I am ashamed to admit this here but even after riding for the better part of 31 years I never learned to hop.
It wasn’t until recently after a long uni hiatus I got a 36 then a used trials here. Got on youtube and discovered that its in the ankles
(all that time trying to use my knees D’ough)
so I grabbed a fence and in a day I learned to hop pretty well, hop in circles, small side hops, etc.
(I must add that that is about the most exhausting thing I have ever done on a uni so far & wish I tried harder at a YOUNGER age LOL.)
I can mount, ride backwards, idle, handle a 3 foot drop with confidence, all the basic skills but for some reason I am having a hard time stalling with the pedals parallel in preparation for hopping.
no matter how hard i try it seems i cant stop it without one pedal at the bottom.
Any tips?
lean back push on your back foot as it starts to come up and pull up and back on the handle, do all of those as hard as required to kill your speed dead.
Normally I go straight into a rolling hop most time I do a very small one to start a set of pre hops to align myself to something as the cranks rarely will line up to stop at the exact point I want to be
Never really thought about it as it is just something that came naturally to me, idling on the other hand
No shame in that at all… other than the irony created by your user name. Based off the user name I figured you would be out there daringly hopping over broken glass.
When I learned uni I learned just enough to ride forward, then stopped trying new things. That was all I needed for the commute. 10 years off of the uni and coming back I’m just now starting to learn other things, old dog, new tricks. I too wish I had done this earlier. Anyway, I made an effort to learn to hop this year and I get a wee bit better as time goes on. Here’s what helped me:
I was trying to ride, come to a stop, and hop. Or a slight variation being a rolling hop. That wasn’t doing it for me. I didn’t make any progress until I just mounted and immediately started hopping as much as I could, not trying to pedal anywhere, just hopping directly after the mount.
After getting comfortable I started to learn how to ride out of a hop, then finally rolling in to a hop. I didn’t move on to the next area until I got somewhat comfortable with the previous area. After some time the practice was do a few revolutions, roll into a hop, 180, roll out of the hop, repeat. I’d also gradually reduce the revolutions between the 180s, taking less revolutions to balance correct coming in and out of hops. I’d like to get down to a half-revolution but I cannot hop with my feet in “reverse” position for the life of me.
Another thing I did in the beginning was stand on the crank arms. It took one more rotating thing out of the equation (the pedals). That didn’t last long though as I found it held me back after a bit. Still, it was a great thing for me to get me over the hump with learning to hop.
I’m sure you’ve already thought of this, but to learn hopping with your feet the other way you need to go right back to basics.
With your feet the “right” way you can freemount to hop? Presumably you can also only freemount with your feet one way round? So you can’t freemount to hop with your feet the “wrong” way, which means you can’t practice just doing that in the same way.
So what you need to do is be a beginner all over again - forget freemounting and mount holding on to something so you can position your feet ready to hop the “wrong” way. Then just do as beginners do and start off by hopping holding onto your support until you get comfortable before letting go and trying to hop without it. You might only manage one or two hops at first, but it will soon get better.
At least that’s the way I learnt to hop with my feet the “wrong” way round. Still not that strong on the “wrong” side, I really must practice a bit more, but it is good practice to go along doing half a rev between hopping (and also looks quite cool I reckon). Really must get round to learning to freemount with my feet the other way round though.
Neither - the position you want for hopping is balls of the feet, which is about halfway between the two - it’s the big lump just behind your big toe. Here’s a helpful image of the right position
