Today me and szehong went to East Coast Park to... cycle! Well not quite, because she can't cycle! So today was basically me teaching her how to cycle!
I have not taught anyone how to cycle before, so this would be good warmup/experience for me to teach my kids in the future hehe. I will just recap the experience here, so if you want to teach your friends next time you can.. learn from my mistakes!
When we first started off, with virtually no prior experience, I didn't quite know how to teach her how to cycle. I tried holding her handlebars to steady her but she said I was making her more off-balance so that didn't work.
I then tried to hold the back of her seat but somehow I wasn't doing it right and was making her off-balance or something!
Thus, we started off with me asking her to coast - basically push herself forward and try to lift her feet off the ground. (We were at east COAST park after all.. hur hur. ok ignore this sorry)
After a while of this it seemed pretty pointless as she wasn't really making progress, so I told her to try pedalling. (The idea of coasting came from a website I was researching the night before, which said the best newbie technique was to coast down a gentle slope to develop balance)
I went back to trying to hold her seat or handlebar or even her body to steady her, but I was somehow off-balancing her according to her. Thus I just resorted to yapping words of encouragement, trying to motivate her to keep going.
This went on for quite a while, with me continually telling her she's doing a good job and that it was awesomeee. I mean, you have to motivate the student regardless because chances are he/she is going to be even more frustrated than you!
We tried a new strategy too, basically for her to complete a complete 'pedal-cycle' - basically start with a pedal higher than the other, step on that to pedal forward, then step on the other pedal.
She kept losing her balance after just the first pedal though, so this went on for quite a while, interspersed with a few occurrences of her succeeding in this pedal cycle once, even 3 times.
After some time of little progress, I decided to go back to giving her support by holding on to her seat and her shoulder. I began to get the hang of how to help and feel her balance and providing the right balance-support for her.
With this technique, she managed to pedal for a few metres before losing her balance or swerving wildly to the side and I have to basically catch her or cushion her. Times like this I'm glad I don't have a hippo of a gf =X I know i know, so mean. But realistically, if she was like, my weight, I would probably not have been able to support her.
I felt that she was making progress (despite her saying that she hopes to finish learning by 3 days, I told her she was going to learn by TODAY!) so I just held the back of her seat as in the picture above.
This was because she was having problems with starting -
The first pedal is always the wobbliest as you have to get your balance, but once you establish it you can continue pedalling!
Thus I was stabilizing her by holding the back seat when she made the first few pedals, and when I felt that she had stabilized I released and let her go as far as she could. (I didn't tell her whether I was holding anot after awhile, I just continued running next to her as if I was :) )
Of course, at first she couldn't go far after that and wobbled and had to stop/fall so I had to run alongside her to catch her when she fell.
I repeated my advice to her to:
1) Just start pedalling (as mentioned, the wobbly start is scary to a beginner, and if he/she doesn't muster up the confidence to make a few pedals to get into a moderate pace, it's going to be very hard to pedal at a super slow pace)
2) To maintain a constant speed (she kept speeding up at first... which is bad as I have to run super fast to keep up and if she lost her balance it would be harder to stop) and to just keep pedalling!
And I kept holding the backseat to stabilize her start and would release it when I felt some semblance of balance. After repeated tries of unaided 5-10 metres, she actually managed to cycle for a good unaided 20 metres before feeling the jitters and losing her balance!
After this I got her to practise starting on her own without me holding the backseat - basically urging her to not be afraid of the initial wobble in the first few pedal cycles and just use her newfound balance to readjust and stay straight.
After some time, she managed to start on her own at about a 50% success rate :) (which went up as time passed)
One thing I realized was that her 'stop' was horrible - she was basically losing her balance and she would swerve wildly and I had to catch her. This meant I had to constantly run alongside which was damn tiring for me! And also very dangerous if she swerved off the path and fell on rocks.
(I think beginners don't know how to slow down, so naturally the bike stops when you swerve sideways so that's what you do? lol)
Thus the next thing I began training her was to stop properly - I got her to cycle for about 10 metres (unaided) and then begin coasting (not pedalling but keeping feet on the pedals) to slow down, and finally put both feet on the floor for friction to grind to a stop.
The first few attempts were bad with her being very jerky/sudden with the stop or swerving again, then after awhile I gave her the ultimate test - I stood in front of her 20 metres ahead and told her to slow to a halt right before me (otherwise she would hit me)
She did it :D (stop properly, not hit me)
Once she had the basics of starting, stopping, pedaling and balance there, I felt safe enough to let her cycle on her own without running along next to her to catch her if she fell.
By then I was pretty much exhausted at having spent the past 2 hours (she learn how to ride in about 1+ hours, but I still followed her closely for awhile after that to be sure) running next to her and supporting her whole bike/weight and motivating her and stuff, so I collapsed onto a seat and let her cycle on her own for awhile till the rental timing ran out.
Below are just some videos are took, they're really short, like 20 seconds each, so just have a look!
Ah, it was an exhausting but very satisfying experience. Nothing beats the feeling of her suddenly pedalling on her own for 5-10 metres even after I had released the backseat (she probably didn't know) and realizing she CAN cycle. Aiya basically every bit of progress was very exciting, my heart literally jumped the first time she went for like 10 metres on her own!
So proud of her :) My amazing student! Learnt in only 1hour+ ! (ya ya if you learnt under that shut up i dont care she's still awesome)
And thank God for no accidents! I was quite concerned that she may fall and get a bad graze or something because the bicycle track was asphalt. The only injuries she sustained were some minor scratches from her bad 'stops' earlier on and thus her toes hitting the floor abit, the pedal hitting her legs abit, her hands gripping the handlebars too tightly, etc.
Great day today :D Love that girl!
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