Leaning turns

A good way to force yourself to make leaning turns is to turn around
something, a pole of some sort, keep your fingertips at the pole all the
time, and try having your wheel as far out so you have to lean to reach
the pole, keep the speed up and try not to lean on the pole with your
fingertips 🙂

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Try to use a slick floor like a basket ball court or a smooth garage
floor, because it's smooth it's easier to turn. That's how I learned to
do 180 turns.

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get some sidewalk chalk. Draw a circle about as small as you're
comfortable with. Then ride around the outside line of the circle.
You'll use action-reaction turns at first, but eventually you'll have to
lean to stay inside the circle.

Another thing about leaning turns is that I find (dunno if anyone else
does it like this, but oh well 😄) that the wheel is further out than I
am, so I wind up pedalling really fast to get the wheel back underneath
me after I've gone however many degrees of rotation I desired.

And as with everything, practice practice practice.

Good luck!
-Dave

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Can someone kindly explain the action/reaction turn vers. the leaning
turn. I'm not following any of this.

Thankx
JL

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vivalargo - Santa Barbara Unicycle Club
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Correct me if I'm wrong but... A leaning turn is usual done in a larger
circle than a regular turn because the weight is shifted into the turn
where as in a regular turn the rider quickly shifts his/her weight
(usually by the hips). Leaning turns can be done sharply and when done
the pedals are more likely to touch the ground.

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carsonpalooza said:

Correct me if I'm wrong but... A leaning turn is usual done in a larger
circle than a regular turn because the weight is shifted into the turn
where as in a regular turn the rider quickly shifts his/her weight
(usually by the hips). Leaning turns can be done sharply and when done
the pedals are more likely to touch the ground.

Sort of.

Yes, an action-reaction turn is one where you twist your body to turn the
unicycle, then slowly straighten up, then twist again. I wouldn't say any
weight is shifted. It's also shown by learners by the characteristic
"swimming" arms. Your body and unicycle remain pretty much upright while
you're doing this sort of turn.

A leaning turn is possible with your body as relaxed as it would be for
straight riding, but because your weight is shifted off to the side of the
unicycle, you naturally turn. The unicycle leans inwards, with the tyre
pushing outwards against the edge of the circle you're turning. (You fall
off if your tyre is dusty and the floor is smooth - as my demonstrator on
Saturday did until he cleaned his tyre on the carpet in another room!)

Action-reaction can be used to turn no its own, or you can use it to
tighten a leaning turn.

I think the real skill comes from tightening the leaning turn, with the
holy grails being spins - extreme cases of leaning turns, and pirrouettes
- not a leaning turn, but only possible* from a tight leaning turn/spin.

Sorry for any rambling. I'm hoping to nail this in the next couple of
weeks, but I do only get about 2 hours practise a week at most!

Cheers,

Stu
(*without the aid of external objects)

Ken Cline said:

*For example, I did a quick calculation for a 20x2"
wheel tilted at a 15 degree angle. If you let this wheel roll with no
slip, the resulting circle is over 600 feet in diameter - too big to
be a significant contribution to turning.*

I don't know how you arrive at that figure, but it doesn't seem very
relevant to real-world riding. In other words, I can turn in a
pretty-small circle, with what feels like a 15 degree angle or less. Are
you factoring weight into your calculation? Remember the rider is
included. You are balancing acceleration against a fall in the direction
of the circle, to maintain the shape of the curve. If you equal
everything out properly, you make a circle. If you speed up too much,
your circle gets bigger, slowing down makes it smaller, etc. This is
easier to demonstrate on a nice, heavy motorcycle, but it's the same
principle.

Another thing to do when practicing smooth circles is to make sure your
upper body is turned in the direction of the turn. So if you're circling
to the right, your left shoulder should be rotated a little in front of
you, facing your upper body toward the circle. As mentioned above, use
something as a central reference point. You don't have to hold onto it,
but you can, for example, use a like pole and stare at it as you go,
trying to stay the same distance away from it while pedaling smoothly.

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All these physics discussions make me dizzy.

Just check out a video of HardCoreCokerRider to get the idea of leaning
turns.

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With a leaning turn, at a 15 degree angle you would come to the same
conclusion at any speed, but the speed that you would have to maintain
to stay balanced is indeterminable because you have to figure in weight.
But if too slow a speed is reached your balance will shift.

ex: Just put your unicycle up and don't hold onto it, (like you would
for a suicide mount), it will fall, and it doesn't even have weight on
it, so the unicycle will always fall if you try to stay in the same spot
for too long, unless you shift your weight manually.

Posted by: Ken Cline

Quoted message said:

Finally, I don't really understand how a rider develops the rotational
velocity for 360s, spins and pirouettes.

Quoted message said:

Well, I can't do pirouettes but I can do a 360 spin, and in order to
get enough velocity you have to lean the opposite direction that you
want to spin, so in order to do a right 360 spin to the left, change
all your balance to the left, and then move your weight. Like a
pully, imagine a skiier on a hill, the farther up the steep hill
they are the faster they can go, so the higher they can go up on
their jump. So you counteract the balance at the point where you
need to spin. And you need a highly inflated tire. And after the
spin you need to simply but all your balancein the center, like when
the balance on your speakers is all the way in the middle. But
executing the spin is the most difficult part

Back on subject, with a leaning turn you don't need to get any
velocity, all you need is a direct turn and to continue pedaling,
just anything to keep the weight in the one area while moving,
because if you didn't move, all of your weight will be on one side,
not balanced, but if your moving your momentum will keep you up.

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unign said:

ex: Just put your unicycle up and don't hold onto it, (like you would
for a suicide mount), it will fall

I actually witnessed my unicycle not falling by itself one day. And I
as setting up for a suicide mount! Careful balancing of the unicycle
in playground sand left it so stable I was able to walk away with the
unicycle standing by itself. Also, I was able to repeat the trick
later. But yeah, eventually it would have fallen.

Ken

This business on leaning turns got me to thinking (often a dangerous
thing) . . .

I was just at a skate park featuring deep pools and vertical (in places)
side walls--the standard stuff for vert skateboarding. Watching the
skaters and bikers, it was obvious that centrifical force, generated by
speed and momentum, was what kept them up on the side walls. Since we
couldn´t generate enough speed (we were on 24s with 165 crank arms) to
get the centrifical force, we couldn´t get up on those walls much at
all.

The interesting thing here is that most skaters and bikers weren´t going
very fast--somewhere between 10 and 15 MPH by the looks of it--and you
can certainly get those kinds of speeds on a Coker. If a body developed
the technique and confidence to start pulling leaning turns up on the
side walls, I actually think a Cokering maniac could start riding those
pools somewhat like the skaters and bikers--and it would be all about
sweeping, leaning turns. If you could get air and pull 180 flip turns
high above the pool coping . . . that´s a different question. But
leaning turns on a Coker, inside those pools, high up those side walls,
seems very possible. Maybe not for me, but for someone.

I´ve got a feeling that someone is gonna start doing this soon, and half
the battle will be figuring out what size uni and crank arms to use. I
wonder how a ´29 with 150s or even 140s might work inside those
pools??

JL

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vivalargo - Santa Barbara Unicycle Club
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vivalargo,

Find HardcoreCokerRider's gallery. He has videos of exactly what you're
thinking about. He also went to Ray's Skate Park and did some indoor
MTB trials stuff. I'm sure if you did a search with some of these words
you'd find the clips.

--unidaddy

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here you go......

http://gallery.unicyclist.com/Extreme-Coker

the maniac himself!😄

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