upL8N8 Posted April 5, 2023 Share Posted April 5, 2023 (edited) Quote my nice, new Sherman S that I could do absolutely nothing with because I did not know how to ride it Just have to say... wow did you choose a horrible wheel to learn on. lol. Since you just dropped $4k on a wheel, my suggestion would be to find a cheap used lightweight small wheel with lower pedals, like an inmotion V5 / V8/ V10, kingsong 14/16, or something similar. Preferably used and cheap ($300-$800) so you don't mind beating the crap out of it. Once you understand the basics, then hopping back on the Sherman S will be much easier, and you can sell the beginner wheel with zero / minimal losses. Maybe there's someone around your area in this group willing to offer a wheel for practice for free. If you can find a rider in your area who's willing to help you practice, then even better. As to learning... although you may know some of these since you're nearly a month in... Step 1: Stand up straight on the ground with feet 12" apart. Look forward Lock your knees Tighten your butt Your entire body should be straight and rigid. Lean forward from your ankles onto your toes (even standing on your toes) as if you're reaching for something on a high shelf. Do not bend at the waist or bend your knees. This is the position you're trying to get to on the wheel for maximum stability. It's the best stance to start with as a beginner. It will stabilize you. Make sure you're practicing on a flat smooth surface where you don't need to bend your knees to soak up bumps. Once you've learned to balance and stay upright on the wheel, THEN you can learn to bend your knees to soak up bumps and turn. Standing on the ground and leaning forward puts your body in an imbalanced state, requiring more work to keep from falling over. Leaning forward on a wheel leads to the wheel accelerating, pushing your body back in an attempt to make it vertical, reducing the work your body needs to do to stay upright, and creating balance. Step 2: Learn to brake. Being confident in your ability to brake is important when you get off the wall. if you don't know how to stop when you're off the wall rolling around a parking lot, there will be moments where you lose control and either start heading towards an obstruction or accelerate more than you're comfortable with. You can either panic every time this happens, or you can just come to a stop and reset. To learn, you want to start with aggressive pendulums, preferably between two walls, fences, poles where you can hold on to both sides. I did this, carefully, in a hallway at home. Stand up straight on the wheel. Lean forward hard at the ankles and push the wheel back behind you so it causes it to rubber band and accelerate forward. As it accelerates, lean back and let the wheel roll under and in front of your body. As it's passing under you, bend your knees and drop your butt as if you're sitting down in a chair. That'll cause the wheel to brake hard. Be confident and aggressive in your movements. As the wheel slows down, but before it comes to a complete stop, begin to straighten up and the wheel will reverse direction and start penduluming back. Lean forward hard to restart the process. Do that multiple times. Like 10 minutes. Next.... do the same thing, only this this time, as the wheel comes to a stop and you straighten up, step off the wheel (back and to the side) with your non-dominant foot. You're learning to come to an IRL stop on the wheel. Step back on the wheel, and do it again. (Also practice for mounting) Step 3: Practice half moons and one leg push offs to build strength and get a feel for the wheel. Half Moons: Put your dominant foot on the pedal. Bend your dominant knee so your shin is positioned a bit more forward than half way between front and back of the wheel, with it leaning a bit past vertical. Push down on your foot and lock the inside of your leg against the wheel. It should feel tight, like the inside of your leg is attached to the wheel. The wheel should be very close to vertical, maybe tilted a bit in. Your other leg should be to the side of the pedal with a little bit of space. To move the wheel in a half moon shape, it may seem like you need to manhandle the wheel forward and back, using your leg / hips / waist, but you'll quickly figure out that you can't do that. It would take a ridiculous amount of body power to move a 100 lb wheel like that, or even a 40 lb wheel. Instead, you want to use the position of your leg and pressure on your toe to engage the motor to move the wheel in a half moon forward, and then you want to switch pressure to your heel to engage the motor to half moon back. The whole time, that wheel should be locked to your leg. You should eventually practice this with both legs, but it's not essential starting out. You'll want to do this drill every day until it starts to feel natural. Once you get decent at it, you'll be able to spin like a top backwards or forwards with full control of the wheel with the motor doing most of the work. The only issue being how dizzy it'll make ya. You don't need to perfect this to move on to other steps. One Leg push offs... or skateboarding: Lock your dominant foot / leg on the wheel per the half moons. Your body position should be nearly over the center of the wheel, with your non-dominant leg extending out about 45 degrees back and to the side of the pedal. Your goal is to get the wheel to roll forward, giving you enough balance to lift your non-dominant leg onto the pedal. (You won't be mounting yet) To do that, you push off / hop forward with your non dominant leg, while pushing on your dominant foot with more weight towards the toe, while straightening that leg up. Pushing off gets the wheel rolling. The weight on your toe is to get the wheel to start accelerating forward as you're lifting your non-dominant foot up. (If you don't have weight on your toe or your body isn't centered over the wheel, the wheel will resist your push off and forward movement and it'll just want to fall over) Straightening your leg helps lift your non-dominant leg into the air to assist with mounting.. or in this case hopping forward. It's like walking up stairs. Your dominant foot is on the first stair of a stairway. To walk up, you straighten your dominant leg and lift the other leg up to the next step. You'll start with small hops forward and increase the size of the hops as you feel comfortable. Eventually, you may even be able to ride a bit one legged. Step 4: GET OFF THE WALL! GET OFF THE WALL! GET OFF THE WALL! The wall not only isn't helping you, it's sabotaging you. You're either constantly looking towards it for safety, knocking you off