In the case of bikes at least, the soft cushy ones really aren’t comfy for long rides. They put pressure where you don’t want it and shifting around to adjust how you’re sitting on them doesn’t do much.
Well I suppose that’s a good problem to have then, if you want to look at it that way.
Yes and no. My bed feels like a rock to someone who just sits down on it, but my back couldn’t take anything softer for a full night. And for a long day of writing or programming or whatever, I don’t want a soft cushy chair. It needs to be pretty firm.
What works for you now might be different than what works a year or two from now, but you’ll be the one who gets to figure it out.
When I got to that point (about a month ago), I was so happy to finally get past my 1.5 revolution-sticking point that I felt I had mastered backward riding. Oh well, it seems you are wiser than I was.
Anyway, now I can go about 100 yards backwards, just yesterday I did my first figure 8 in reverse, and today I did a few more, but weeks ago I noticed that forcing myelf to attempt even minor turns in reverse caused immediate, dramatic improvement in my ability to ride backwards in a straight line. Nowadays, riding uphill or downhill in reverse seems like it’s helping me. You might want to try that, with or without a bit of turning here or there. Uphill is easier. Be careful to control your speed on that larger wheel, as running out a UPD is harder in reverse.
Good point but it’s not the only thing. Try a pirouette on a bike. Or a jump mount / kickup mount / wraparound mount. Or jump over a bar of 1 meter high. Turning on the spot. Etc.
Add hopping up a flight of stairs to the list. Sure you can do it on a bike but if you’re going to go down that path you can ride backwards on a bike just as easily as you can hop up a set of stairs.
Riding Backwards - Important?
In a word, no. I got many years enjoyment out of riding a unicycle and never knew how to ride backwards. It all depends on where you want to go with your riding. For instance, if you want to do nothing but road riding is learning to ride backwards really that important?
Riding backwards involves getting a feel for where your balance point needs to be so you can recover quickly and stay stable. This is also true of riding forwards but freaks most people out because, well, it’s backwards.
Here are some tips I use to help teach backwards riding:
The trick is to think of it as half pedal revolutions and getting stable before going to the next half rev. So it is always: half rev, stop, half rev, stop…
Over time those stops will become unnoticable but you will always be stable.
Yeah, when I first managed to go backward in circles, I noticed I sometimes paused at various points, longer than I would have thought possible without losing my balance.
Learning to idle and ride backward will give you all-around stability for road riding, though of course you can have plenty of fun on a uni without ever learning these skills. Riding backward is indeed more of a workout than riding forward, at least in the beginning.
Oh- learning to ride backwards also seems to make you more ambidextrous on rollback mounts, though the way different skills fit together is highly variable from person to person. There are lots of official lists of skills and levels out there, but this thread has various riders discussing what they learned and when.
Dixit Mr “Totally doable” :). I’d like to see some of those. E.g., a pirouette? At most a rather watered-down version of what you see on any random freestyle competition, I’d think.
I respectfully disagree. More than once I’ve found myself on a trail and needing to ride backward a bit to get into a better position to go forward. Sure, you can hop the same distance but it’s nice to have both options.
You can come up with potential uses for it; that doesn’t make it “important.” Certainly if my interest were in MUni or trials, riding backwards would not be something I’d put anywhere near the top of the skills to work on. (Backwards comes up in street/flat quite a bit, but that’s different).
I have some questions about slanted roads, what do you guys call them again? Sorry I’m bad with technical terms. Basically normal roads but they slant to the side. I heard one of you guys call them something but I can’t recall what it was.
I’ve been having issues dealing with them, any good tips? Does it get a lot better with practice or will it be problematic? My only thought is hopping and going into the sidewalk, but then I have to deal with pedestrians.
My area has tons of them (as in those kind of street roads) and I have to struggle not to steer into parked cars. I have to curve my body to one side all the time. Not a super fun experience…
Update on the backwards riding:
So the church has either been closed or preoccupied the last few days, yesterday or so I got really impatient and went to a nearby park for about an hour or two and now I’m able to go back about 50ft or so. Can’t steer just yet but I can ride a bit more straight. Practice was cut short due to a group of rowdy teenagers, which got me nervous since I don’t live in a very good area. So after a few minutes I bailed and went home. Hopefully I get to practice more tomorrow…if the church’s gate is opened.
You’re probably talking about road crown. They put the crown into the road to help water drain off into the gutters. Most roads have some crown, and some are pretty severe.
The other kind of road slant is called camber which describes the cant or angle of the road in a corner. This is not very common on neighborhood streets.
Some tires make a difference, and tire pressure can influence how your uni will react.
THANK YOU!
Exact term and I did a google search, found someone with the exact issue with the same unicycle with the same tire too haha…
Seems like more pressure will help the problem, my guess is less influence by the road. Someone also recommended knobby tires but that’ll kill the purpose of the hookworm because I wanted to use it for the street. Also recommended more squarey kind of tire rather than the really round type like the hookworm… Well…I’ll read on. I can increase the pressure but I wanted to do some hops though…it would be harder to hop with high pressure. It’s already at 40 (max is 65). I was even thinking of dropping the psi for better spring action on the bunny hops for the curbs etc (not to mention lower pressure for the uneven ground). Guess we’ll see.
The above thread discussing road crown is really good, though not related to backward riding. When I first put on a 20" Hookworm, I was dancing the twist everywhere I went, and that gets old if you don’t alternate sides of the street. Once I pumped the tire up to its 110psi maximum, though, things straightened out a bit. The extreme responsiveness was good for learning to idle, but for hopping you need lower pressure, no?
