bikes for kids that are too small for a normal bike, so they use it for some time before they get tall enough to change (around a year or 2).
A balance bike is a way of transportation for kids, they can use balance bikes for a long time before they are comfortable with biking with pedals. We are talking years with a balance bike and then there is an overlap where they prefer the balance bike.
It is also alot more light weight than a normal bike so it is actually better for you and the kid. I transported a kid and a balance bike easily on a normal bike for more than 20 km, they managed about 10 km on their own.
> We are talking years with a balance bike and then there is an overlap where they prefer the balance bike.
Let me clarify - I'm not saying you can't continue using it for years after.
I'm saying there is no point to continuing using it once the kids has developed their balance. That development typically takes only a few dozen minutes, at most.
As an analogy, consider reading. Your kid can, after learning to read, continue reading the level-1 (Fun With Dick And Jane type) books for years, but why would you encourage that?
Also, there might be plenty of cheap used balance bikes out there. We bought ours for 10-20 bucks, our 2.5 year old used it until she got promoted to real bike with 3.5 or so and had zero issues.
Compare that to me as a kid, where would I had the training wheels nonsense, and it took me waaaay longer to learn how to ride a bike.
I'm slightly surprised this is such a revelation in this thread, around these parts (Berlin, Germany), balance bikes are extremely common and training wheels are seen as a maladaptive thing from yesteryear.
My son kept using it because it was fun. You don't have to optimize everything.
By the way, buying things that are useful for a short amount of time is not such a waste if you embrace the second hand market. Which at least in my country, is very lively for kids' stuff.
Second hand? What a waste! The neighborhood co-working space has a free pile of kids stuff divided by age range. It works pretty much like a library: people take some and leave some. Every once in a while some stuff gets thrown out because it's broken or too used up and donations come in regularly. They got to a point where they had to refuse some donations because they had no room.
A kid that can use a balance bike is a lot faster on that than on a normal bike for a long time, they have a lot more fun as well. So it is practical as a transportation, which is what bicycles are for me.
IME balance bikes is the greatest thing for bicycles since the safety bicycle. My family are cyclists, my kids easily cycled 20km per day before turning six. I got a balance bike for my second child because I needed to get around faster and I do not like having to transport my children. At 3 years old we could do 3 km with the balance bike in a pinch.
There is a reason electic bikes are cheap and easy to use, when you remove pedals and chain the construction get so much easier the same is true for an balance bike.
> IME balance bikes is the greatest thing for bicycles since the safety bicycle.
Since before the safety bicycle: Balance bikes came first. Then the pedals were added -- driving the front wheel, like kids' bikes still did when I was a kid -- then the front wheel grew into the "penny-farthing", then came the safety bicycle. But the balance bike -- for adults! -- came first. Invented by a baron (Carl?) von Drais; that's why they're called "draisins" in some languages. (Which is also the name for muscle-powered rail vehicles in some languages; presumably via pedal-powered bicycles --> pedal-powered rail carts.)
> I'm saying there is no point to continuing using it once the kids has developed their balance. That development typically takes only a few dozen minutes, at most.
Well yes there is a point. At the age of 2 or 3 bikes are so small and their cranks so short that the gearing is very low. Which means kids are usually faster on a balance bike at that age so it is much more rewarding.
At age of 4 or 5 kids can realise they might be faster and get tired less by riding a real bike so they have a motivation for it.
> I'm not buying a toy that gets used for 5 minutes only
Round here loads of kindergarten-age kids use their balance bike for transportation every single day. I saw one zooming along behind her/his parent (who was pushing another kid along in a buggy) first thing this morning.
We got about two years per kid out of it (age 2-4). 4 years of amortized bike for something like $100 seemed pretty good, and it was in good enough shape after that we gave it to a neighbor. It's definitely not a 5 minute thing if used as the primary bike for a child too young for a pedal bike.
How old was your kid? I mean apart from learning to balance itself there is a matter of how strong the thigh muscles are in order to pedal. If your kid was like 5 then it makes sense that it would not be that interesting. If your kid is like 3 or sth, then a balance bike can be a great means of transportation for them. They can use it really a lot and enjoy it, until they can actually pedal on a normal bike in a way that it can be practical. The point of the balance bike is not "to learn balance", but to actually be used for moving around.
I have a stepson. We had a balance bike for him; one of his weekends with his dad, his dad got him a bike and he pretty much just started cycling immediately. We bought a bike and he barely needed help. It was pretty remarkable.
Balance bikes are all the rage in Tokyo. I have heard from parents that their kid learned to ride a regular bike in a day or two after pushing around a balancing bike for a couple of years. We agreed that learning to ride a regular bike a kid (without first using a balance bike) was tough!
Half the children seem to have one in France. My neighbourhood is full of them. Draisiennes/laufräder/balancebikes are a real transportation means as children go every single day to the crèche on them. Some Kids that do this know how to ride and can learn to ride a real bike before 3. You then have to find one small enough
Yeah, both my wife and myself learned with training wheels (I don't think balance bikes were a think) and it was a rather long process involving being scared, not wanting to remove the training wheels, and having an adult hold us and basically deceive us by releasing when we weren't suspecting.
My son had a balance bike when he was around 2 or 3. It then became too small for him. We bought him a normal bike when he was 5. We thought that maybe he would still need training wheels because it had been a few years since he last used the balance bike, but said "let's try without them just in case". He learned to ride in literally less than an hour, without any fears or surprises, and has never fallen so far unless when he gets cocky and thinks he can ride behind very slow pedestrians at like 1 km/h.
