17 ms·
Learning how to ride a bike
- alex_young 5y agoTraining wheels were known to be garbage in the 80s, likely earlier. Nothing beats learning on a bike with pedals, once you learn to balance you can then start propelling yourself.
- flakiness 5y agoI don't think anyone read this but anyway: After reading this, I resumed my 4yo daughter's stalled bike practice. This time we focused on pedaling, as advised in a thread. And she got able to ride after less than an hour! So thanks HN. You changed my daughter's like ... maybe in a small way? but still.
- pmdulaney 5y agoYes, this is a post about learning how to ride a bike -- not learning how to ride a bike as a metaphor for something else.
- polyterative 5y agoHonestly the whole idea of training wheels always seemed wrong to me
- LAC-Tech 5y agoit worked for me. one day it was decided I was too old to keep using training wheels (when I was 4 or 5, can't remember), and they got taken off. I remember it being easy.
- zadwang 5y agoI learned how to ride a bike when a young kid sticking one leg inside the triangle frame of the large adult bike. Kind of dangerous now looking back but I still remember the liberating feeling of more mobility.
- tosh 5y agoAlan Kay on learning: https://youtube.com/watch?v=50L44hEtVos https://youtube.com/watch?v=50L44hEtVos
- 123pie123 5y agoHaving had the pleasure in training three kids on how to ride a bike, forget training wheels, or taking the pedals off! find a reasonable long grass hill - not to too steep, but steep enough to allow a kid to go down the hill riding the bike with out pedalling. and then goto the top of the hill and let them go down the hill on the bike. Once they master the balancing part of going down, they seem to pick up the art of turning the pedals at the end of the hill to keep going (if not, explain what to do) advantages: doesn't hurt when they fall off, gets them used to rough terrain. it becomes fun once they start to master the balancing bit
- hourislate 5y agoThey have to understand to keep pedaling and not to stop while you push them to get up to speed where it requires a lot less balance. The hill method you mention offers the same affect. It's amazing that it only takes a try or two and they are set.
- eru 5y agoWhat were the ages of your students?
- 123pie123 5y agoabout three to five yo
- nodamage 5y agoThis is how I taught myself to ride a bike when I was a kid. I eventually figured out (through trial and error) the actual technique to maintaining balance: if you feel yourself falling to the left, turn the handlebars slightly to the left, and if you feel yourself falling to the right, turn the handlebars slightly to the right. I suppose kids these days learn this intuitively with balance bikes but it was a real lightbulb moment for me and I suspect I would have learned much more quickly if someone had explained it that way.
- bestham 5y agoMy favorite metohod on how to learn kids to ride a bike is the "wibble-wobble method"[1] by Douglas Engelbart, where you instruct the kid to keep alternating between turning gently left and right on order to get the balance (as you would to if you wanted to balance stationery) and the feedback mechanism between tilting, steering and then un-tilting established. It is incredible how quickly most "get" the relationship. [1]: https://collectiveiq.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/how-doug-engelbart-taught-kids-to-ride-a-bike-without-training-wheels/ https://collectiveiq.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/how-doug-engel...
- mmmBacon 5y agoStarted all 3 of my kids on a balance bike at age 2. All my kids could ride a regular bike by the time they were 3. It occurred to me that they will never remember not knowing how to ride a bike. Also it’s amazing to me how quickly they all learned. Conversely, I couldn’t ride a bike without training wheels until I was maybe 7 or 8. OT, the longer I work in technology the more amazed I am at the capability of biological systems.
- eru 5y agoBiological systems can be quite capable, but they can also be remarkably badly 'designed'. They are stuck in many local optima. There's a nerve that goes up and down your neck (and the much longer neck of the giraffe), just because evolution hasn't found a way to remove its loop around your collarbone. Or: the nerves and blood vessels in your eyeball are in _front_ of the light sensors and obscure our vision. Doesn't make any sense, but there doesn't seem to be a gradual [0] way to fix that. [0] Gradual in 'gene' space, that is.
