By Chris Taylor
When you have learned to unicycle, you will want to start learning some more skills or tricks. One trick people will often ask you to do is a "bunny hop" or a "pop-a-wheelie". This is an important skill to learn because you don't want to have to dismount every time you come to a curb.
How to Bunny Hop:
- Before you start you need to make sure you don't have too much air pressure in your tire. When your weight is on the unicycle the tire should squash down a bit. But not too much, the rim should not be close to touching the ground.
- When you are riding stop your unicycle with the pedals in a horizontal position (one forward and the other backward).
- Hold the front of the seat with your dominant hand and hold the other hand out to help you balance.
- Before you hop you will need to put more weight on the tire to compress it.
- "Bob" your upper body down, then immediately make your upper body spring back up.
- After your upper body springs up there will be little weight on the tire. At this point you pull up on the seat and bend your knees slightly to let the unicycle come up.
- When you land you can continue hopping by repeating steps 5 & 6.
If you are trying to hop onto something you will find you have better accuracy if you just do a single hop (rather than using your unicycle like a pogo stick).
Good luck learning to hop!
Chris Taylor
Created on: Feb. 13, 2002
Last updated on: Aug. 18, 2003