We were also skeptical, but bought a used Puky balance bike [0] for our daughter when she was 1,5. It cost 20 EUR and basically had everything a normal bike has (brakes, added reflectors, bell) and she was able to use it for longer distances (2 km to daycare) very quickly and safely. This was a huge benefit for us, as walking this distance was usually an endless litany of "don't wanna walk, carry me please, take me on your shoulders please, etc", and a 2 year also doesn't really like sitting in a stroller anymore.
When she was 4, we bought her a regular bike. The "learning process" went like this: I told her "it's like your old bike, but with pedals to drive faster". She sat on it, used it like a balance bike for 3 rounds in our driveway, and then started to test the pedals. After literally 5 minutes, I went for a drive with her through our neighborhood.
We were completely flabbergasted. It took both me and my wife 2 long Sunday afternoons with our dads in a large parking space to learn to ride a bike. We both started with training wheels when we were 2.
My neighbor who already knew how to ride a balance bike thought herself how to ride a bike all on her own at 4-5 years old. I was in the hammock watching her roll down a small incline where getting to pedaling is even easier than on a flat. That was an amazing moment watching another human being having an absolutely awesome day. She might be exceptionally good at this though she is now 12 and rides unicycles
Snap - my son loved his balance bike and would even ride it around the house. We got him a 'good' bicycle (about £140) and he learnt to ride it in about 10 minutes, and same as your child - he rode home and from that moment on he loved his bike.
My daughter never enjoyed or wanted a balance bike, and only gave up her three wheeled scooter about age 7. We tried getting her to cycle a few times, but she couldn't get her head around it. Then last summer she grabbed a 2 wheeled scooter and picked them up quite fast, and the evolution from that to the bicycle seemed pretty easy. We just had to wait until she was ready and interested - I'd tried to encourage her before, but my style for everything now it just to riff off their interests and let them find their place.
Same for swimming, I went swimming with a friend who tried to teach their child 'drills' - which obviously bored them (both). I just let my kids jump in and dive for sinkies - in time (swimming twice a week) they have developed further and further - but they are always up for the pool as they know I'll let them do what they want and focus on having fun.
We went from floaties to a kickboard one summer and then last summer just took away the kickboard and practiced without it, quickly after that we had a swimmer at age of 4. Note that before that moment paid swimming lessons didn't help, somehow it just needs to happen in the right moment and each kids has their own pace.
Yeah, I used to take our daughter to nursery on her balance bike. I could tell when she started doing little bursts of speed so that she could put her feet up and coast for a while that she had picked up the essentials of balancing.
She did have a bike with stabilisers but she didn't use it much like that as she didn't enjoy it. Between getting "high sided" on bumps and the feeling of falling over before the wheels took the weight.
When her first friend started riding properly she asked me to teach her to ride without stabilisers. I bought one of the push bars from Amazon which was a confidence booster for both of us as I could run behind her and make sure she was safe. It only took 5 minutes before she was riding off on her own. Sadly she got a bit over confident and had a bit of a spill which gave her a bleeding lip which set her back a couple of weeks but the next time she was off without assistance almost immediately.
A few months later she was cycling 10km around the Ile d'oleron in France!
Training wheels are horrible thing. When i was a little kid i didn't want to let go of them. One day my mother removed them, hold me by my shirt collar and told me to pedal. At the end of the day I was riding like a boss.
As the author said, training wheels are learning backwards. You learn to pedal, but not to ride. You need to ride, then learn to pedal.
And the motivation is also positive: removing training wheels is bad, cause you will fall. Adding pedals is good, because it allows you to go faster.
Actually that is what we use to teach adults how to ride bikes. They get it much better if they get used to push the bicycle for a couple of hours, plus mounting dismounting it in a standstill. It teaches them they can control it and it doesn't appear like some external contraption whose sole purpose is to make them crash.
I'm an adult with cerebral palsy and it's been a lifelong dream of mine to learn how to ride a bike as an adult. I feel like I may have just enough balance to make it work.
My biggest problem with learning to ride a bike is they seem to assume the user has a certain amount of flexibility and range of motion. Also in order for me to have 'feet on the ground' I have to be off the seat. If I'm off the seat all of a sudden I'm straddling a massive metal crossbrace that's uncomfortably close to 'the boys'.
This post has me wanting to find a women's cruiser and remove the pedals. I'm ~ 5'10" I should be able to find a bike where I can easily touch the ground from the saddle
There are obviously tradeoffs involved (weight/size & high speed stability), but a trike/e-trike might work out well too if you're looking for other options.
Especially as a cargo carrying bike they're pretty cool.
I used to have a trike in college till it got stolen. I was always skittish of taking it on the road given most 'bike lanes' are painted gutters about as wide as that trike was.
In the MTB world they invented dropper seatpost which allows the seat to slide up or down depending of the riders need. Usually they want it out of the way in the downhills.
Turns out it is also really useful when you are using your bike in a urban area and want the seat down at the traffic lights and I can see those becoming popular on city bikes in the next few years.
Right now there is one particular city/step-thru kind of bike that sports one because it is built to also handle dirt paths:
So you could totally buy a bike this bike in your size, sliding down the saddle and removing the pedals to use it as a balance bike for a little before you get confident enough to use it with pedals.
Additionally I think it looks super cool. I don't need it, yet I want one for myself. I think they just released an e-bike version that I may gift to my partner.
Bikes (at least used to) come in different frame sizes. If ordinary commuter bikes don't any more, at least mountain bikes still tend to, as I understand it. And those have the top tube of the frame lower anyway, and with that usually also the top end of the saddle tube (that the saddle post slides in).
At 5'10" -- which is about my height (am I 5'9½"?) -- I'm fairly sure there exist bicycles that let you put the saddle low enough that you can reach the ground with your feet. [1] Sure, pedalling isn't super-comfortable at that height; it's a bit more effort than if you have your legs almost straight at the lower end of the stroke (but then you can't reach the ground while on the saddle). But it's not all that bad, and it certainly doesn't wholly prohibit the use of the bike.
