I hope we never see you pedal grab then danny. Risky though… Its a nice tool…
I feel that you use your unicycle to get up, then it stioll counts. It is part of your uni.
your using your uni to get yourself up someting otherwise impposible.
One of the main arguments you are using is that for bikes they aren’t allowed to do it. But the thing is a bike has two wheels, they are alowed to use both wheels and one of the techniques they use is to hook the front wheel onto thinks and then pull themselves up.
With a bike using your pedals or bash plate is usually less efficient than using your front tire, and if you can use your pedals/bash plate then you could probably do the line easily with just the tires.
For unicycles we don’t have an alternative method of hooking and pulling up objects besides our pedals. A hooking method is really useful and the pedals are our only method. If your big argument is that bike’s aren’t allowed to do it, well then I disagree, they just do it differently.
A pedal grab on a uni is also different than one done on a bike, with a bike they usually will have a wheel touching as well as the pedal and so they don’t have to rely on their balance as much. With pedal grabs, yes you are on a flat surface but it takes quite good balance to get up from it, and as you know, its a very tough skill in itself. Bikes using their pedal for the most part is just the same skill as hooking with a tire, but a bit easier, so its not much different than something already there, just uglier.
I think your idea of “cleaning up” competition is an alright one, but unicycles are simple, and there isn’t much more that we can do to clean up the performance, this will come more from the design of the trials course. If you give people courses where they can’t pedal grab as much or they don’t have large areas to do lots of prehopping or bouncing around then you will clean up the riding a lot more than disallowing pedal grabs.
I think it’s fine as long as your foot doesn’t touch when the pedal grabs. Grabs are just a technique used to get yourself over an object. Maybe it would be more fair if a trials competition went like this. Pedal grab -1 point, crankgrab -3 points, fall -5 points. Who ever has the most points wins. That would make an interesting competition.
uhm am i the only one that finds it harder to pedal grab a very high (ability wise, this fits everyone) object compared to landing on tire, i like pedal grabs, they are the best looking way to do some lines.
one of my personal favorite things is to rolling sidehop something way too huge to land to tire, grab with pedal and swing back out to what i gapped from, and if its not too hard toss in a 180 or 360 (speaking of which, i almost did a flat ground 540 the other day!(sorry, i’m still stoked though)
I think your cranks are allowed to touch stuff too, in Trials competition, but I haven’t tried looking it up. Is anyone looking at actual Trials rules in this thread?
Beyond that, the object of Unicycle Trials is to complete sections. There are no style points for how you do it, as long as it’s within the rules. Modified rules that eliminate pedal grabs, or possibly other stuff, are possible, but that would be a specialized version of a Trials comp by todays standards. Complete your sections however you want, but your score will be the same as the grabbers.
Bike = 2 wheels
Uni = 1 wheel
Bikes aloud to use front wheel to hook up to things eg.how they do there side hops.
Unis aloud to use there pedal to hook up to things eg.how they gte higher than there max height to tyre.
If you wish not to use pedal grabs then dont danni,There is nothing stopping you from being a world class rider who doesnt use pedal grabs.If you think it is cheating then set a good example and do all your tech lines to tyre. 
In the end, those who don’t use pedal grabs are going to be the ones losing the trials competitions :).
Another way of cleaning up the lines would be a penalty for doing more than X prehops.
Or a bonus for completing a section w/in X seconds.
It’s a trials comp not a street comp. There are no “style points”… if you want to make your video’s flowy then fine, but at a comp you do whatever you want.
I think pedal/crank grabs look shite and I hardly ever do them, but in a comp everythign goes. Trial bikers have a front wheel let us have the pedal.
The tire shouldn’t be allowed either… 
I didn’t read all the posts, but from what I did read, there is a bit of inaccuracy.
Firstly, for biketrials, we don’t always lean the front wheel when doing moves. When you see riders lean to their front wheel first to do sidehops or when pedalgrabbing, that is the easy way out. Most good riders would not do that. Biketrials riders can still kick a uni’s ass when they take their front wheels off in many moves, so it’s not all about the extra front wheel.
