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Balance required


Pete G

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How long did it take you guys to be able to balance long enough to actually ride anywhere reasonably?

I’ve been trying and still cannot get it really. Today i managed to do a 40ft sprint to the ground, mainly because i completely lost any kind of control and couldn’t stop it from speeding up! Lol

Feels a bit like i’m destined to do a solid 4 metres everywhere, gonna take an age to get to work this way! Hahahaha

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20 minutes ago, Pete G said:

How long did it take you guys to be able to balance long enough to actually ride anywhere reasonably?

I’ve been trying and still cannot get it really. Today i managed to do a 40ft sprint to the ground, mainly because i completely lost any kind of control and couldn’t stop it from speeding up! Lol

Feels a bit like i’m destined to do a solid 4 metres everywhere, gonna take an age to get to work this way! Hahahaha

I think you'll get a wide rangeof answers to this. There are so many variables too from previous board sports experience to risk appetite. 

I was really worried about learning. I used a combination of the knowledge from all learning videos and in particular @Kuji Rolls video which is very practical and full of useful tips.

For me i did about 2hrs in my appartment going up and down the length of it, using the hallway to pinball myself from side to side. The latter helped not have a learnt bias to one side of a wall (stationary mount) to another.

I then moved to my car park which after another 1hr or 2hr felt more natural with the wheel. Figure 8s and doing slow controlled circles were part of my training.

I'm at the part now where i want to go out in the real world. But I'm kinda scared since terrain and obstacles (people) will be involved. Thinking of using a leash to keep the wheel in some sort of control if i fall off.

To my point experience. I am comfortable cyxle and idling on the peddles. I also have a number of years snowboarding experience which i think has helped greatly with balance and body movement. Whilst it's a forward position on an ewheel the principle of your feet being bound to one another and needing to work in harmony with each other is what feels familiar.

Hope that helps.  

Check out @Kuji Rolls tutorial. 

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There's a huge range in how quickly people pick it up, don't feel bad.  It seems impossible until something 'clicks', then it seems to happen on its own.

My top two, fwiw:

1) Stand as upright as possible, fight the urge to crouch forward.

2) Don't look at the ground, look at the horizon. Keep your head up.

I found it tricky because in both cases you're fighting natural urges that work against you.

 

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There’s just a lot of variance on this subject.  I’ve seen a rare few people who are able to ride in under an hour with no prior experience.  It took me a week practicing every day after work for about an hour before I felt comfortable enough to start commuting on it, and I’d say that’s closer to average.  The thing you have to keep in mind is when you’re watching videos of someone riding an euc, you’re typically watching someone who has 100s if not 1000s of miles of experience under their belt. You are not going to get that in just a couple of hours.  Here I’ll break with the pack and recommend what I did when I was learning:  teach yourself to self start first.  It is the hardest (and most tedious) thing to learn; you’re basically doing mini-lunges over and over until you can transition from a stop to mostly balancing yourself on the wheel, but once you can do that, then you no longer have need of walls or other supports and cruising straight and turning get much easier because you’ve already taught yourself how to balance on the wheel.  Just keep in mind that even after you’re comfortable with the basics, there’s a big difference between riding in an empty parking lot or flat, grassy area, and riding on the street.  It took weeks of commuting on the wheel before I called myself an “experienced” rider!

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Im in the same boat as you, bought my bot on Wednesday, im falling off left and right at extremely short distances. My feet just dont seem to do much at all while learning and are very static, I know my feet should be working the wheel in keeping my balance with tiny and fine adjustments that should be natural when learnt, however, im learning so only practice will teach me this. 

Im with you all the way brother, and i just believe that practice is the answer, your body will eventually do things that you never knew would do, someone told me to lower the tyre pressure too to help.

Just hang in there! Im in the same boat too!

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Ride faster. As soon as you can ride 5 meters or more, you can ride indefinitely. Any instability then is just because you're too slow.

"Sit down" (bend knees, like there's a chair behind you and you begin to sit down) to brake, that always works.

Edited by meepmeepmayer
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The hilarious part today where i was actually moving reasonably straight, thinking awesome!! Finally got it!! Then realised i had absolutely no control, was going way faster than before and was running out of park rapidly! Lmao

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1 minute ago, meepmeepmayer said:

Ride faster. As soon as you can ride 5 meters or more, you can ride indefinitely. Any instability then is just because you're too slow.

"Sit down" (bend knees, like there's a chair behind you and you begin to sit down) to brake, that always works.