Once you've used it for a while and got your sense of balance, you may not need the option of foot-on-the-ground-from-the-saddle any more, so you'll be able to raise the saddle to the "correct" (=more comfortable for pedalling) height. Or if not, the little bit of inefficiency will mean a more efficient workout! :-)
And hey, if you're really nervous about finding your balance, do what everyone recommends for little kids and remove the pedals, and use it as a "balance bike" to begin with. Anyway, I'm convinced you should be able to find a used mountain or "ladies" (=step-through) bike to try this stuff out on. Talk to the folks at a bike shop, they're often (not always, of course) knowledgeable and enthusiastic, and therefore helpful. Good luck!
___
[1]: Dunno how tall the guy in the video is, but this sure looks like it should fit you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV88C5ZK0x0 . Not that I think you need that super-heavy brute, specifically, but the frame looks like quite a lot of mountain bikes you see around. So here's a cheaper alternative that also looks OK(ish, for its price). : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLPpTFLgEb4 .
While this whole thread is heavily dominated by bashing on training wheels (deservedly so, I can say having tried to teach a full blown 29 year old to ride bikes), this incentive/motivation inversion you mention is interesting.
"Protections/guards" of some kind are so common (not just in software/tech, but all life) that "training wheels" has become a huge metaphor/analogy. I wonder how many other examples there are of the motivation inversion?
It is the same with education. Kids don't get anything if you are using the negative form "don't do this bla bla stop doing that bla bla" and even worse when parents add the confidence sapping "you will fall"/"you will hurt yourself".
It is better to use the positive form: "take your time and make sure you have both feets secured before moving your hand" (on a climbing wall) "stay this distance from the end of the edge of the sidewalk, the bus can pass really close"
> We've now taught both of our kids to bike by starting with a balance bike, and the comparison with their friends who learned with training wheels was amazing
There is actually a third way. Learn to ride a bike the correct way first time. It is not that hard, I got it in a few minutes when I was a kid.
The thing is it can't be easy if you have used trainer wheels before because trainer wheels teach you stuff you have to unlearn first.
Note: I am not arguing about the merit of the balance bike. A balance bike is indeed faster for a small 2-3y old kid than a bike is at that age anyway. But most of the benefits of a balance bike is less to teach balance than to put the idea of trainer wheels away from parents.
Yes, I see this all the time around my neighborhood, kids get so used to the training wheels, they can just hop off their bike and leave it there while they play some other games. And then they just jump back on the bike. Those bikes can also have all tons of silly accessories, like baskets, ribbons, huge bells, it's not like the kid has to hold the bike upright or learn how to lean it against a wall or on the ground. And then I heard a parent say his kid doesn't want to take off the training wheels, they tried it once for a day and she hated it. Gee, wonder why, now they are waiting for the 5-yearold to tell them when she's ready to take them off. Good luck with that.
I always wondered why almost all the kids bikes sold in Canada have coaster brakes. I actually thought all kids bikes had coaster brakes until I saw some at Decathlon with hand brakes (turns out it's a French company).
The ones in decathlon are great because they have levers designed for smaller hands. We went with rascal bikes, they are expensive but extremely light weight and no coaster brakes, they also have belts so no lubing and no clunky chain guards. I think the idea behind coaster brakes is that kids have weak hands and that it's easier for their brain to only think about what their legs are doing, pedal forwards to go, kick back to break. I know I had them as a kid back in the late 80s and it was fine, even cool. My recent experience with my own kid was opposite to that. We started on a second-hand Specialized Jett 16 with a rear coaster brake (before I realized it was a mistake and ordered the much more expensive Rascal). The coasting brake makes the bike heavy, it prevented her from pulling up the pedal at start and it also confused the hell out of her while pedaling, she would sometimes mistake the direction of pedaling and activate the break, causing her to stumble or fall. It would also be one more thing to unlearn later on.
The typical quality of kids bikes in the US is appalling. I wouldn't trust a bike made with hand brakes unless I could adjust and maintain them myself, which I can. But a lot of parents can't. And the weight is inexplicable, given how much smaller they are.
Oh yes it may very well over half your kid’s weight. These things are ABSURDLY heavy.
This makes starting hard (an already hard problem when learning), it makes falling off worse because there is so much weight pulling down, and then they get pinned under all that weight so it can be hard to get up again. It makes walking the bike uphill physically impossible so if it is hilly you can't actually go out for a ride.
There will be at least some people out there whose road bike weights less than their toddler’s bike.
Same here, balance bike straight to pedal bike at 3 years old. No training wheels, she managed to learn in a span of a day or two. It took some more time to learn to brake with front levers and that's it. And the back pedal coaster brakes were just confusing, she would unknowingly start pedaling backwards and it prevented her from pulling the pedal up to start propelling (later on she would learn to push off or just sit on the bicycle and get started). We started on a 12" kokua likeabike jumper before the age of 2 and later converted to a lightweight 16" rascal bike (great czech brand that delivers across europe). The coaster brakes where on a specialized jett 16 and we ditched this boat anchor quickly. Now she is 4.5 and she can do a 12km ride with me, we even do climbs with a shotgun tow rope because her bike is single speed.
> Woom and Isla and probably a few others now make aluminum frame bikes for kids that are much more appropriate weight for their sizes, though at a bit of a cost.
I remember coming across Isla while researching online for my kid's second bike, but sheee! were they expensive.
My daughter started using a balance bike around 18 months. By the time she was 2.5, she zoomed around on it and had started asking about pedals. We got her a pedal bike two months before she turned 3, with the expectation that we might have to take the pedals off for a few more months. Instead, within a few days (maybe 2 total hours of practice?) she was riding confidently and totally by herself--at not quite 3 years old.