As for pedalgrabbing and going to metal in general… it’s not great and is considered slightly taboo in biketrials. It degrades the value of getting up an object if you have to force yourself to go to bashguard/pedal/crankarm. Especially in the UK, where biketrials standard is FAR FAR FAR ahead of North America, we are more strict on ourselves with going to metal. That’s for biketrials anyway. But do remember, without biketrials, unicycle trials would not be as big or technologically-advanced… heck, a huge proportion of components that trials unis use are biketrials parts, and lots come from biketrials brands! (e.g. Koxx, Onza, Monty)
BUT… for unicycling, pedalgrabbing is a different story… Yes, this is the only method we have to ‘hook’ on. But in truth, Danni is right. In an IDEAL world for unicycling, none of us would need to go to pedal, and just be able to go to tyre. I believe that in competition for trials, pedalgrabbing should deduct points, but not be totally outlawed as not everyone can sidehop 125cm or so like Joe Hodges can.
But that beind said, we should all push ourselves to not use our pedals. Many of us think ‘oh i can just go to pedal’, when POTENTIALLY we are all physically able to go to tyre (it just takes time to get the confidence to make the jump of course). Like for hopping to rails or high walls, most of us instantly tell ourselves to pedalgrab because we can’t make it to tyre YET. If going to bash/pedals was as taboo in unicycling as it is in biketrials, then we would all be much better trials riders. Part of the reason why biketrials is a more evolved and advanced sport is because they have tabooed the use of going to metal… this pushes riders to go to tyre, and bloody hell it has worked very well! The biggest biketrials sidehop is somewhere just a shade under 60 inches. That’s huge… and this would have taken way longer to achieve if they kept resorting to pedalgrabs.
Biketrials riders could easily go to pedal and get sidehops that shoot near around 70 inches… but the vast majority choose not to, and that is why they are so damn good at hopping high to tyres.
Too much emphasis and thought that pedalgrabs make it easier for you will only make it harder for you to get higher and better hops to tyre in general. Push yourselves in training to not have to use the pedal, and i am sure after a few weeks your riding would improve at a MUCH faster rate.
To cap it off: just try and do pedalgrabs less and less, and push yourselves to hop to tyre as much as you can. In a competition it would be good to give small penalties to pedalgrabs. Joe has talked to Kris about this in the past, because he too like me, strongly believes that uni trials can only truly evolve and become great if we go to tyre more. Sure some of you will argue ‘nyeer nyer nyer, trials is free, you do what you want’… well, to be honest, not really… the theories and truth of ‘trials’ is buried deep within biketrials, so if you can, research it a bit. Because using rubber is TRUE way to get up an obstacle. Using bashguards/pedals/cranks is just a last resort method to MAKE UP for not being able to get to tyre… that’s why it’s done! it’s a LAST RESORT method!
Oooh: for those whining about the fact that bikes have a front wheel to lean on and complain that it’s cheating… then why do you ride a uni? if you want to really achieve HUGE things in trials, then ride a bike. By choosing to ride a unicycle, we have signed a contract to limiting ourselves (in a sense!), so we should make do with what we have.
First post here in ages… haha, i should start riding my uni more again.
Well, bikes have the advantage of the leverage affect of the handlebars.
So, lets not ban the pedalgrab but ban the crankgrab.
The crankgrab is way easier to master and gives more stability then a pedalgrab.
As going for pedalgrabs in competitions, why not enter a rule that you must go to rubber from pedal in a sertent time (5seconds or so).
That would make a grab much harder and the line keeps it’s flow.
Another creative move is to pedal grab then side hop over the object from the PG. Harder than a regular side hop since you don’t get the benefit of tire compression. Looks cool too.
That would have to be a tiny object unless someone can muscle the entire unicycle over the object from that dead stop…
In your opinion, i happen to think a well flowed pedal to rubber on a 130cm ledge looks very slick.
Chase
Also PG look so cool when it’s done up onto a really tall and super skinny post or something.
This is actually a rule in BIU. There is also a time limit on lines, so riders can’t track stand for eternity until they get the oomph.
I don’t see why pedal grabs would be so bad…in a competition they go a lot by time to decide the winner right??? So a person going to tire has probably a much better time than someone going to pedal, so really it’s the person pedal grabbing’s own loss right?
I know about the “grabbing rule” in BIU, thats why I mention it here.
I kinda like the idea of a 5 second period to go to rubber from a pedalgrab.
Gonna work on my grabs to do them in 5 seconds (but I think they allready are less then 5 seconds)