Take the pedals off the bike

Apparently if you want to teach kids how to ride a bike you have to take the pedals off first, and now my mind will never change.

I have recently been trying to teach my youngest daughter how to ride a bike without training wheels. I did it the usual way – sit him on the seat while I held the handlebars and ran beside him, then let go of the bike and watch him panic, freeze, fall over, and kick the bike in frustration.

We only have to do this about thirty times and he’ll fail, right?

I mean, that’s how I learned to ride a bike, as well as everyone I know. Unfortunately, it didn’t work very well. My daughter was getting more and more frustrated, and I thought we just had to make do until one day it clicked. My wife thought there must be a better way we were lost, so she started googling.

Turns out there’s a better way: remove the bicycle pedals.

What?

No one told me this. No one I know has ever done this to their children. I have not had contact with this information in my entire life.

And you know what? It works perfectly.

You give your child a pedal-free bicycle and tell them to straddle the seat with their feet touching the ground. Then you tell them to just run the bike forward. Then, once they have enough speed, they should lift their legs and try to shore. At first they can only manage half a second, but that soon becomes a full second, then two seconds, then three, and then they can coast a whole block. Not every child masters it in a day, but it is much easier and less scary to learn than the old way.

When the child can confidently accelerate the bike and ride straight, you simply return the pedals. They quickly learned to pedal, and poof! Now they can ride bikes.

This method is excellent because it teaches the most important and basic skill first – balance, and saves pedaling to maintain speed later. Bicycles achieve balance by gyroscopic effectsomething with angular momentum and physics or whatever. The faster the wheels, the stronger they are. It is deeply counterintuitive to children that going slow feels “safe” and going fast feels “scary.” Removing the pedals allows them to explore this mysterious new truth about the world in a simpler and less intimidating way.

EDIT 1/14/2025: this article went viral on hacker news and now I have a bunch of comments telling me the above is wrong; mea culpa, I’m not good at physics at all and obviously copy-pasting the explanation from the first hit on google for “how do bicycles stay upright” is not reliable in 2025. All I want to say is that there’s something mysterious and ineffable about balancing a bike when you’re young that’s hard to master when you’re also trying to get a grip on pedaling, and your every instinct is to brake. every time you get scared, that immediately knocks you out.

Once they’ve been acquired, adding pedaling to the mix is ​​easy. But if you rely on the traditional method, a child will not make any progress until the first time they manage two lessons simultaneously; a method that is more expensive in time, sore knees, and tears.

Okay, cool, we found a neat trick for making cycling easier, but if I’m being honest, “breaking down complex tasks into simpler ones” isn’t exactly a revelation of basic pedagogical principles for me.

But what is that was a revelation removing the pedals another option.

From now on, whenever I try to learn something (or teach it to others), the first thing I ask myself is, “How do I get the pedals?”