It's so different than the challenging, scary attempts to remove training wheels when my siblings and I were 5 or 6 years old. One of those things where I didn't realize the science and tradition on teaching kids to ride bikes could change so dramatically within two decades!
All three of my kids were riding full bikes around 3 years old, having used a balance bike for 12-18 months previous. I don’t think my kids are exceptional - balance bikes work wonders!
This reads like a carbon copy of my experience! When I learned to ride a bike at 6, it was so hard. I had to practice for a long time with my father. These balance bikes really are a game-changer.
She doesn't have very athletic parents, so she regularly exceeds my expectations for her, but she's not a particular standout otherwise!
Probably the more relevant factor: we replaced one of cars with a cargo bike when she was 15 months old, so she does 1500+ miles a year "on" a bike, and a tiny fraction of that in a car (we live in a totally car-centric US city, so this is pretty out of the norm). Bikes are the fabric of her daily life so she is really, really motivated to spend time on a bike.
I had heard about this some years ago, and I taught my youngest daughter (11yo now) to ride a bike this way.
Granted, it didn't happen in 1 day because she didn't have a bike when she started "riding" (We got her first a balance bike, which she out grew rather fast due to her size). But when we finally did get her a bike, it took an afternoon - really just a couple of hours - for her to start riding it.
My partner is still baffled by this, years after the fact (Science, girl!)
To put it funnily, the second she started riding the bike it felt very Forrest Gump.
You mean like those pedal-free started bicycles marketed at daycare/kindergarten age kids?
The ones none of my kids could ever figure out how to ride? Nor would I expect to, because they ask you to learn too many things at the same time? The ones that have no stable position other than lying on their side?
I'll consider trying this for the "training wheels off" period, so thanks for the tip. At the same time, I don't know who figured it's a good idea to push these contraptions as starter bikes.
EDIT: balance bikes, they're called. Maybe the ability to use them is determined by a gene that isn't present in my lineage, or something.
Balance bikes work great for many kids. The seat needs to be low enough that the child can put both feet on the ground at the same time with the legs slightly bent.
I'll recheck how low did I set up the seat on the bike my kids tried; IIRC it was close to lowest position, but maybe the minimum was itself too high? Anyway, for my kids, that bike was just a pure exercise in frustration that didn't lead anywhere.
The reverse three-wheel Mini Micro scooter fared much better, though. Not the same as balancing a bike, but the kids were able to gradually pick up on how to push off the ground with their legs - something that, more than balance, turned out to be the hurdle with the balance bikes.
Thinking about it much more now, and going off memory, they had no problems with those silly ride-on cars that are like balance bikes, except with no balance and more plastic. Now I'm not sure what's going on, why none of them could figure out they have to actually sit and push off when on the balance bike.
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Of course, putting the pedals back on can be difficult with these...
Author here. This was the point of the post -- but fwiw I did in fact learn about pedal-less bikes shortly after I learned about the "take the pedals off" method. I figured if I went forty years without learning about this, how many of my other peers did too? [1] These bikes were not available when I was a kid, and never came on my radar for any of my three young children until now.
The other point of the post is to make the connection that if this obvious-in-retrospect method makes teaching something difficult easier in this domain, how many other domains am I missing applying a similar method to, no matter how "obvious" ?
[1] I guess I was just one of today's lucky 10,000 https://xkcd.com/1053/
One wonders how many HN commenters stepped out before that conclusion was given. Adopting BLUF[1] may help in that regard!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)
https://xkcd.com/1053/
They were ridden exactly the way you're teaching your kid. Adding pedals later is just following the history of bicycle tech development.
Velocipede, the French word for that vehicle, remained being the word for "bicycle" in several languages.
I guess if there's any moral to this, it's that learning history makes a lot of things far less surprising — and makes a lot of what we have today far more meaningful.
Or: one doesn't really understand something without knowing its history (and the best way to find gaps in your own understanding is to teach or explain the concept to someone else).
Using the metaphor of your post: to find out what are the "pedals" to take off, learn about how the "bicycle" came to be before explaining it to others.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy_horse
Balance bikes are the way.
Balance bikes also exist in the US and have for just as long as they have existed in Europe.
But this is not about either. A real bike without pedals is needed, because the transition from gliding to riding can take as little as 30 minutes. I mean, for sure, get your small child a balance bike and let them use it for fun. In my opinion, a razor scooter-type thing is even better. The key is to get the child to not worry about being slightly off-balance and instead of panicking they steer and/or lean to correct.
Years ago, I paid REI $50 for a learn-to-ride class for my oldest son. They did this remove-the-pedals thing for 100 kids in a group and had every single one of them riding in an hour with just 5 or 10 instructors. I watched the whole thing in amazement and did it on my own with each of my younger kids. It turns out that it is really easy to teach, and my youngest was riding a real bike at age 4.
I'm 44 and still can't ride a two-wheeled scooter. I don't know if it's harder or different from bicycles (which I have ridden regularly and enthusiastically since I was about 7), but it just won't click for me.
Looking back, perhaps I was offensive for suggesting that Europe and America were pretty much the same on the topic of learning to ride a bicycle. If that was the issue, I do not apologize.
Our child got a kickbike for his 2nd birthday an was proficient in using it within days. From there he moved to a pedal-bike when he was around four or so. No training wheels, and no real difficulty.
https://youtu.be/OJ-1I8RsqXg
I feel there are lots of parallels in e.g. Maths education in the more generalised form:
In education, skills that allow you to utilise technology are prioritised and these are often directly opposed to skills needed for mastery.