balance, or you're tilting your body towards it in preparation for losing your balance, thus knocking you off balance! It's a self fulfilling prophecy. The wall is meant to give you a basic understanding of how the wheel operates. Basic balance. How to accelerate. How to brake. You should have been off of it on day 1 or 2. People here will say "people learn at their own speed"... well I'll say it right now... some people are just using bad learning techniques... starting with hanging on a wall or fence for far too long. If you do 20 pushups in a row for 100 days straight. Know how many pushups your body can do in a row after the 100 days? 20. If you don't push your limits, your limits will never improve. Doing the same thing day in and day out, using the wall as a crutch is sabotaging your progression. Free mounting the wheel is definitely difficult at first, so It may be helpful to use the wall to mount the wheel while learning to ride it, but once on the wheel, turn away from the wall and push off and ride around a big empty parking lot. Maybe you're worried about going faster and falling off, but 5-10 mph isn't that fast. Get into that straight body, locked knees, tight butt position, and lean forward from the ankles. Eyes AND attention towards where you want to go. If you want to make a gentle turn, all you have to do is look where you want to go, and your body will naturally follow without you even trying. Don't try to force the turn... yet. After about 20-30 feet of riding in a straight line, lean back, (sit back if you need more braking power), and as the wheel slows down step down with your non-dominant foot. Get used to your dominant foot / leg being a permanent fixture attached to the wheel. (Hint... it feels natural to stop and step off because the act of stepping off to the back and side of the wheel puts the weight into your heels, causing the wheel to slow down rapidly. When starting off, it may feel a bit easier to step off, then as your foot hits the pavement, half moon the wheel around towards your non dominant side.) Major Beginner Hiccup: The side leans / veers / fall overs... When starting out, you will undoubtedly veer off to the side, or the wheel will lean / fall over to one side that you didn't intend. This often happens when learning to mount, and is the big reason learning to mount is so difficult. You will undoubtedly try to correct these inadvertent leans by bending your upper body to the opposite side and gyrating your hips...maybe flailing your arms. This not only won't help at all, it'll guarantee that the wheel (and possibly you) will fall over. The science is that when you bend your upper body to the side, you push down on the other side's hip and leg; the side that the wheel is already leaning towards. That makes the lean worse, forcing the wheel over. (If the wheel is leaning right, and you bend your upper body left to correct, it causes your right hip and leg to push down, causing the wheel to lean even further to the right, to the point that it can't be recovered.) Seems counterintuitive, right? Keep your body centered over the top of the wheel at all times and do not bend at the waist. Not forward. Not back. Not to the sides. Turning the wheel is about twisting your upper body and slight bending of the knees. It isn't about leaning at the waist... at least not for beginners. There are two reasons the wheel leans uncontrollably like that when you're starting out: You're going too slow, like walking speed or less, and the wheel doesn't have enough centrifugal force to stay upright. While 5-8 mph may seem fast at first, it's not that fast, and the gyroscopic effect will help the wheel balance. You're inadvertently bending a leg and/or transferring your body weight to one side of the wheel or the other. If you're moving fairly slow and you bend the right leg, it puts your weight on the left leg and causes the wheel to leans/turn to the left, and vice versa. (Fast speed turns are different) How do you correct when this happens? Turn your head and twist your body into the direction of the turn, while maintaining a slight forward lean at the ankles to keep the motor engaged. (You do not want to come to a stop in the middle of a sharp turn) Trust me, you can spin in a circle with a 2-3 foot diameter fairly easily without falling over. If you turn into a sharp wheel lean, you may be worried you'll fall over. You won't unless you panic. You'll probably notice the leg on the outside of the turn is bent, and the inside leg is straight. Once you feel like you're in control of the wheel during the turn, push down on your outside leg and begin twisting your body and head back to the direction you want to go... which is likely in a straight line somewhere. As you come out of the turn, tighten up your body, lock those knees, tighten that butt, and lean forward at the ankles, looking in the direction you want to go. No bending the waist. No bending the knees. No gyrating the hips. Be like the picture: An inadvertent wheel lean to one side is just a turn you didn't mean to do... the best way to handle it is to pretend you actually meant to turn and flow with the wheel until it's under control (maybe a split second, maybe 2-3 seconds). Here's a good video showing how to turn. Notice how his outside leg is bent slightly and he's twisting his body, but otherwise not bending at the waist? When you inadvertently, you're almost certainly in the same position. Instead of freaking out, just pretend you meant to do it. As you learn to turn and to control your turns, you'll have far less trouble dealing with inadvertent wheel tilt, and eventually you'll develop enough control where it'll happen far less often. ______________________ I won't go too much into free-mounting. Basically, it's like the One leg pushoff, except instead of hopping forward, you bring that non-dominant foot onto the pedal. It helps to start by keeping the wheel tilted just slightly to the inside when pushing off, because it'll move to vertical as you straighten up. Try not to stomp on the pedal with your non-dominant foot (difficult at first), instead really using the straightening motion of your dominant leg to lift your non-dominant gently onto the pedal. Definitely keep pressure on that dominant toe so the motor engages and begins to accelerate your forward... thus keeping the wheel from just falling over. Your dominant leg is maintaining most of the wheel control during this process. ______________________ Hope that helps GET OFF THE WALL! Edited May 30, 2023 by RagingGrandpa (split from previous thread) 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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