Steering control is the most important thing, because you can't do much
of anything else until you have good control over where the wheel is
going. Wide turns are done by leaning in the direction you want to go.
Sharp twists are done by using the inertia of your upper body to twist
the wheel underneath you with your hips and legs. Many turns are
combinations of the two. That's about all that can be explained in
words; it's all reflexes, just like walking. As with everything else in
unicycling, the only way to learn it is to do it over and over and over
until your body figures out what it needs to do to stay on the thing.
The mind is a hindrance; turn it off.
Don't focus too much on idling until you learn how to steer pretty well,
especially with the inertial body-twist type of steering, because you
are actually steering constantly as you idle. Balance a long stick on
your finger, and see how in order for the stick to remain upright, the
bottom end has to move around more than the top end does, in all
directions. As the stick starts to tip, your finger has to go beyond the
balance point in the same direction in order to correct the imbalance
and keep the top end more or less stationary. You have to move your uni
wheel around underneath you in the same way that you move the bottom end
of the stick. The forward/backward dimension is pretty obvious; the
side-to-side bit is the tricky part. People who are learning to idle
have a tendency to just rock back and forth, and topple over sideways
within a few seconds. To keep the wheel under you while idling, you need
to make the same directional corrections that you have to make while
riding forwards (and backwards); you're just doing it over very short
distances in alternate directions. You also need to be in control of the
repeated reversals of the wheel rotation. I think it does help to start
with the single-idle thing, what Rob referred to above as "ride half
pedal backwards then forwards again." Being able to ride backwards at
least a little will also help. If you can ride forwards, reverse
direction for a few revolutions and then go forward again, you're
halfway there; you just need to make fewer and fewer revolutions in each
direction until you are down to half-revolutions.
I was a bit odd in that idling came rather easily to me for some reason.
I could idle pretty comfortably before I was able to freemount with any
consistency; this is probably why the rollback mount is still the only
one that I can do every time.
--
weeble - There can be only one... wheel
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Another Joe in MN
Level 2 and holding
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