I have had my uni for 4 weeks and am not making much progress. can anyone give me any tips. Im 62 and have done hang glining and wind surffing
this is the hardest thing ive tried. thanks
Be patient young grasshopper.
start off from a wall or fence, that helped me the most.
just start up against something and push off, pedaling wildly and flailing your arms around a lot. people will think you’re insane, but it’s the best way to learn.
anyway, people already thought i was insane even before i learned to unicycle. telling people i was going to learn to unicycle must have made them ready to cart me off to the happy place with padded walls. 
Stick at it. It took me nearly three months to ride across the school playground. My breakthrough came when I realised that one needs to lean forwards more than expected, and to go a bit faster than I’d been hitherto. Think of it as a process of the wheel catching you up continuously as you fall off the front. It’s much harder to do slowly. A flat, smooth surface helps. Keep most of your weight on the seat. Practice daily, even if only for a few minutes.
I eventually leant using crutches left over from the wife’s broken leg some years before. I’m not sure if I learnt quicker with them than if I’d not used them, but the advantages were that I could actually cycle around using them very soon, and I didn’t have a suitable length of wall nearby to practice against. As a result, when I eventually threw them away, my first unaided ride was for about 30 m. A wonderful feeling! We opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate!
Martin/
Welcome to the fora!
Keep at it. I recommend staying along a fence or a wall until you are very comfortable keeping the unicycle beneath you. Put as little weight on the wall as possible and learn to make your falls controlled. I told my kid to let the unicycle take the beating and try to land on his feet.
You will know when you are ready to leave the wall and have controlled dismounts, planned or otherwise.
A big issue is keeping the wheel rotating. Is there a place that is slightly inclined where you can practice? Going down hill helps that issue.
Good luck! Do check out the unicycling journal as suggested above.
Also if there are specific problems you are having , post them. People here are generous with their advice and encouragement!
Blake
Re: beginner
On Sun, 14 May 2006 10:58:12 -0500, kenpen wrote:
>I have had my uni for 4 weeks and am not making much progress. can
>anyone give me any tips.
Welcome to the group!
Tips For Beginners, including a free downloadable booklet “Learning to
Unicycle”, are here:
I’m 52, I learned 5 years ago.
The best advice I was given was to keep most of my weight on the seat.
I learnt initially by using a narrow strip of path with railings either side which I held, I then moved to a different area with railings on just one side of me. I found this really worked for me before eventually launching my myself in to open space.
Good luck
Tet
I had just about the same experience. It took me a few months to get to where I could ride down around the block. I have zero natural ability when it comes to this. You just have to be hard headed about it and not give up. Eventually your body’s self preservation mechanism gives in to your persistence and suddenly you’re unicycling. Bet you don’t have a 14 year old running circles around you while you’re trying to learn. 
It helps motivate you.
A tennis court is a good place to learn. The court is level, smooth and flat. You can hold onto the fence.
A key to this process is getting used to turning the wheel smoothly and with control.
A little speed helps. About the same as a moderate walking speed. As you become more comfortable, you will lean less on the fence.
In the early days of learning, you will have a tendancy to carry your weight on your legs. This will cause your legs to get tired in a hurry. As you get more comfortable with riding, you will settle more onto the seat, your legs will get stronger and you will be able to ride longer distances.
Be patient, and hang in there.
A few of the differences compared to hang gliding are…
- Other unicyclist will not yell “Whack” when you crash
- A parachute is not required for the mountains “Muni”
- You can ride in the rain
- The cost is much cheaper
- Storing your equipment is much easier
- Equipment failure during use isn’t a big deal
- Your Life insurance premiums won’t go up
Good luck from one former HG pilot to another.
Persevere!! It took me 8 Months. I’ve traditionally never been very athletic. And I still believe that I’m a bit “balance challenged,” but I’m very,very stubborn. I was not going to let the uni beat me. Once I got it the reward was sooooo sweet. I now ride every day and confidently enough to brave city sidewalks replete with pedestrians. I learned at a tennis court, hanging onto the fence. A friend of my just learned using ski poles for balance. Took him 2 months. Another friend just used the pedal and flail method. He got it in about a month. The moral of the story; there are as many ways to learn to ride as there are unicyclists. Practice every day, even if it’s just for 10 minutes.
Best advice for beginners given on this forum: Keep your weight on the seat.
Thing that helped me a lot: Practice stopping with feet horizontal. Took me a while to realize that if I stopped with one foot weighted to the bottom, I had no control and nowhere to go.
Also be sure that your saddle height is properly adjusted for you. With the pedal in its lowest position, if your heel can rest on the pedal with your leg straight, it’s about right (of course when you are riding you should have the ball of your foot, not the heel or arch, on the pedal). Having the saddle too low is a common mistake among beginners, and makes riding a great deal more difficult (and tiring). When I was teaching myself to ride, I had my saddle set much too low, and I’m sure that that was one of the things that made learning take longer than it otherwise would have for me. I didn’t know what the @#$% I was doing either; I’d had no contact with the TCUC or any other unicyclists then, and my first look at the internet was years away.
What underdog said. Me too.
Cathy
It helped me a lot when I tried using two chairs instead of a wall. after I could go about 15 or 20 feet from the chairs I started off a wall, and it seemed a lot easier.
Just take two chairs with the backs facing eachother and sit on your uni ion between the two. hang on to the backs and push off when you are ready. this keeps you even and you are not leaning to one side.
good luck!
Like others have said, use a railing, fence, or wall.
I learned using a railing and I highly recommend it (which I’ve said before here, here, here, and especially here) . It gives you more “in the saddle” time. If you just go for it, you fall right off. And you spend most of your practice session climbing back on over and over. Check out those links. And good luck.