I'm not sure this is actually true at all. Kids can go pretty fast on a balance bike. Probably as fast as on a bike with training wheels. And for kids that small, gears are mostly useless anyway.
I'd even go further and say that training wheels optimizing for utility instead of mastery teaches the secondary skill first, so the child can pedal and add power without needing to learn to balance the bike. So, when the training wheels come off, they've got effectively nothing.
And this certainly applies to every other sort of teaching, where learning the mastery-related skills can seem so irrelevant at first.
I was flabbergasted.
No they don't. If that were true you could cycle along at a 45 degree angle. They balance because you steer into a fall.
They naturally steer themselves into a fall really.
Furthermore you will notice a bicycle wheel rolling down the street often won't roll in a straight line (as it starts to tilt sideways, it will turn to bring the contact patch back underneath it), so even with just the wheel, the gyroscopic stabilization is insufficient on its own to keep it upright.
Veritasium made a video about it: https://youtu.be/9cNmUNHSBac?si=8cbWXgoqg-uuVidb
At very low speeds, yes, the bike will fall over. But a bike with some minimum amount of speed can roll upright on its own just fine. You can try it yourself with your least favorite bike and an empty parking lot. All it takes is a good solid push. It has to do with bicycle frame geometry and center of mass.
Neil deGrasse Tyson explains it in this video at 2:52: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIrgwWQqqts
It only really enters the picture during wheelies, if you've got the front wheel spinning fast enough.
Tutorial complete. You just have to keep those two words in mind.
If your wrench/spanner is pointed straight up to the sky like a clock hand at 12, rotate towards the back wheel to loosen, and towards the front wheel to tighten. Important! When you put the pedals back on and rotating toward the front wheel isn't working, you've grabbed the wrong pedal. Use the other one.
I believe the idea back in the day was so lug nuts would want to screw themselves tighter if they were loose whenever you braked as a safety feature so the wheels don't fall off. In practice it isn't really effective at unless you are doing some crazy hard braking like in a race but they should never be anywhere near loose enough to start with for such a minor force to screw or unscrew them. Your wheels aren't really suppose to be holding you up through the shear force across the studs, but held by the clamping force friction between the wheel and the wheel hub.
Steering dynamics (steering to counteract bike lean) and trail effect (bike are built to automatically counteract lean), along with rider input (steering, leaning body), are more important components.
Without forward movement you miss the centrifugal force that tips the bike back up.
Here's me doing it: https://gopro.com/v/QoMmEVLp7pJyX
The easiest bike to trackstand is a fixed gear, you turn the front wheel about 45 degrees to one direction or the other, then find the balance point, with the cranks leveled out. Pedaling forward leans you one way, pedaling backwards leans you the other way.
The next difficulty step is a conventional bike, if you have a slope to point your wheel up, that replaces the ability to pedal backwards.
The final difficulty level is replacing the slope with just brake modulation and body weight.
> The ideal bike for learning to ride, whether for a child or a deprived adult, is a bike that is "too small" for efficient riding. For learning purposes, the rider should be able to sit on the saddle with both feet flat on the ground and the knees slightly bent. The bike can then be used as a hobby horse or scooter, with the feet always ready to stop a fall. It may even be useful to remove the pedals at first, so that the feet can swing freely. (In case you are new to all this and haven't read the pages about pedals on this site: the left pedal unscrews clockwise!) Ideally, a bike for this approach should have at least one handbrake, so that the child can stop while using both feet for balance. A good place to practice is on a grassy field, perhaps with a slight downgrade.
> Unfortunately, it is often difficult for parents to justify the expense of a smaller bike that will be outgrown shortly, so there is a constant temptation to buy a bike that is a bit too large on the theory that the child will "grow into" it.
There's a hospital here that does a clinic on teaching kids to ride a bike and this is what they do as well.
It doesn't work well for young kids because their legs aren't strong enough - it takes a lot of leg strength to pedal a bike effectively when the seat is that low. (the classic "adult on a BMX" posture, with your top knee level with your ears)
I taught a 10-year-old to ride in about an hour or two that way, using my 6yo son's bike, and the next day the 10yo and her mom were off riding all afternoon on rented bikes.
The threads are different in their direction per side so that the rotation during forward pedaling further tightens the pedal.
Another related interesting fact is that on a unicycle, especially one used by someone who can ride backwards, needs to be checked often to ensure the pedals don't back themselves out due to pedal rotation in the opposite (loosening) direction.
The trouble with training wheels is that they are exactly backwards to really riding a bike. You turn the handlebars like you'd be driving a car, not like you do to affect balance. You can lean to the outside of the curve to go around, rather than leaning in.
I've been a balance bike evangelist ever since.
get a used balance bike off craigslist, use it for a while, send it back to craigslist. Super duper. Do recommend.
I have two kids, taught one with pedals and one without. The pedal-less was immediate in a single day, and the training-wheels pedal bike kid struggled for days until we took the pedals off. Pretty sure my training wheels experience took multiple days, though I can’t remember it clearly.
It only took about half an hour or so of effort to get over the "I'm going to fall" fear and get the feel for how a bike actually works.
Bicycles achieve balance because the rider counter-steers to prevent the bike from falling aside.
Destin from SmarterEveryDay had a friend build a special bike where the actions of the handlebar are inverted: when you turn it to one direction, the front wheel turns in the other direction.
It's impossible to ride such a bike.
Well, not exactly impossible: you have to completely re-learn riding, like you never knew before. Which shows that steering is the core (only?) skill to riding.
It's a great video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0
I think his name is Destin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destin_Sandlin
Terminology: balance is from steering (not counter-steering aka push-steering) which is to get the bike (usually motorcycle) to lean faster which allows taking a corner sharper. To balance upright, one steers the bike in the same direction the bike would naturally steer (as it's falling to one side) by the way the forks are raked/offset.
