[Shibby]

And will there be an RM-7 for freeriding?



just kidding. actually, i do need doing the rear wheel hop thing... maybe i should get a front brake too.

 

[stringcheese]

actually try to not use your front brake to get back on your rear wheel. Just push hard on one of your pedals to get you up then hit the rear brake. I can't really explain it well from here on but just hop. It took me like an hour to learn.

 

[Toshi]

It's actually much easier to learn by using your front brake to rock forwards, then rocking backwards. Pedal kicking straight to the rear wheel is unnerving to learn at first, because you have to kick hard enough that you'd fall on your back if you didn't catch the bike with the rear brake. My advice is to find a steep set of stairs and use them to raise the front wheel up a foot or two. Hop on the bike, grab the railing, and move around until you find the point where your body needs to be to balance. Also keep your arms fairly straight, bend your knees, and generally try to keep your body pretty bent.

 

[Woggle Bear]

By rocking back or throwing your weight back you force your self to hop backward. Unless you pedal kick to stay in one spot or foward. I use the same meathod as SC or I just sit down over the rear tire and lean back to bring the front up.

LEARNED IN A HOUR!!!:angry: I hate you:angry: Man it took me over a month!! hahaha


and I said it in the past on mtbr, Yes! there will be a RM7 for Free Riding, but it will break just like the RM9 Was that you the whole time? Man you had ECDH soo pissed! haha

WB

 

[Shibby]

wasn't me. it's just two typical questions in their respective forums that tend to get a laugh (rm7 and rear wheel hopping)

anyway, i can get about 3 hops on my rearbrakeonly bike by leaning back to get up... i can't pedalkick in yet. i think i should get a front brake because it's cheap, and because it would allow me to actually do a bunch of simple trials moves that aren't very easy when ya can't stop the rear wheel. bike is more BMX styled right now, i guess.

i'd build a real trials bike, but i'm already in debt . maybe give it a month......

 

[Dog Welder]

Here's a little how to that helped me learn when I first started.

Rear Wheel Moves

How to get up on the rear wheel

I’m gonna start out by saying this is not an easy move. It took me well over a year to learn, you may learn faster, you may learn slower. Just don’t expect it to happen over night. Having said that, let’s get started…

The best way to get up on the rear wheel is using what I’m gonna call a pedal roll (similar but different than a pedal kick which I’ll go into more later). What you do is set yourself up hopping in place or in a trackstand. If you start from a trackstand you just have to straighten the wheel before you do this. When you go to the rear wheel you need to stop hopping, you then ratchet your cranks back a few degrees, I usually stop about halfway between horizontal and vertical. Then you ease off the brake, don’t let go of it, ease off of it, meaning keep it on just not so tight the wheel can’t roll, as you do that crank forward with your good foot (which should be ratcheted back slightly at this point) and pull the front of the bike up and lean back a bit. What this effectively does is releases your wheel as you crank your pedal forward and pull the bars up…so the bike should roll forward right under you.

You can also go up to your rear wheel by lunging. To do this you start from hopping in place or a trackstand again. Then you hop forward as far as you can and you push the front of the bike up at the same time. This is done a lot faster than the previous method, which is done very smoothly and slowly. As you hop forward you need to throw the bars up and away from you. So you end up having both wheels on the ground, then you execute the move and you end up on your rear wheel about half way between where your front and rear wheels were a second earlier with your front wheel in the air.

Another way to get up to the rear wheel is to do it purely by transferring your weight from one end of the bike to the other. This is a bit more advanced and is very affective but it would be very difficult to try if you still haven’t learned to hop on your rear wheel yet. What you do is fairly simple, you ease of the brake and pull the bars up towards you, as you do this lean back and make sure your pedals stay level. You can get to the rear wheel by transferring your weight another way too. Crouch down towards your bars and keep the rear wheel locked, then just lean back and pull up simultaneously and the bike will tip back on its rear wheel. When you get to the angle you like ease of the rear brake and level your cranks out.

