hey there. im trying to learn to ride w/ my seat in front. but i cant! ahh. i cant think of a good way to learn. i can ride easily standin up and get the seat out easy but the secound i do i smack into the pavement. i have tried doing it while holding onto a wall/rail. but i really cant get the hang of it. i think i put to much pressure on the pedals. even holding onto a wall or person i cant seem to go far even holding the seat as tight as i can i just fall side to side when i pedal. also where is the best place to hold the saddle?
thanks
-jess-
Yeah, I’m in the boat with ya.
I don’t have any advice. But cheer up, I know exactly how you feel. I finally stopped trying because I kept hurting myself.
Anybody have any advice?
I hold the seat real close to me usally againest my body. I do that when I hop anyway.
Seat Out
I just started riding seat out 2 days ago… I found using both hands on the seat, elbows tucked in, I can sometimes go about 5 or 6 feet before falling… I’ve actually found I can jump seat out better than I can ride 
I think it just takes lotsa practice… like learnin to ride the thing again
Practise riding with nice smooth even pedal strokes. Start with the seat against your body and then gradually move it further and further away from your body. Then you can try letting go and seat dragging which is a very cool trick. Its worth practising heaps of seat for this purpose.
I too have just started, and can also jump better than I can ride. Part of my difficulty is because my KH saddle is too wide, and since the uni is set up for my dad (it’s his) the seat is a little too high. Today, I accomplished somewhat of a breakthrough, when Iwas actually able to ride for a few pedal strokes. I was able to do this because I kept an extremely hard grip on the saddle, using my elbows/forearms to keep it straight. this seems to help a lot, and really encreased my control.
I just learned to ride backwards with the seat out, I think I might be able to help.
I hold the seat with my left hand, but that’s just a personal preference. Once I get the seat out, I lock my arm. Just as stiff as a board. This way, the unicycle still has the same stability as it does when you’re sitting on it.
Then, which I think is your problem, einrad, keep equal pressure on both pedals. As long as you do that, you have complete control over the wheel.
Other than that, you just need to find the balance envelope. If you fall forewards, try keeping your weight back more, or pedaling a little faster. If you fall backwards, get your weight forewards, or focus on keeping the wheel underneath you.
As for falling to the side, once you start to lose your balance, shift your weight, and turn into it. Just keep your weight over the wheel.
Re: seat out probs
Can you ride stomach on seat? If not, then you really should start at that skill first, following the same sequence as below.
Next. Hold onto a post or a wall while sitting on your uni. Stand up and pull the seat out. Keep the seat pressed against your legs for stability. Try to ride off. Just standing there at first is a start, so don’t feel like you are not learning anything by just holding onto the wall and getting a feeling for having the seat out. Ride off by slowly leaning away from your support until you feel the wheel starting to move, then pedal away. At first you may only get a half rev or one rev if you are lucky.
Once you can ride, practice getting back onto the seat, which is easier than getting the seat out while riding. Then practice riding and pulling the seat out once you can go 20-30 yards seat out.
Seat on stomach hurts my lower ribs and concave chest.
Lol. seat on stomach.
Anyways, i suggest don’t bother learning stomach on seat because it doesn’t really help with seat out anyway. Plus it only has one use - getting into hand wheel walk stomach on seat.
Yes and that’s barely an advantage as it doesn’t help much.
But think of the disadvantages.
It’s the crappest trick ever.
It looks really pathetic.
It’s a great way to get laughed at.
If I saw anyone doing it I WOULD laugh at them, and they would deszerve it.
On, no, there are plenty of other crappy tricks.
I suggest learning it if only for the fact that it is required for level 3, and seat out doesn’t come along until level 4
Maybe the first skill in unicycling should be to put your fragile psyche aside and keep your eye on the goal: learn to ride under any condition.
The opinion that stomach on seat is practically useless is fine for a single person, but why spread this thinking as dogma?