This is only partially correct. A rider can compensate for road irregularities to keep the bike upright, where an uncontrolled bike would topple over, however an uncontrolled bike is stable when rolling on flat terrain. That there exist bikes that, by making countersteering impossible are unridable, doesn't support the proposition that countersteering is the primary mechanism by which a bike stays upright, it just shows that countersteering can have a much more powerful effect that the dynamics of angular momentum.
The "something about the geometry" is called caster, and is the same effect that makes the front casters on a shopping cart go straight: the point where the steering axis intersects the ground is ahead of the contact patch of the tire. On a bike, this is mostly determined by the angle of your head tube when looking at the bike from the side (if the fork is "bent" from the side view, this would also contribute to the caster effect).
But I've now googled, and found a paper that says that a bike can be stable without gyroscopic or caster effects [1]. It seems like the specific mass distribution of the steerable mass (front wheel, fork, handlebars, etc) vs the rest of the frame matters, and of course all of these variables interact in complex ways. They do agree that caster plays an important role though.
Vehicle dynamics is notoriously tricky stuff. I can say with experience that it doesn't get easier when you go to four wheels.
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51051995_A_Bicycle_...
Yup. Plenty of videos on youtube where they send a bike down a hill with no rider and as long as there is forward motion it will self-correct and stay upright.
Bikes in motion are self-balancing, and with no rider on, will continue indefinitely until the forward momentum has been exhausted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcZCzr9ExKk
When I learned to ride a motorcycle I was taught to push the handle bars with the hand on the side I wanted to turn (so, if trying to turn right, push with the right hand); this causes the bike to "fall" on the side of the turn, and follow the turn.
This is what I meant by "counter-steering" but 1/ it only works at relatively high speeds (above, say, 20 mph, which isn't high on a motorcycle, but pretty high on a bike) and 2/ it doesn't "prevent" the bike from falling, it makes it fall, which is what we want.
Following the same principle, staying upright on a bicycle involves steering, not counter-steering: when a bike starts falling to one side, turning the wheel to that side makes it want to fall to the other side; and if done fast enough and often enough (as all riders to), maintain the bike upright.
No, it works at much lower speeds. This guy is not going 20 mph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Counters...
My understanding is that it means "briefly turning the handle-bars to point the front wheel in the opposite direction of the intended turn, causing the vehicle to start tipping over in the direction of intended turn", which is exactly how you steer both motorcycle and bicycle.
One thing I think gets lost in the discussion of training wheels: people act like you have four wheels flat on the ground, with no opportunity to balance. But proper training wheels should have two or three wheels on the ground, depending on if the rider is balancing or not. In other words, the training wheels should be lifted slightly up: https://www.twowheelingtots.com/training-wheels-faq/
Watching peers of theirs who used training wheels, I've realized they're a trap. The mechanics of how a bike actually steers are completely different when you put training wheels on it. Whenever a third wheel is touching the ground (something that seems to be hard to avoid while turning, from what I've seen) it starts to steer like a trike instead of a bicycle. So transitioning from that to riding without training wheels is doubly difficult, because you also have to un-learn the instincts and muscle memory you developed with training wheels.
Transitioning from a balance bike to one with pedals is much easier because the main instinct they'll be taking from it - putting a foot on the ground when you get into trouble - remains useful. It naturally helps prevent skinned knees during the transition period.
Not sure if it helped, but we had a Strider-brand push bike which you can and add pedals to when ready. He was already familiar with that exact bike.
By the time they were ready to switch to a real children's bike, didn't even need to temporarily take the pedals off, they just picked it up more or less instantly.
We've now taught both of our kids to bike by starting with a balance bike, and the comparison with their friends who learned with training wheels was amazing - the balance bike kids were zooming around earlier, confidently, and with many fewer spills than the training wheel cohort.
Also, you can get a balance bike with a handbrake, which sets them up well for getting a bike with handbrakes instead of coaster brakes. Kids bikes in the US have to be sold with coasters but there are several manufacturers (like woom) who make it really easy to remove the coaster and have front and rear hand brakes.
Also also, most kids bikes in the US are too heavy: they're tough and cheap but it makes it hard to control them. Woom and Isla and probably a few others now make aluminum frame bikes for kids that are much more appropriate weight for their sizes, though at a bit of a cost.
I think that coaster breaks (and maybe steel frames) are better suited to kids who want to be rough with their bike. My wheels were never very true, and they would have rubbed awfully with rim breaks. (Disk breaks were unheard of on kids bikes then, and I think are still pretty rare now.) The main downside is that if you loose the chain, you loose all breaking power. That happened once to me, but thankfully there was a nice dirt ditch close at hand.
I broke my jaw this way when I was 6 or 7. :-) Tried to do a 90 degree skid going down a steep alley and did an endo, landing on my chin. Do not recommend.
I mean, I probably would have broken some bones anyway with the way I biked at that age, but this particular one might not have happened without the coaster breaks.
We haven't quite gotten to that stage with my 7yo yet. 12yo wasn't too rough on her bike but 7yo is, um, er, let's say he doesn't have the wisdom of being older yet.
We kept this up into our teens (bc we were rural way outside of town and our parents were luddites about the internet so we had little else to do after playing all our video games to death) and I got to the point I could drift down the latter portion of the trail and right the bike and ride away without touching the ground. I had moved on to a regular "mountain" bike by my teens so I had to tighten my rear brake and true my wheel so it didn't rub to get enough stopping force to lock out the rear wheel. At one point I was using that move as a core workout lol. (That and side flips on the trampoline.)
They also hold value well. I’ve been buying/selling used kids bikes on FB as my kids outgrow them, and so far been averaging about $15/year to keep my kids on primo bikes.