Hopping on the rear wheel

This gives people the most trouble and it’s actually one of the simplest things to do. Getting up on the rear wheel is the hard part, hopping is easy! All you need to do is use a chinup motion from gym class! It’s that easy! Pull your body upward with the handlebars like you were going to jump up off your pedals. By doing this you get all your weight off the bike and you can move it as your body is up in the air. You don’t have to hop the rear wheel 8 inches in the air to be able to hop on the rear wheel. All you need to do is unweight the bike so that you can make small corrections. If you start to fall to the side you pull your body up and when you stop the upward motion keep your feet on the pedals by pulling the bike up under your feet. As you pull up you unweight the bike, when you stop the upward motion just by holding onto the bike it comes with you. If you stood in the middle of a board with a piece of rope attached to each side and you crouched down and jumped up you could do the same thing. Jumping is easy, by pulling on the rope you would keep the board firmly attached to the bottom of your feet right? That’s the problem guys. Most people try to pull the bike up with their weight still on it. If you stood on that same board and tried to just pull the board up it wouldn’t work…you can’t just pull your body into the air. So don’t try to pull your body into the air on the bike either. Pull up on the bars to jump into the air then just hold on and bring the bike up under you.

Pedal Kicking / Lurching

I call it a pedal kick, some people call it a lurch, you can call it whatever you want….this is how it’s done. You need to be hopping on your real wheel first, so get up there before you try it at all! There’s an upward motion and a downward motion to hopping on your real wheel. As you come down and the wheel hits sink down, lower your body down and back over the rear wheel, as you do this, ratchet your cranks back so they’re between horizontal and vertical, you also need to let the front wheel drop a bit. All this needs to happen at once, you land after a hop, you crouch down and back, you ratchet the pedals back, and you let the front wheel drop a bit. Then all at the same time, you need to ease off the back brake, you need to lunge up at your bars pulling with your arms, and you need to crank forward on the pedals. You want to be cranking as you unweight the bike by pulling up towards your bars, this turns the wheel under you and kicks the whole bike forward. As soon as you’re airborne you need to lock the wheel again and level out your cranks as you come down. Then you just repeat the process. When you land setup the same way you did for the first pedal kick and string them together. This will hop your bike forward on the rear wheel and you will be pedal kicking!

You can also hop the bike on the rear wheel to either side and backwards. To hop to either side you set up the same way as if you were going to hop forward, but when you start the pedal kick and you’re pulling your body up unweighting the bike…pull towards a grip on your bars instead of the stem, then while you’re airborne center the bike under you so when you come down you aren’t off balance. Hopping backwards is extremely easy, just pull the bars toward you and lean back and the bike will start tipping over backwards, as soon as you’re slightly past vertical just use your feet to pull the pedals backwards and you’ll pull the whole bike back under you. To string these together you need to alter your landing a bit. When your rear wheel lands don’t let the front fall, keep the angle of the bike high and then you can lean back as soon as you hit and you can start the next hop backwards.



Rotating

You can rotate the bike on the back wheel fairly easily too, but this is harder than most of the other rear wheel moves. To rotate the bike while hopping on the rear wheel you need to use a twist of the bars. As you unweight the bike and you pull toward the bars you need to turn them to the side. Not a lot, just give them a quick twist to either side as you unweight. This will rotate the bike in the air as you hop. It may take you several hops to get the bike to turn 90 degrees, 180 degrees, or even all the way around. You have to be patient. If you try to turn too much in one shot you’ll mess up. It’s possible but that’s a whole different thing to practice. For this purpose you’re just rotating the bike a little bit at a time.


Sidehopping

There are really three kinds of sidehops. You can sidehop sideways…you can sidehop off of something down, and you can sidehop sideways up onto something. Sidehopping sideways isn’t very difficult, nor is sidehopping off objects, however sidehopping up onto something is a bit more tricky. I’ll start with the easy stuff and then we’ll work our way up.

To sidehop sideways, there are really a few ways to do it, you can just crouch down and pull a typical hop but to the side. That’s the easiest and probably the most often used. You don’t typically have to hop sideways over large distances, there’s almost always room to set up to lurch over the gap. If however, you do need to hop sideways over a bit of a distance, there is a better method. You need to start in a trackstand or using stationary hops. As you prepare to hop, you want to lean back and pull the front wheel up and to the side…you don’t want to pull the front wheel real far over to the side, I’d say again like 45 degrees, halfway between straight ahead and straight to the side. As you pull the front up and swing it to the side, you need to slouch back, this is how you load up like a spring to make the sidehop, all at once you need to pull yourself straight towards the bars…which are now at a 45 degree angle to either side of straight ahead, then you need to push the rear wheel over to the same side behind you. It’s the same motion you use when you’re pivoting on the street. You know? You’re outside messing around and you lean forward and pivot the rear end to either side. Same idea, the only difference is the front wheel isn’t on the ground. You can kinda use a cheat move to help push it over by actually pushing the frame over with the inside of your lower leg.

