Not totally true. If you have the right tire you can grip the obstacle and sorta climb up, like in a rolling hop, but just not as much.
David
I have a vid of Thomas Remvik Assen doing a 53" side hop on a mod and also one of a guy form the UK doing a bike equivalent of rolling hop onto a British red pillar post box, which is never ever going to be done a unicycle.
Physically speaking…
With the seat in, a rolling hop has the capacity for greater altitude.
with the seat out, rolling hops have greater potential.
In a side hop, the rider is able to place the wheel where s/he prefers to hop from, and making it possibe to focus all energy solely on the hop. If the seat is out, they can then bend their knees, and lift the unicycle as to clear an obstacle.
in a rolling hop, some effort is taken away from the hop in order to ride, and time the hop accordingly. However, with the seat in, the rider can bend at their hips/back, extending the wheel in front of them. The effect is similar to bending the knees with the seat out.
Good work sockmonster, exactly what I’ve been saying. You can extend your wheel forward in a rolling hop and let your momentum carry you up onto the obstacle.
As a side note, measuring hops without carrying a yardstick around is really a crapshoot, so I noticed the top of the decal on my KH Muni is at 20" and can gauge pretty accurately from there. On my trials rig I can just gauge it off the 20" tire.
Measuring like this is helpful sometimes, though at other times you might try and break your old record if you don’t know the exact heigth, which may otherwise psyche you out.
JL
just to throw in a random angle on this…i do my sidehops seat in (my SiF hops feel really uncontrolled) and today i managed to clear 65cm, although i know eventually i will have to turn to SiF to get higher, does anyone know what the highest seat in sidehop is? i’d be interested to know how far it has been taken. i do prefer rolling hops, but my sidehops are now dead even with my rolling hops…
Mike Middleton has landed a seat in sidehop artound 24", but it was a long time ago. Eric (Mango) seems able to do over 2’ seat in.
As for SIF rolling hops, I find that my seat holding arm is seriously jerked during the hop, but I seem to have more potential for pike and lift when I’m seat out rolling hopping. I’ve only spent about an hour of my entire riding carreer practicing these moves, yet I’ve landed SIF rolling hops of about 26", while my straight rolliung hop record is about 32.5". Ryan Atkins did a 32+" rolling hop SIF onto a picnic table at CMW.
Vivalgro: That’s exactly how I measure my hops when I don’t have a measuring tape and desperately want to know the height. My seat clamp is about 26". My seat is about 35 or 36". My seatpost has a scratch on it that’s about 30". These are helpful but aren’t ver accurate at all.
There you go Joe, perhaps you have the NEW WORLD RECORD in seat in side hops? 65cm = over 2ft
lol yea maybe pete…
Bike trials riders are WAY ahead of unicyclists for sidehops and it will likely remain that way due to the much better mechanical advantage they have (although it would be great to prove this wrong…).
However, one sole consolation is that the pioneering biketrials rider Ot Pi held the world biketrials sidehop record for a long time, at 90cm. This stood officially (although was broken unofficially long before) until the late 1990’s. At least we have caught up to that, anyway.
Kris Holm.
Maybe you guys are hitting that same wall…maybe theres some undiscovered technique that will give us those huge hieghts. I don’t think we’ll catch up, but it’s nice to see we’ve made so much progress in, what, 5 years?