Small kids need smaller components, but it's hard to make small components reliable and cost effective. I really appreciate the folks who took the time to translate the same darn brake levers used all over the world to a size suitable for a 2 year old's hand. They're the cutest thing and they're the first thing I had to teach my son how to use after he was cooking it down hills on the balance bike. They get banged up first on a fall, they get merciless treatment, and they perform the same way I expect mine or any other to perform.
in practice, this winds up applying to 14" wheel bikes and maybe some 16" wheel bikes.
definitely a silly rule though.
I looked at the balance bike, thought "what a waste of money" and told my kid "just scoot up and down this level pathway while I fix the pool pump. don't worry about pedaling." and 5 minutes into the pump repair he was balancing just fine.
I'm not buying a toy that gets used for 5 minutes only. Whether I can afford it or not is irrelevant.
It is also alot more light weight than a normal bike so it is actually better for you and the kid. I transported a kid and a balance bike easily on a normal bike for more than 20 km, they managed about 10 km on their own.
Let me clarify - I'm not saying you can't continue using it for years after.
I'm saying there is no point to continuing using it once the kids has developed their balance. That development typically takes only a few dozen minutes, at most.
As an analogy, consider reading. Your kid can, after learning to read, continue reading the level-1 (Fun With Dick And Jane type) books for years, but why would you encourage that?
Compare that to me as a kid, where would I had the training wheels nonsense, and it took me waaaay longer to learn how to ride a bike.
I'm slightly surprised this is such a revelation in this thread, around these parts (Berlin, Germany), balance bikes are extremely common and training wheels are seen as a maladaptive thing from yesteryear.
By the way, buying things that are useful for a short amount of time is not such a waste if you embrace the second hand market. Which at least in my country, is very lively for kids' stuff.
Sounds like second hand.
IME balance bikes is the greatest thing for bicycles since the safety bicycle. My family are cyclists, my kids easily cycled 20km per day before turning six. I got a balance bike for my second child because I needed to get around faster and I do not like having to transport my children. At 3 years old we could do 3 km with the balance bike in a pinch.
There is a reason electic bikes are cheap and easy to use, when you remove pedals and chain the construction get so much easier the same is true for an balance bike.
Since before the safety bicycle: Balance bikes came first. Then the pedals were added -- driving the front wheel, like kids' bikes still did when I was a kid -- then the front wheel grew into the "penny-farthing", then came the safety bicycle. But the balance bike -- for adults! -- came first. Invented by a baron (Carl?) von Drais; that's why they're called "draisins" in some languages. (Which is also the name for muscle-powered rail vehicles in some languages; presumably via pedal-powered bicycles --> pedal-powered rail carts.)
Well yes there is a point. At the age of 2 or 3 bikes are so small and their cranks so short that the gearing is very low. Which means kids are usually faster on a balance bike at that age so it is much more rewarding.
At age of 4 or 5 kids can realise they might be faster and get tired less by riding a real bike so they have a motivation for it.
Round here loads of kindergarten-age kids use their balance bike for transportation every single day. I saw one zooming along behind her/his parent (who was pushing another kid along in a buggy) first thing this morning.
A toy? The balance bike was our kid's secondary mode of transportation for 2.5 years, after our bike trailer.
My son had a balance bike when he was around 2 or 3. It then became too small for him. We bought him a normal bike when he was 5. We thought that maybe he would still need training wheels because it had been a few years since he last used the balance bike, but said "let's try without them just in case". He learned to ride in literally less than an hour, without any fears or surprises, and has never fallen so far unless when he gets cocky and thinks he can ride behind very slow pedestrians at like 1 km/h.
When she was 4, we bought her a regular bike. The "learning process" went like this: I told her "it's like your old bike, but with pedals to drive faster". She sat on it, used it like a balance bike for 3 rounds in our driveway, and then started to test the pedals. After literally 5 minutes, I went for a drive with her through our neighborhood.
We were completely flabbergasted. It took both me and my wife 2 long Sunday afternoons with our dads in a large parking space to learn to ride a bike. We both started with training wheels when we were 2.
[0] https://www.gigasport.de/puky-laufrad-12-lr-1l-br-pink-72928...
My daughter never enjoyed or wanted a balance bike, and only gave up her three wheeled scooter about age 7. We tried getting her to cycle a few times, but she couldn't get her head around it. Then last summer she grabbed a 2 wheeled scooter and picked them up quite fast, and the evolution from that to the bicycle seemed pretty easy. We just had to wait until she was ready and interested - I'd tried to encourage her before, but my style for everything now it just to riff off their interests and let them find their place.
Same for swimming, I went swimming with a friend who tried to teach their child 'drills' - which obviously bored them (both). I just let my kids jump in and dive for sinkies - in time (swimming twice a week) they have developed further and further - but they are always up for the pool as they know I'll let them do what they want and focus on having fun.
She did have a bike with stabilisers but she didn't use it much like that as she didn't enjoy it. Between getting "high sided" on bumps and the feeling of falling over before the wheels took the weight.
When her first friend started riding properly she asked me to teach her to ride without stabilisers. I bought one of the push bars from Amazon which was a confidence booster for both of us as I could run behind her and make sure she was safe. It only took 5 minutes before she was riding off on her own. Sadly she got a bit over confident and had a bit of a spill which gave her a bleeding lip which set her back a couple of weeks but the next time she was off without assistance almost immediately.
A few months later she was cycling 10km around the Ile d'oleron in France!
As the author said, training wheels are learning backwards. You learn to pedal, but not to ride. You need to ride, then learn to pedal. And the motivation is also positive: removing training wheels is bad, cause you will fall. Adding pedals is good, because it allows you to go faster.