Sitting down but not quite? Like i’m gonna have a shit? Lmao!!

Thanks! i’ll give it a try tomorrow...

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There's a simple trick that allows you to find out what ANY kind of movement will do on a wheel: just do it while you are standing on the ground (no wheel involved). Are you losing balance into falling forwards (unless you compensate to not fall over)? You just accelerated. Would you fall backwards? You did just brake. Are you still in balance? You did nothing.

It's all about what your center of gravity does.

So see what happens when you start bending your knees like you're about to sit down in a chair behind you:)

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My observation is that telling people to imagine sitting on the handlebars of a bicycle helps them twist instead of tip to one side.

Typically, new riders will go a short distance while contorting their body to one side, as they try to keep the wheel balanced by tipping it. They quickly lift up one pedal, often going back and forth as they overcorrect.

An easier way is as follows.

1. Only tell them to imagine they on sitting on the handlebars.

2. Ride next to them on a bicycle or EUC.

The primary advantage to riding next to them is that you get them above the magic 5 mph, and once an EUC is above that speed most balance problems go away.

 

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Having someone to help you out makes a huge difference. Hold their hand so that if they fall over they can recover and keep trying without having to mount again. Slowly lessen the amount of hand support given to the point where you are still there and can grab it if they need to, but they shouldn't touch you. Next thing they know they're just rolling by themselves.

 

I had to learn it on an empty parking lot, without anything to hold on, so lesson one was mounting the damn thing, and I coulnd't even ride it for 1 meter. I lost a lot of sweat the first couple of days :D 

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15 mins on grass.. the most difficult part by far is getting over the fear factor.. you are scared to fall so you jump off at the very slightest wobble.. thats why i recommend to learn on grass and dont fear falling.. dont jump off just go for it dont go 2 kmph because then you will be forced to jump off, pick up a little amount of speed like jogging speed and just go for it.. you will 100% fall or jump off a few times but just dont worry about it, once you bypass that fear you will very quickly adapt and learn to keep yourself balanced as easily as walking

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6 hours ago, Pete G said:

How long did it take you guys to be able to balance long enough to actually ride anywhere reasonably?

I’ve been trying and still cannot get it really. Today i managed to do a 40ft sprint to the ground, mainly because i completely lost any kind of control and couldn’t stop it from speeding up! Lol

Feels a bit like i’m destined to do a solid 4 metres everywhere, gonna take an age to get to work this way! Hahahaha

you can stop it, you can set a speed limiter in the app.. best to set it to something like 16-18 in the app since anyone who is even remotely in shape can run off at that speed just until you get the hang of it then set it to max.. because tbh the 25 kmph hard limit is slow as it is :P

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3 hours ago, AlexEssex said:

But on the E+ my battery housing pad is twice the size as the pad on the other side, so if your foot is another inch out than the other one, how is balance maintained?

what? no euc ever made is not symmetrical unless you bought it with some weird mod someone did? your balance will always be screwed up if thats the case lol, put some padding on the opposite side to balance it out if it is

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6 hours ago, Rywokast said:

what? no euc ever made is not symmetrical unless you bought it with some weird mod someone did? your balance will always be screwed up if thats the case lol, put some padding on the opposite side to balance it out if it is

I will take the deeper pad off and look under, I suspect its a mod!

Edit: Just checked and the bottom of the pad had come away from the ninebot, probably when i fell off it. I have pushed it back in place now and both sides symmetrical now! Thanks for the heads up! :)

Edited by AlexEssex
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54 minutes ago, AlexEssex said:

I will take the deeper pad off and look under, I suspect its a mod!

Edit: Just checked and the bottom of the pad had come away from the ninebot, probably when i fell off it. I have pushed it back in place now and both sides symmetrical now! Thanks for the heads up! :)

haha thats awesome, glad its back to normal :P

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12 hours ago, Pete G said:

The hilarious part today where i was actually moving reasonably straight, thinking awesome!! Finally got it!! Then realised i had absolutely no control, was going way faster than before and was running out of park rapidly! Lmao

I've been there too. :roflmao:One-leg hops should cure that - slowing your EUC down when you need to stop I mean. You get off the wheel the same way you get on (but reverse order). The skill you could practice is mounting the wheel with one foot, scooting forward a couple of feet then stopping again. No need to even get your other foot up, just build the muscle memory on rocking your balance forward slightly to accelerate and then backward to decelerate. Do that 10 times, then do it 30 times. Next try and go a couple of meters, do that 10 times, then do it 30 times. Slowly extend your distance without picking up too much speed. Repetition builds that muscle memory.