 

[diesel]

thats from the trials howto document. i have that somewhere around on my harddisk...yea "learn in a hour" !!! bastard. im STILL working on it and its pushing a whole year...i can do about 3/4 hops if im lucky.

 

[stringcheese]

Yeah the hard part really is just learning how to get up onto your back wheel. To learn I just rode to an isolated area with no distractions, and I followed those same directions. And after consistant practice I had it within the hour.

 

[eastcoastzigzag]

hey man, string cheese!! a hour?? rock on man, i did it for the first time ever yesturday. i endoed then to the back wheel. it was a big confidence booster since i couldnt just get on the rear from a track stand. i can get one hop then i fall to the right everytime. cya trial monkeys

 

[madbiker]

Well, I can get 2-3 in, but my issue isnt getting into them, its keeping my balance to keep going. I dunno, maybe a trials bike would help.....

 

[Shibby]

i will get medIEval on cho arse! at least you have a front brake.

excuse us, we bicker offline too.

Originally posted by madbiker
Well, I can get 2-3 in, but my issue isnt getting into them, its keeping my balance to keep going. I dunno, maybe a trials bike would help.....

 

[jhusktrials]

Originally posted by stringcheese
Yeah the hard part really is just learning how to get up onto your back wheel. To learn I just rode to an isolated area with no distractions, and I followed those same directions. And after consistant practice I had it within the hour.

Hey Stringcheese do you compete? There aren't too many trials riders in the Denver area so I may know you.

 

[madbiker]

My buddy (who can do like 8 now) was practicing and got like 3 in, turned his foot and trapped it in between his TT and pedal, kept his balance for a few seconds, got his foot out and did like 2 or 3 more. It was hella funny

Edit: his downtube, not toptube, meh im tired

 

[stringcheese]

Originally posted by jhusktrials


Hey Stringcheese do you compete? There aren't too many trials riders in the Denver area so I may know you.

No I haven't competed yet, I only started like a month ago. But I'm hoping to try one sometime this season. What do you ride? Because at some of my races I stop by and check out the trials riders, so I might recognize you.

 

[hectolyte]

>I dunno, maybe a trials bike would help.....

A trials bike would be of minimal help in learning to do rear wheel hopping(as long as you are practicing on a hardtail). I got one when I could pedal kick around reasonably well expecting that it would transform my riding. It didn't. The chainstays are noticably shorter than an XC bike, but rear wheel moves still require lots of practice and discipline. Get good on your XC bike. It took me a month to hop somewhat consistently on the rear wheel, another month to figure out the pedal kick--all on an XC bike. Remember--the more time you spend on the rear wheel the more comfortable you get up there.

 

[madbiker]

Too bad I don't have an XC bike......soon I will though. Anyways, ya I have a slalom/urban hardtail that I use. I can see what you are saying about the not so noticable dif. Seems like an XC bike would be better cuz' its steeper than my slalom bike. That's why I'm gonna build it up soon.

 

[MattFoley]

first off, pedal kick? whats that?
second, find your center of balance! can you ride a wheelie? when your in a wheelie you get to a point where you can just sit and pedal and pretty much just go. well, i can anyways. But find a spot where you are comfy. thats what im trying to say. find the spot where you dont need to struggle with the bike. center your body, fully extend your arms and just practice bouncing! I prefer to hold the front brakes in while i do this, just a habit i guess. its a hard thing to explain, even harder to learn but just keep practicing and before you know it youll be answering questions
one more thing! ive been riding my XC bike, is a trials bike better for bouncing/balance? just curious

 

[MattFoley]

oh yea i forgot: for those of you who said you fall to the side. before you start to lean or lose your balance just kick your back tire out to compensate. sometimes i can just twist my body and throw my weight to do the same.. but anyways it all comes with practice! keep riding