Same thing though. I was ruding the bike like a boss pretty quickly.
My biggest problem with learning to ride a bike is they seem to assume the user has a certain amount of flexibility and range of motion. Also in order for me to have 'feet on the ground' I have to be off the seat. If I'm off the seat all of a sudden I'm straddling a massive metal crossbrace that's uncomfortably close to 'the boys'.
This post has me wanting to find a women's cruiser and remove the pedals. I'm ~ 5'10" I should be able to find a bike where I can easily touch the ground from the saddle
Also known as a bicycle with a step-through frame.
Especially as a cargo carrying bike they're pretty cool.
Turns out it is also really useful when you are using your bike in a urban area and want the seat down at the traffic lights and I can see those becoming popular on city bikes in the next few years.
Right now there is one particular city/step-thru kind of bike that sports one because it is built to also handle dirt paths:
The Marin Larkspur 2 https://www.marinbikes.com/ww/bikes/2021-larkspur-2
So you could totally buy a bike this bike in your size, sliding down the saddle and removing the pedals to use it as a balance bike for a little before you get confident enough to use it with pedals.
Additionally I think it looks super cool. I don't need it, yet I want one for myself. I think they just released an e-bike version that I may gift to my partner.
At 5'10" -- which is about my height (am I 5'9½"?) -- I'm fairly sure there exist bicycles that let you put the saddle low enough that you can reach the ground with your feet. [1] Sure, pedalling isn't super-comfortable at that height; it's a bit more effort than if you have your legs almost straight at the lower end of the stroke (but then you can't reach the ground while on the saddle). But it's not all that bad, and it certainly doesn't wholly prohibit the use of the bike.
Once you've used it for a while and got your sense of balance, you may not need the option of foot-on-the-ground-from-the-saddle any more, so you'll be able to raise the saddle to the "correct" (=more comfortable for pedalling) height. Or if not, the little bit of inefficiency will mean a more efficient workout! :-)
And hey, if you're really nervous about finding your balance, do what everyone recommends for little kids and remove the pedals, and use it as a "balance bike" to begin with. Anyway, I'm convinced you should be able to find a used mountain or "ladies" (=step-through) bike to try this stuff out on. Talk to the folks at a bike shop, they're often (not always, of course) knowledgeable and enthusiastic, and therefore helpful. Good luck!
___
[1]: Dunno how tall the guy in the video is, but this sure looks like it should fit you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV88C5ZK0x0 . Not that I think you need that super-heavy brute, specifically, but the frame looks like quite a lot of mountain bikes you see around. So here's a cheaper alternative that also looks OK(ish, for its price). : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLPpTFLgEb4 .
"Protections/guards" of some kind are so common (not just in software/tech, but all life) that "training wheels" has become a huge metaphor/analogy. I wonder how many other examples there are of the motivation inversion?
It is better to use the positive form: "take your time and make sure you have both feets secured before moving your hand" (on a climbing wall) "stay this distance from the end of the edge of the sidewalk, the bus can pass really close"
There is actually a third way. Learn to ride a bike the correct way first time. It is not that hard, I got it in a few minutes when I was a kid.
The thing is it can't be easy if you have used trainer wheels before because trainer wheels teach you stuff you have to unlearn first.
Note: I am not arguing about the merit of the balance bike. A balance bike is indeed faster for a small 2-3y old kid than a bike is at that age anyway. But most of the benefits of a balance bike is less to teach balance than to put the idea of trainer wheels away from parents.
This makes starting hard (an already hard problem when learning), it makes falling off worse because there is so much weight pulling down, and then they get pinned under all that weight so it can be hard to get up again. It makes walking the bike uphill physically impossible so if it is hilly you can't actually go out for a ride.
There will be at least some people out there whose road bike weights less than their toddler’s bike.
I remember coming across Isla while researching online for my kid's second bike, but sheee! were they expensive.
It's so different than the challenging, scary attempts to remove training wheels when my siblings and I were 5 or 6 years old. One of those things where I didn't realize the science and tradition on teaching kids to ride bikes could change so dramatically within two decades!
Me on the other hand, I had a tough time back when I was a kid on training wheels, only really grokking it at 6 or so.
Probably the more relevant factor: we replaced one of cars with a cargo bike when she was 15 months old, so she does 1500+ miles a year "on" a bike, and a tiny fraction of that in a car (we live in a totally car-centric US city, so this is pretty out of the norm). Bikes are the fabric of her daily life so she is really, really motivated to spend time on a bike.
Granted, it didn't happen in 1 day because she didn't have a bike when she started "riding" (We got her first a balance bike, which she out grew rather fast due to her size). But when we finally did get her a bike, it took an afternoon - really just a couple of hours - for her to start riding it.
My partner is still baffled by this, years after the fact (Science, girl!)
To put it funnily, the second she started riding the bike it felt very Forrest Gump.
The ones none of my kids could ever figure out how to ride? Nor would I expect to, because they ask you to learn too many things at the same time? The ones that have no stable position other than lying on their side?
I'll consider trying this for the "training wheels off" period, so thanks for the tip. At the same time, I don't know who figured it's a good idea to push these contraptions as starter bikes.
EDIT: balance bikes, they're called. Maybe the ability to use them is determined by a gene that isn't present in my lineage, or something.
The reverse three-wheel Mini Micro scooter fared much better, though. Not the same as balancing a bike, but the kids were able to gradually pick up on how to push off the ground with their legs - something that, more than balance, turned out to be the hurdle with the balance bikes.
Thinking about it much more now, and going off memory, they had no problems with those silly ride-on cars that are like balance bikes, except with no balance and more plastic. Now I'm not sure what's going on, why none of them could figure out they have to actually sit and push off when on the balance bike.