Stomach on seat is an intermediate skill to seat out skills, if you are wasting time trying to learn seat out, suck it up and go to school on a lesser, admitidly funny looking skill.
Although the basics of stomach on seat are ‘easier’ than full seat out. from my experience I can go further with seat out, I can turn much better, so overall, for me stomach on seat is a challenge once you advance past just getting it.
Anyway, I’m pretty used to people laughing at me by now: bystanders constantly see me trying some skill over and over again and not getting it, and they are just thinking ‘what the hell is he doing’.
Ride for youself, for your own reasons.
My brother had some of his hardcore moutain bike friends over and they were most impressed with stomach on seat. Even more then one footing, backwards, wheelwalking, 180’s, 270’s, no footers, pedal/crank grabs, 2’ hops and 4’ drops. So what does that tell you.
David
That they know nothing about unicycling and they have no understanding of what looks cool? 
I guess I at least know your criteria for choosing how you progress in this sport.
There are probably hundreds of un-cool things even you have to do to actually get to something cool. If you can agree that seat out is cool, what is the reasoning for not learning that skill in any way you can? If you do seat out, is it cool to ride around with the seat stuck half way up you rear or tender areas to maintain balance, or is it only cool if you can extend the seat away from your body? By how far? How many fingers should hold the seat? Is it cool to place any weight on the seat as you ride around? Is it only cool when you don’t need to use any hands at all? Is it only cool when you can go around in a circle?
IMHO, what is cool is working your ass off to learn a skill you want to learn. Don’t be afraid to look like a fool on your way to looking cool.
I also learn tricks that I think will help my overall control on a unicycle.
I just think that stomach on seat is stupid, looks really poor and has no real benefit for my unicycling ability. Seat out front isn’t that hard, I rode like 20m on my second attempt.
I don’t mind if people need it to get to seat out front riding, just as long as once they can ride seat out front they never ride stomach on seat again.
I can only get the seat out back because it’s too wide and knocks me off balance coming through. I can ride out in back for a while but apparently people think it’s cooler if I sit with the tip of the seat in my butt. It’s easier to do and my neighbor says “Wow, that’s pretty cool.”
I would put stomach on seat in a separate class of tricks which I would call ‘extreme positions’. It might be the easiest of them, I know it wasn’t that hard for me to pick it up really, but the skill levels requires getting into and out of the skill. It is obviously easier to learn to pull the seat out and immediately rest your stomach on the seat than it is to support all your weight on the pedals as in seat out. Learning the entire level three skill of stomach riding is simply a stepping stone to learning the level four skill and beyond. And remember, some cyclists might not make it that far.
Beyond stomach on seat there is another skill which I would say is a combination of seat out and the extreme (low riding) stomach skill: chin on seat. However dumb or stupid stomach riding is, chin on seat riding actually looks ‘extreme’. The no hands version, or as I saw in NAUCC 2002 ‘chin on seat backward’. There is also the skill of touching the floor (one hand or both, or seat out), so stomach riding is the easiest of the low center of gravity skills. You can also ride seat out (front or back) in a crouched down position. I used to be able to rest my arse on my heals, but my knees are not too happy nowadays.
So I would look at the skills in a continuum from easy to extreme. We should all strive to try the extreme and perfect the easy. Where we end up is probably a matter of innate talent, dedication and luck.
My basic belief is that every skill adds to every other. There is never waste of effort in unicycling. Some methods of learning are slower than others, less efficient maybe, but always helpful. Sometimes taking a break is helpful. Boring, but helpful.
Ride and try to find something new, that is all there is.
They should take stomach on seat out of the skill levels at least though, and make a link for seat out front that suggests for learning seat out front you may want to try stomach on seat to give you a feel for it.
That way those learning seat out frontare given the stepping stone to seat out front that is currently a level 3 skill, and I won’t be nagging about how such a lame trick is in the skill levels… everybody wins.