I am a busy father of two with limited time. Am I served well by learning every trick I do with my left foot as well as right? For example, I just learned to ride one-footed with my right foot. Does it serve me well to learn left footed?
I can now hop pretty well, seat in and sif but not with my left crank forward going to the right. I notice that at least in some videos, some really good urban, trials riders will change directions so they can hop in their preferred direction. Kris Holm mentions in his book not to worry too much about hopping in the non-preferred direction.
Advice in this area? Should I learn new tricks after learning another trick, or learn the same trick with both feet before moving on?
At first it might be helpful to learn both ways but as you progress to harder and harder tricks (treyflips, fifthflips, etc) it will probably be a pain to learn them on both sides as they are hard enough with your non-dominant foot.
I am right-footed for my dominant side, but I practice left. This includes the left hand on the seat grab handle. I don’t have any plans on mastering tricks both sides, but it is a good thing to be able to perform basic stuff like hopping,rolling hops, sideways hops etc with your non-dominant foot. This would include idling as well. I just incorporate a small portion of my uni time for this sort of practice.
I think it depends on what your goals are. If you want to be able to say “I can do that trick on either foot”, then obviously you’ll need to practice. If it’s to achieve some other goal like more fluid riding then I suppose it depends on the trick and the style of riding (or how often you’d actually use it).
I’d disagree that it’s not too important to practice skills on your non-dominant foot for all situations. To me, hopping on the non-dominant foot for Muni is a really helpful practical skill, for example. One-foot riding, not so much.
For rolling hops it’s very useful to learn both ways because it means you’ll be twice as likely to have the cranks in the right position when you roll up to the obstacle. More often than not, you can just ride up to something and hop it without having to measure out the distance to get the cranks horizontal.
Personally I can do, or I plan to learn the basic stuff both ways round - can hop with either foot forwards, and keep planning on practicing more on my weak side - as mentioned above it’s useful for muni to not be limited by pedal orientation. One footed riding with either foot is on my list (once I manage it on one side), as that’s useful for foot repositioning etc.
I don’t think I’ll be bothering to learn more complex tricks both ways though.