- avip 5y agoThis is how writing should be done. First - you throw out your main idea. Then - you stop, put a period, and hit publish. If only all web content was like this post!
- hervature 5y agoCycling, along with swimming, are the two activities I give that exemplifies how poor people are at explaining what they are doing. For cycling, most people will adamantly claim that to turn left, you first turn the handle bars to the left. When they show me on a bike, they are surprised that they never noticed that they turn the handlebars right first. The funny part is, even people who know this and know it is called "countersteering" proceed to explain it in such a way that is actually less insightful than just telling someone to turn left. Almost no one mentions that the goal of a turn is to get the correct lean to a bike. With swimming, I did 7 years of lessons and never enjoyed swimming. My legs always got fatigued in a couple of minutes and could not go as fast as others. It did not matter how many good swimmers or instructors I told this to. It was not until a fellow engineer at university told me that your arms are what propel you forward and your legs simply keep you afloat. Such a simple statement did more than all those years of lessons. It is amusing to think about that, even with the best intentions, sometimes being taught something is the worst thing that can happen for you to actually learn it.
- stefan_ 5y agoTelling someone how to steer a bike is useless and plain unnecessary. You teach them to balance and they will naturally counter-steer. There is no theory class.
- mostertoaster 5y agoWhen I was a kid I had training wheels. It was terrible, it took me forever to learn how to ride because I was focused on turning and pedaling. My kids on their balance bikes just learned how to propel themselves forward by pushing off then balancing as long as they could. Learning the easy part of propel yourself forward with pedals was easy then.
- eru 5y agoLearning how to ride a unicycle is somewhat similar, though the opposite: Here hard part is the back-front balancing, because it is intimately mixed up with pedaling for propulsion. If you already know how to ride a bi-cycle, then the left-right balancing is so easy, it's essentially free.
- ybroze 5y agoThere's a general principle that's at work here for certain concepts: it's often a good idea to teach children technology skills in terms of the technology's historical development. Riding a bicycle is certainly one; the earliest velocipedes had no pedals at all, and are essentially the "balance bikes" mentioned here. Mathematics and computer science is another one -- no matter how elegant it can feel to construct a world from teaching in first principles first, the historical pedagogy is much more intuitive and effective, IMO.
- eru 5y agoWhat you suggest works, but it's also somewhat of a false dilemma. For eg math you don't have to pick between historical development or axiomatic approaches, you can make up a new order of presentation from scratch. Take category theory. The historical approach requires lots of advanced maths [0], and the purely axiomatic approach is basically way to abstract for anyone to get any intuition of why this is useful. By comparison, it's relatively easy to teach someone some basic programming, and then go more abstract from there. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_category_theory_and_related_mathematics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_category_theory_an...
- hereforphone 5y agoI taught a woman to ride a bike once. I was an adult, she was an adult. She mentioned she wanted to learn so I took her to a park and taught her. It didn't take very long. When she finally was able to start peddling around in a circle without help she was laughing so much she looked hysterical. People in the park were staring. I'll remember that fondly for a long time.
- nickkell 5y agoThat’s a lovely story! Bicycles are one of the greatest devices ever invented. A relatively simple machine that enables humans to efficiently propel themselves much further and faster than they’d otherwise be able to. Everyone deserves to ride one!
- ksp41865 5y agoI wrote an article about how I approached it for my 5 years old. https://kunalspathak.github.io/2020-07-18-Teaching-biking-lessons/ https://kunalspathak.github.io/2020-07-18-Teaching-biking-le...
- robga 5y agoI taught my kid how to ride using training wheels 4 years ago. She rode 4 times in 4 weeks using 2 training wheels. 1 hour on 1 wheel the next week. The next weekend within 20 minutes of no wheel she was fine and cycled perfectly since. Truth be told I didn’t teach her any more than encourage her. I was sceptical of the balance bike method. She didn’t need it. I remain highly skeptical that it offers any advantage whatsoever. Away from kids, when I watch adult riders, a high proportion (30%+) have the seat far too low, maybe 3-5 inches too low. If you can flat foot sit, add 2 inches.
