1,000 Reps: Objective Rating of the Difficulty of Various Skills

Riding Advice
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TLDR: This is an experiment that consists only of recording the amount of times you attempt to do each skill. I put a cap at 1,000 so this doesn’t ruin our entire lives.

I was practicing at the park, failing at the stand-up one-foot wheel walk, when I imagined myself getting on this forum and asking someone who knew this skill, “How many times did you try this before you saw ‘x amount’ of success?”

And then I thought, “They would think that was a very weird question, and what’s more, I would only get approximate answers the accuracy of which I would have no way of being able to judge.”

So, I’m doing it myself. And I just told my friend about this experiment, and he thought it was a good idea, and I told him it would be much better if I had several subjects, so he agreed to take part in this as well. If any of you would like to also, post in here and let me know - I only ask that you make an effort to be accurate.

Each attempt to perform each skill will count as 1.

This means that you will reach 1,000 hops pretty quickly - or at least comparably quickly.

But each wheel walk is only 1 rep, no matter how many revolutions of the tire you make.

So there will be a difference, I suspect, in the amount of times necessary to learn different skills, not only because of the difficulty of the skills, but because of their duration. I have not found a way to counterbalance this, and the only reason I would need to would be to determine, based on number alone, how difficult these skills are to learn. As far as I can tell, accounting for the difference in duration is not possible to do accurately - I believe this for a variety of reasons which I will not bore you with, but you can let me know if you disagree.

A comparison will be possible after only 50 or 100 reps, I suppose, but I’m carrying the experiment to 1,000.

Another thing which we must account for intuitively, since an accurate system is not quite possible to measure this, is how good we are at the skills to begin with. I would rather start counting my wheel walks at ‘1’ tomorrow than to add a few hundred based on a guess. The data for these skills will be tainted, but there’s really nothing I can do about that…

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Intoit let me get this right, so I put here is how many times I tried to do a trick?
Ok today I tried around 50 times to take the hop is like that? haha or I misunderstood?

Look This game , sounds good for us , learning with everybody is better than learning by yourself

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50 times to take the TIRE HOP * , sorry i forgot the word :confused:

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ok, ill post my progress on turnarounds.

bout 5 months ago i was working on these very consistently. highest i did was 4 turnarounds in a row. this took at least 1500 reps. (prob more, thats an underestimation) i eventually just stopped even trying these until about 3 weeks ago.

so for these 3 weeks, i’d say a good estimate is 750reps. i just got 3 turnaround in a row today, but they are still very inconsistent. this time i won’t be giving up, however. i think the 1000 cap is too low. i’m still going to count each sesh now anyway. i want to be up to 20 turnaround in a row by july 2011(naucc). my cap will be 30,000. i think it will take 30,000+ reps to get 20 in a row. i’ll post progress vids. turnarounds are the hardest thing i’ve ever tried.

heres my old turnaround vid( i am no longer this good, but soon i will be)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dAYN1MzfGY

so i have 29,250 reps to go before i believe i can do 20 turnarounds in a row.

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it doesnt really work cause you could do 1000 of something in a day and not make any progress because you havent improved enough to do it.If you did 1000 over 1 week you would be much closer

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yesterday i did about 40 reps…all miserable, horrible…pathetic. ended up very pissed.

today was a much better sesh…but not good enough. these are the most frustrating things i’ve ever dealt with. but i will NOT give up.

heres the highlights of todays sesh

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InG0vIrLKDk

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its way hard on wood cause the tyre grips especially if its pointy like yours.I do mine by grabbing the handle and doing two 90 hops but whatever works

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its not really noticeable, but i’m actually doing 2 lil mini hops each time i turn…to reduce some of the friction. ive also been practicing on a low metal pole…it definitely easier to turn, but definitely harder to stay on after the turn. i probably land 1 in 15 on the metal pole.

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yeh its tricky but you should get it pretty fast cause of your insane balance skills :smiley:

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is not better try a 180 turnaround than 2 hops of 90? you just have to do very controlled to not lost the balance ! or is more difficult?

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its way harder. i slip off like 10x more.

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hm, understand , i do just in the floor , is cool , keep praticing man , one day you will get this mastered! , using your thread do you have any tips to how to start to train stand still? skinny? Is one of my dreams , ride mi unicycle ina handrail and can stand still!

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check out this post,

practice both riding skinnies and standstills. they go hand in hand. the more standstills you do , the better your skinny riding gets. the more skinny riding you do, the better you standstills get.

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nice man thanks a lot , i wil start doing it on the car parking haha

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Hmm. I doubt I will work on skinnies for over a year. I’m still a fairly new cyclist, and there is really just too much to learn…And it appears that you could really spend 100% of your time on skinnies and get better and better at that one skill…and by the time you can fairly claim that you’re ‘pretty decent’ at turnarounds and skinnies, perhaps you could have learned a good ten other flat/free skills instead.

It’s very impressive, though.

I mentioned in another thread binding the cranks to help learn seat wraps, (I contend that the larger number of simple steps a process can be broken into within reason is the quickest way to learn a skill solidly) and I’m wondering if anyone else has tried that or something similiar. Surely someone has…

And Erik, I clicked on your name and saw you were having some trouble with tire hops? I have just started working on those this week, and my opinion is that they are very easy - compared to other things - especially when you consider how cool it looks.

I would recommend hopping from the floor to the tire for a while just for the purpose of being able to comfortably hop in that position. Once you’re really comfortable in the tire hop position, I think that hopping up from the pedals will be a much simpler matter because if you try it now, you are attempting two skills at once - the transition and the tirehop itself. It would be something like working on riding hops when you can’t really hop yet, do you know what I mean? It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Forgive me for even offering advice when you and I are trying to learn the exact same skills, but I also find it helpful to focus on a single skill and go nuts on it, rather than trying this a few times, then that…

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thanks intoit , for now i mastered the tiire hop trick haha , i did like you said , jump on the tire for a pedal postion and fal on the pedals again :slight_smile:

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i’ve done about 500 reps since i last posted… up to 1,250

here’s my progress

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-noFUlOicc

only 28,000 left to go! lol:p

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those rail skills really are impressive.

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Glad to hear it!!

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Starting today, I’m going to do 50 reps a day on each trick that I am working on.

-Crankflip (have landed several)

-180 US (have landed several)

-Seatwrap (just did 50 reps and landed my first “no-hop” seat wrap on rep #50!)

-Rolling wrap (not even close)

-Legwrap (about 50% success)

-Donkey kick (never worked on or landed)

-Backroll MOUNT (never landed it, never tried from pedals)

-Koosh koosh (got to admit, it’s getting better [and better - all the time])

-90 and back to pedals (still find this difficult)

That’ll be 900 reps for each of these by the time school starts on the 16th. I’ll update then - or before then.