by Daniel B

Created on: February 01, 2007   Last Updated: May 14, 2007

My five-year-old learned to ride a two-wheeler in a total of 2 hours using the simple 3-lesson method I describe below. I was impressed by this, since although I'm a somewhat serious cyclist and former racer, I didn't learn to ride until I was about seven!

She had already been riding tricycles since age 2, and riding a small bike with 12" wheels and training wheels since age 3. She had grown into a bike with 16" wheels, but still had training wheels, and on week off from school, she asked to have the training wheels taken off.

First, we tried our fairly flat, paved driveway - which proved absolutely useless for anything other than falling over repeatedly. The vast majority of people suggest learning to ride on a flat, paved surface... ignore them! They're being given kickbacks by the makers of band-aids, or something. :)

I realized that a novice rider will find it almost impossible to balance and begin pedaling at the same time, but also realized this skill can be learned in a matter of hours in a safer setting, after which a return to the flat, paved driveway becomes easy.

We headed up the street to our local park. This park is grassy, as parks often are, but unlike some parks, it has a couple gentle hills - mounds, really - in the middle. I took my daughter up to the top of the largest mound, and pointed her bike in the direction of a large, flat grassy area at the bottom.

For the first lesson, I told her to push off and coast down, using her feet for balance if needed, but to NOT use the pedals. We repeated this about ten times. Sometimes she had trouble building up momentum, or ended up veering off to the side, but by the end, she was quite good at it.

Lesson number two was pushing off and trying to get her feet onto the pedals on the way down, but still just coasting. This helped her get used to the idea of balancing with her feet on the pedals. Again, we repeated it about ten times, and she managed to escape without injury, only falling over once, onto soft grass.

The final lesson was "push off, get your feet on the pedals, and start pedaling." I still have home video of her shouting "look out, I'm coming through!" to other children who were in her way. By the 10th time, she was making it down to the flat section of the park, then continuing across it for 50 feet or more.

At that point, I told her that she now knew how to ride without training wheels, and we went home, where she promptly demonstrated that now, she could push off, get her feet on the pedals, and pedal down our flat, paved driveway - without needing a box of band-aids!

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