Riding Seat In Front

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This skill can take a while to learn. Well.. okay... it took me a reasonable amount of time but then I don't use it much in the riding I do. The process goes a little something like this:

• Ride along.
• Come to a very brief still stand with the pedals horizontal and holding the front of the seat.
• Stand on the pedals to raise your rear end off the seat.
• Pull the seat out in front of you.
• Ride away.
• Come to another brief stand still.
• Pop the seat back between your legs and ride off as normal.

Riding Seat In Front

Depending on your current riding skills that may, or may not, sound reasonably easy. Either way here's some stuff to keep in mind that should make the learning curve not quite so steep:

• To pull the seat out from between your legs it's a good idea to wear shorts so the seat comes in and out without catching too much. If you're wearing trousers then just make sure you pull them up around your waist before starting off. You can also drop the height of the seat by a small amount (an inch say) when learning and put it back up once you've got it sussed.
• For actually pulling the seat out I do a three handed manoeuvre:
  • Hold the front of the seat with my good hand.
  • Pull it out in front of me and as it's coming out I grab it by the mid section with my other hand.
  • When it's out and clear of my body I now have both hands holding the seat. I quickly move my good hand from holding the front of the seat round to hold the rear outside corner.
  • As soon as I've moved my good hand round to the back I release the other hand and use it for balance.
• While learning (and when you want to make life easy on yourself once you've got it down) it's a real help to hold the seat in close to your body and keep the holding arm pressed in tight against your chest. This helps counter any side to side movement of the seat as you pedal along. What tended to happen with me was that when my right leg would reach it's lowest pedalling position the weight on said pedal would push the frame and the seat out to the right. Same goes for the left pedal pushing out to the left side. This makes it very hard to stay on. So by holding the seat and the holding arm tight in against your body you are better equipped to fight this side to side movement than if your arm was holding the seat straight out.
• Now comes the pedalling action to get you moving. The side to side motion I mentioned above can be really frustrating and make it seem near impossible. There's a couple of things you can do besides holding the seat tight in against your body to help fight this:
  • When pedalling try pointing your knees slightly outwards. Not quite sure why this helps but it just does okay?!
  • Crouching down slightly also helps. Same reason as before - don't ask me why but just take my word for it.
• One hand is holding the seat which leaves the other arm free. Use this arm for balance. I tend to keep my free arm pointing straight as a board and horizontal to the ground. When riding forwards normally it's pointing straight in front of me. Use it to help correct your balance if you feel like you're veering to the side.
• Stopping to put the seat back in can be a bit tricky. You need to apply pressure to either pedal (your choice) as it approaches the rear horizontal position.
  • Hang on tight to the seat and bring yourself to a brief stand still.
  • Stand tall on the pedals.
  • Shove that seat back in between your legs and sit on it again - boy does that feel good!
  • Ride off and congratulate yourself!

There you go - easy ;-) Learning riding with the seat out is real tough on your leg muscles to begin with as you don't have the seat to sit on but keep at it and your legs will learn to deal with it.

Once you have this skill in the bag there are many other variations to learn: turning, hopping, riding backwards, pulling the seat out behind you... the list goes on.

For the skill levels it stipulates that the seat and holding arm should not be in contact with the body. So, if you're going for skills testing you'll need to learn to hold the seat way out in front of you. To do this you'll need to work hard on the pedalling action to keep it as smooth as possible.

One more thing - learning to ride an ultimate wheel is made a lot (relatively speaking mind you) easier if you can ride seat in front.