A couple of us from the Santa Barbara Muni club decided to try and learn some level 10 freestyle skills (a long term project, to be sure) and while we could grasp how coasting etc. could be possible with a couple decades of practice, we could get nowhere trying to sideride. How do you work into this trick?
Thanks,
JL
Try this
Stand by your uni. With your good foot on the oppisite pedal. Meaing you’ll be to the side of your uni like side ride. Have the pedal be set foward, and push. Ok you probably will get nowhere. That happened for me. Well, rigth when you push down to get the pedal all the way down, you have to come up to the seat and try any way to rest any weight on the seat as possible. The more the better. Hold the seat in the middle and at the front, and try to place your weight towards the back of the seat. Ok now when you push, get the weight over the seat best you can, and once you push you ahve to let the pedal come around, this poses a problem with all that weight on your pedal, then push down on the seat to hold yourself up. Once you get your frist rotation things start going alittle easier. With that free leg a suggest holding out and over the tire alittle. This trick should be naturally done in a circle. Keep fooling around with you weight on the seat, and leg possition. Remember KEEP LIGHT ON THE PEDAL, LET IT COME AROUND. Don’t force it too much, try to be smooth. That’s all i can help you with.
In my experience the sideride takes ages to learn but once you learn it goes from feeling completely impossible to not that hard, perhaps similar to gliding or seat drag but easier than coasting.
Maybe you’ll get it a lot quicker but for me it took a few months of fairly solid practice to get it. For me the main thing was keeping my arms locked, not bent.
Although it’s likely easiest on a freestyle uni I don’t personally find it harder or easier on a 24" MUni or a 20" trials uni.
Kris
Thanks for the tips, boys. Kris, you’re the only person I’ve ever seen do this trick in person, but I’d only been riding a month when we rode that time in Venice so I don’t remember much.
Ayal and I actually broke out the total list of freestyle tricks and we could do most of them (very sloppy form) up to about level 8 (minus all the fancy mounts) since they’re basically just refinements of backward riding, one-foot, WWing and seat out moves, which we’re okay on. But things get wicked hard around level 8/9. Backward riding, seat out front, felt very strange, but doable after a bit. One-foot backward riding is going to take a little work, but also felt doable, though scary.
But how the hell do you do one-foot, seat out front riding? We couldn’t even start that one.
Now that we’ve got tips on side riding, perhaps we can make some headway on that trick, but the one-foot seat out front trick stumped us entirely.
JL
plese tell me about your group.
i live i ojai and am 13 and afidly into unicycling.
i hame school and go up there 1 time a week and would like to meet you guys
Err, I thought backwards with seat in front was level 6. [See here ] This trick is a lot easier if you hold the seat in close so that it is touching your body. Sometimes crouching a little helps. To do bwd SIF by the book you should hold the seat out away from your body, which is a bit harder.
Riding one foot SIF is kind of like doing stomach on seat but one footed. Get into stomach on seat riding then put one foot up on the crown and start one-footin’ it.
Slight change of topic: can anyone describe side saddle riding to me? I recently thought of a trick which seems related to, but slightly different to what I think is side saddle. My trick (which I can’t do yet 
starts as crown idle then goes into riding in a circle in that position. Does this trick have a name?
+()|>-
If you want to ride with the guys at Santa Barbara, just get a hold of Matt at SBUNI.ORG. They ride 3-4 times a week. I drive up from LA on weekends to MUni with the group. The trails are very rocky and steep but you’ll catch on fast since all kids seem to.
I mentioned backward seat in front not to insinuate this was a level 8 trick (which it’s not) but that compared to most of the other tricks up to Level 8 (which are mainly variations of WWing, 1 foot riding etc.), at first this trick felt totally bizarre and different, as did 1 foot backward riding. Keep in mind that we are muni riders just fiddling with freestyle stuff, and don’t know squat about it–which is half the fun. It’s a blast to see what you can do with that list. You come to appreciate how hard and how much work it takes to really get any polish on these freestyle tricks, as opposed to just slopping through them, which is all we can do.
If I understand correctly, 1 foot seat in front riding is basically a stomach-on-seat trick, and that makes sense. We were trying it just holding the seat with one hand, like other seat out front tricks, as opposed to getting all our weight over the seat on our gut. I still believe someone could–and probably has–ridden 1 foot seat out front without their stomach on the seat, but it wasn’t Eyal or me, that’s for sure.
JL
im good with muni i do tons of trials
Re: Side Riding
On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 12:20:39 -0500, “unifreak7” wrote:
>There’s a sideride clip here. If that’s any help.
>http://gallery.unicyclist.com/Hazard
There’s another one here (near the bottom):
“The more you think, the less you have to do. - Leo Vandewoestijne”
Actually to do one-footed seat in front on the skill levels, you have to ride with neither the seat nor your arms against your body. I would recommend learning it with the seat against your body at first, then when you get good at that, pull the seat away and go for it. To get into it ride fairly quickly with the seat in front and putting as much of your weight as you can on the seat through your arms. Then take a foot off and place it on the fork and transfer some of your weight through it. You should also lean over the unicycle at first so that more of your weight is on the seat. Eventually, try moving the seat away from your body. I find this a lot harder and am still not very good at it. I haven’t been practicing it lately because I think it’s rather stressful on my weak rim. I think seat in front one-footed might also be a good preperatory exercise for side ride, although I don’t know since I can’t side ride at all.
When trying side ride at first, what angle should the pedal be set at?