I haven’t been on my uni since spring, been cycling on my two wheelers a lot and feeling pretty good. Finally jumped back on and was feeling pretty good, so pushed pretty hard on some trails, cleared a few sections that always gave me trouble… This just made me ride more and push harder…
Man am I paying for it now! My thighs are destroyed! I think tomorrow is going to be worse.
Hope everyone is doing well, take care!
Been there and done that too! As you no doubt know from past experiences, you will recover. Have fun! Well… once your thighs are better… 
That’ll teach you for leaving it so long to ride!!
Dude,
I thought you broke some bones are had a bad fall.
Isn’t it interesting that riding a road bicycle or even mountain bike has no benefits for unicycle conditioning. Bicycle is such an efficient machine that divides the balance and leg powering action so well. Legs just add pure rotation power with no need to waste energy for stability, timing, sudden accel/decel spurt for falling fwd/back. No constant back pressure and “resisting” against speeding up or slowing down, because unicycle “cruising” needs constant rotational speed.
However, bmx riding is completely different. If you “never sit” on the saddle and always ride standing up. If you do wheelies and manuals. Especially, if you have a “fixed” single gear to be able to ride backwards.
Now, this is very very close to a unicycle. It’s not unusual to find a bmx trick rider being able to get up/running on a unicycle in an hour of practicing.
So, my advice for anyone who wants to maintain unicycle conditioning on a bicycle. Ditch the $5K carbon fiber road bike with 100 gears and 10 mm wide tires.
Get a “basic” one gear bmx bike. Enjoy…slam
Very true and that’s why most roadies have to do hours on the bloody thing , let’s see them do half hour on one wheel!!
Yeah, that has always surprised me, to most people the motion of pedaling a uni vs bike looks identical… Definitely not. Cycling keeps your heart in great shape, which helps on the uni plenty, but not the legs.
Unicycling makes sitting on a bike saddle feel like a dream!
Riding on a bike standing up with no weight on the saddle is much closer to a uni. That is what I do on my exercise bike sometimes to keep in shape.
Agree, it’s not like being generally fit doesn’t help a fair amount on the unicycle. General cardiovascular fitness translates over very well, the lung and heart doesn’t really care whether it needs to supply oxygen because you are unicycling, riding a bike or running…
To not get too sore, you need some specificity to get the muscles “conditioned” to unicycling, but I find that riding Muni for a few hours once a week is enough to maintain that for me.
If only there was some type of machine I could sit on to get my legs conditioned…
Agree with JimT. Standup on your exercise bike. Good for uni leg power building. Heres bonus. Try it with “no hands”. Now thats hard. I can only do for maybe 3 pedals. Quite challenging. Must create your own pedal load/resistance to balance. Plus, be hypersensitive to accel/decel demand. Close to ultimate wheel difficulty. For me its basically impossible. I challenge you’all.
Recently, when I’m commuting to work (15km) and whenever I have to dismount, at lights, I do hip flexor stretches. I’ve been feeling weakness/tightness in the left hip and find stretching during and after unicycling maintains it…just.
I’ve also been looking at YouTube for “stretches for cyclists” not sure if these help specifically for unicycling.
Anyone have any specific stretches for unicycling?
Road unicycling / Muni
Hey slamdance, I agree with the basic single speed notion to get in shape for other activities. This explicitly focuses on cardiovascular fitness, other skills will be gained, but the cardio is great for muni.