- exhilaration 5y agoHow old was your kid? My daughter was riding a normal bike without training wheels at 3 years 11 months thanks to learning on a balance bike. She's the youngest and had the benefit of watching her older siblings so YMMV. Reading this thread you'll see a lot of the balance bike proponents saying the same thing: that their kids were riding normal bikes by age 3.
- robga 5y agoI can’t actually recall, history blurs. Somewhere 3.5-4.5. I did try her on a balance bike. She wasn’t interested and just ran everywhere. Within 2-3 months of hopping on a pedal bike she had no training wheels. I don’t doubt your or other commenters experience at all. I am just adding my data point. It feels like ‘proponents’ claim some proven superior method. I wonder if there are any blind studies that actually prove the notion? How large is the effect?
- eru 5y ago> Away from kids, when I watch adult riders, a high proportion (30%+) have the seat far too low, maybe 3-5 inches too low. If you can flat foot sit, add 2 inches. That's still way too low. If you want good bio-mechanics, try putting your seat so high that you can comfortably reach the pedal with the balls of your feet. Though if you want to get a good leg workout, having your seat way too low might be beneficial?
- mping 5y agoMy own experience is the opposite. My son learned to use a balance bike since 2 years old, a couple of weeks before his 3rd birthday we got a regular bike, on the same night we ran alongside him riding his bike grabbing his jacket in case he fell. He started riding the same night. This is obviously not a competition, but the faster your kid learns the more fun they will have. If you are ok with training wheels that's fine too.
- billsmithaustin 5y agoNo doubt a balance bike is an effective way to teach someone how to ride, but it also sounds like a way for bike companies to make more money. I taught my kids on normal bikes but with the seat lowered so that it was easy for their feet to reach the ground.
- eru 5y agoYou can get cheap balance bikes for a couple dozen bucks. But, of course, there's no upper limit. When I grew up in Germany in the late 1980s, early 1990s, scooters were more common than balance bikes for young kids. They also taught some balance, I guess.
- lqet 5y agoBut was the old way really that ineffective? I remember driving to a big empty parking space on a Sunday with my father, he removed the training wheels, and after around 30 minutes, I got it. Learning to ride a bike isn't complicated, what makes it look so hard is that it is a sort-of binary skill. You can either hold your balance, our you can't, and so it will look completely impossible until you suddenly can do it. Tom Scott learned to ride a bike in this 30ies, it didn't take long [0]. Interestingly, "training wheels" aren't called "training" wheels in Germany, but "supporting wheels" (Stützräder), and when I was a kid, nobody used them to "train" their children to ride a bike. They were used to transform the bike into another kind of vehicle the kid could use until it was old enough to learn to ride a bike. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7GKK3liv8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7GKK3liv8M
- stkdump 5y agoI think besides learning how to balance and steer a bike, kids have to learn propelling the bike using pedals. A bike is different from most other pedalled vehicles that kids usually use (with the exception of pedal karts) due to the gear ratio and the fact that stopping the pedals doesn't stop the bike. This requires learning to use the brakes as well.
- Hayarotle 5y agoAnd furthermore, the two skills depend on each other. If you can't keep your balance, keeping your feet in the pedals means falling down and not getting back up right away (as you also have to learn how to quickly get your feet off the pedals and onto the ground). If you can't pedal, you can't get a fast enough speed to make it easier to keep your balance. Combine that with the fear people might have of pedaling at a higher speed and falling, it's understandable why some people never learn how to ride a bike
- warner25 5y agoWith balance bikes, the kids seem to learn so quickly that they're too young to have any memory (like you do) of learning to ride. I remember almost nothing from age 3, but that's when my second daughter made the transition from her balance bike to her big sister's bike, with zero instruction or encouragement from me. My oldest daughter was more cautious and insisted on training wheels, which she saw other kids using, depsite already mastering the balance bike, so she didn't fully learn until age 4. Anecdotally, I notice a real difference in my neighborhood between the families trying each approach, with the balance bike kids "getting it" significantly earlier.