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.

Wheelies!

Wheelies are great! It’s a very simple thing to accomplish and it’s a huge crowd pleaser. It also helps you develop a good feel for the balance point on your bike and teaches you good rear wheel control. For starters you need to be sitting on your bike, rolling forward fairly slowly. The slower you go the easier it’ll be, you do want to be rolling forward fast enough that the bike is moving in a stable line. Start by putting your bad foot forward, crouch down towards the bars then all at once lean back, pull the bars up and back with you and crank your good foot forward a half pedal stroke. The biggest trick in one word to wheelies is…… BRAKE. That’s right. A brake. The whole trick to wheelies is your rear brake. As you pull the bike up squeeze your rear brake. If you pull to hard you’ll lock the wheel and your front will drop right back down to the ground. What you want to do is squeeze it so your rearward momentum slows down. As soon as you crank your good foot forward, don’t stop, keep pedaling at a moderate pace. If the front wheel starts dropping crank harder and lean back more. If you start to fall over backwards, squeeze the back brake harder and lean forward a bit. You may find yourself falling to either side. To avoid that you need to be able to move around on your seat. The lower your seat is the easier it is to move around, but the harder it is to keep your front wheel up. The higher the seat is the easier it is to bring the front wheel up but it makes moving around harder. You want a compromise. You want it set so when you pedal your knees don’t make it up to your waist, but you want it to be low enough so that you have good contact with the pedals all the way through the pedal stroke. If its hard to move around on the seat lower it, if you have to pull on the bars hard to keep the front wheel up put the seat up a bit. To turn while wheeling you just need to tip the bike slightly in the direction you want to turn and as you do that pump a little harder with the matching foot. If you want to turn to the right tip the bike that way a bit while pumping a little harder with your right foot. That’s really all there is to it. It just takes practice.

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.

Hopping sideways off objects is one of my favorite moves. I think it’s much safer and more effective than lurching off things, particularly because there’s less opportunity for fate to step in and plant you on your ass. If you lurch off something lots of stuff can go wrong, your brakes can slip, your hubs can skip, it happens… it’s happened to me, it’ll probably happen to you. So if you can, just sidehop off the object. There’s really nothing you can mess up. The brakes are already locked and the drivetrain isn’t involved in the move at all. All you have to do is pivot your rear wheel off the side and then pull your front wheel off as you drop off. As you drop heading for the ground pull the bars up a little bit so you land with the front wheel in the air the same way you land when you’re doing a pedal kick or lurch, this way you can soak up the impact when you land. If you’re a little more ballsy you can just hop sideways (the simple way, not for distance) off and pull the front wheel up before you land.

Sidehopping up onto objects is kind of tricky. I’ll write more about this when I feel I’ve mastered it.

 

by LawnMM
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