I’m a muni newbie progressing along. Question is are there any hot tips for climbling hills?
Grab onto the front of the seat. Stand up on the pedals and concentrate on half a revolution at a time. If it gets too steep, turn sideways and hop up. Just taking little hopping breaks to rest and recover your balance helps too. And keep at it, you’ll get better every time.
cheers… Mojoe
I read in a recent post that it helps to point your toes downward on each downstroke when going up hill. Apparently it helps utilize more leg muscles and gives you more… uh… well it helps.
Uphills are one of the things that make MUni such a fun challenge. I’ve found it a skill that comes gradually with experience, but there are some techniques that do help.
On smaller, shorter hills, often you can speed up just as you reach the bottom, then concentrate on keeping forward (upward) momentum to carry you over.
On the longer, steeper ones, though, I’ve found the following concepts helpful:
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learn to recover from stalling. Inevitably, you’ll lose momentum and stall out, which is where I’d fall off initially. Try not to just fall off, but make it a brief stillstand, leading to a reinitiation of climbing. Eventually, you’ll find yourself catching your balance between each half stroke (as mentioned by Joe).
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don’t let your stillstand happen in the “dead pedal” position (one pedal exactly at bottom stroke). You need to push through the dead position to an action position to start the next stroke.
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think of the chicken dance. This one-stroke-at-a-time, with a very brief stillstand between, accompanied by suitable arm flailing, can look pretty funny – someone said it looks like the chicken dance. But it works.
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don’t let the whole hill psych you out. If you look up at the entire climb, the tendency can be to say “no way man” and then promptly lose your balance. But if you concentrate only on the little bit ahead of you, even just the next pedal stroke, then it becomes the uni equivalent of “one step at a time” and before you know it, you’re up and over.
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theoretically, the “hop to recover balance” technique mentioned by Joe also works, but I’m usually so hypoventilated mid-climb that I just UPD and rest a bit. I need to work on this!
Hopefully these ideas will help you. Basically though, as with everything uni, practice, practice, practice. You will feel great satisfaction, though, once you start making hills that previously laughed at you. Good luck!
Jerry
jpcycler
- learn to recover from stalling. Inevitably, you’ll lose momentum and stall out, which is where I’d fall off initially. Try not to just fall off, but make it a brief stillstand, leading to a reinitiation of climbing. Eventually, you’ll find yourself catching your balance between each half stroke (as mentioned by Joe).
This is something I experience especially on rough terrain hills, it’s surprising what you can recover from by just holding a stillstand, gathering yourself and then setting off again.
I’ve found that one of the things that made me fail on steep rough hills was trying to go up them with too much speed, it’s often better to slow down and focus more on your balance.
This means there’s an interesting transition between the ‘hurling yourself up with as much momentum as possible’ on the inital approach, and then calming things down for the slow focused climb ahead.
Re: Going uphill on my Muni?
On Sat, 14 Jun 2003 20:51:21 -0500, loafr
<loafr.p1kyb@timelimit.unicyclist.com> wrote:
>I’m a muni newbie progressing along. Question is are there any hot tips
>for climbling hills?
Two more tips:
- Unweight the back pedal, in other words: to some degree actively
lift the back foot in stead of resting it passively during the
upstroke. - Lean into the hill, to prevent that while you have enough power in
your legs to roll the wheel upward another pedal stroke, the body
‘stays behind’. For more on the concept see
<www.xs4all.nl/~klaasbil/lean_uni.htm>.
Klaas Bil - Newsgroup Addict
“661, neighbourhood of the Beast”