U-Stride has a good demo @ the 9:00 min mark:

 

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It took me probably about an hour. That long mostly due to not "standing" up straight. One's back that is. As soon as I remembered the advise from others about an upright back, I suddenly was about to ride a short distance with a little speed. After a week or so my main problem for riding further is pain in the bottoms of my feet. So I ride until  the pain gets too much, then I walk the wheel until I'm ready to ride more. Also, my right foot is turned out about 35 degrees, an external tibial torsion, which makes right turns more difficult. That sucks! I'm still wobbly after a week. I've limited the top speed, of my new V8, to 10 mph as I am concerned about a fall faster, and the wheel wobbles easily, probably due to me, any faster. The best thing about the wheel so far is not the wheel itself yet how social other people are when I go by or stop. I've let others try my wheel. Almost all love it. I think around 30 people have tried it so far. Young to old! I've met so many of my neighbors, people walking, cyclists, vacationers, of all ages. The wheel is quiet yet very cool! Lastly, I must thank all of you, on this forum, for all of your very informative posts and answers to my questions and those for the many videos that I have spent days, in hours of viewing, spanning across many languages. Thanks all! Peace...Guy near Portland Maine.

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I rode for the first time 2 Sundays ago at this event. That's me at the beginning of the video in the orange helmet. By the end of the day I was pretty much able to ride in a straight line. There's no way I would've made such progress without @who_the providing instruction. He's such a good teacher.

 

 

 

23 hours ago, Pete G said:

Today i managed to do a 40ft sprint to the ground, mainly because i completely lost any kind of control and couldn’t stop it from speeding up! Lol

I had a similar wipeout and probably my worst one. I was too far over the pedals and couldn't bring my mass back. It seems like every ride I adjust my position a little bit. From this wipeout I learned to have my center of mass a little forward but to actively use my feet to control the wheel. I don't know if it's the right thing to do but it's what I'm doing now.

I also think it's a process of building up the right muscles. Yesterday I rode for a few miles non-stop, no falls and I just feel sore all over today. Hopefully the stamina will come and with it more stability.

 

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This may seem a bit counterintuitive but: if you feel an instability, try speeding up.  The gyroscopic effect of a spinning wheel is such that the acceleration will more often than not allow it to right itself.  This is the same reason why motorcycles sitting at a stoplight can remain upright if the motor is revved up and the clutch is disengaged.  Bike isn't moving, but the axle is generating enough gyroscopic effect to keep the bike upright.

I had difficulty learning because I was constantly rolling uber slowly.  It wasn't until I pushed past the fear of moving on an EUC and sped up quickly by a couple mph/kph that I found myself moving with a good amount of stability.

Edit: sorry, just saw meepmeep's post above!  He suggests the same thing.  Speed up a bit :)

Edited by leadfeathers
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6 hours ago, leadfeathers said:

I had difficulty learning because I was constantly rolling uber slowly.  It wasn't until I pushed past the fear of moving on an EUC and sped up quickly by a couple mph/kph that I found myself moving with a good amount of stability.

Certainly true, but not because of the gyroscopic effect of the turning wheel, but because twisting the wheel for balancing becomes less and less effective with decreasing speed (and has more or less zero effect at zero speed).

6 hours ago, leadfeathers said:

This is the same reason why motorcycles sitting at a stoplight can remain upright if the motor is revved up and the clutch is disengaged.  Bike isn't moving, but the axle is generating enough gyroscopic effect to keep the bike upright.

Did you ever try this yourself?

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2 minutes ago, Mono said:

Certainly true, but not because of the gyroscopic effect of the turning wheel

I would say it is precisely because of the gyroscopic effect. A higher angular momentum needs more input to be disturbed. So a faster spinning motor is more stable.

4 minutes ago, Mono said:

but because twisting the wheel for balancing becomes less and less effective with decreasing speed (and has more or less zero effect at zero speed).

Not sure what you mean. You don't need to twist at speed, and at lower speed is where twisting comes into play. So isn't it effective right at low speed?

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6 hours ago, leadfeathers said:

This is the same reason why motorcycles sitting at a stoplight can remain upright if the motor is revved up and the clutch is disengaged.  Bike isn't moving, but the axle is generating enough gyroscopic effect to keep the bike upright.

What motorcycle can do this?

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