Now you won’t be able to cycle without using your hands after reading this, unless you already could. At best you’ll know how to try and teach yourself to do it. And at worst- …well let’s just ignore that.
Obligatory don’t do this probably
To be honest, I’m fairly certain that cycling without your hands should theoretically be dangerous. So maybe don’t, idiot.
Steps
Here is a list of things you’ll need to learn to do on your bike, without using your hands, roughly in the order of how I learned it many time ago:
1. “cruising”
2. Pedaling
3. braking, if your bike has a “coaster brake” (terugtraprem)
4. turning
5. look mom no hands
Safety precautions
Before I get into the specifics of all those steps I will tell you some safety things.
always be ready, at any moment, to put your hands on the handlebars again. It’s very important not to get cocky, always be conservative. If you try to rush into this, you could fall and/or cause an accident.
If there are sudden gusts of wind happening, just use your hands. You cannot anticipate sudden gusts of wind when it’s windy, it will push you aside out of nowhere and by far the best way to make sure you’re safe is by using your hands. If some electric scooter is passing you by and the wind fucks you, you’re in an accident. And it’d be your fault.
Don’t do this near anyone until you’re 100% confident you won’t get close enough to them to scare them.
How to Control Cruise
Before I start explaining how you can start trying to learn this, it’s probably good to first explain how you can actually control your bike when not using your hands. Principally it’s really simple; just balance. If you want to go to the right, balance you and your bike to the right and you will steer to the right. Just like skateboarding, I think?
Because all you’re doing is changing the weight distribution or whatever, you can use virtually your whole body to steer!
I wouldn’t recommend using just any ol’ limb though. Steering with your feet would be inadvisable since you then have to take your foot off the pedal meaning you lose a very important point of contact with your bike. Meaning you end up with less control. Using your arms is also inadvisable since it tends to confuse other people near you. If you try to re-balance by sticking out your arm, people will likely think you intend to take a turn in that direction, but you’re not. Avoid using your arms and feet for steering or balancing.
So that leaves your knees, thighs, hips and the entirety of the upper body to control your bike. But for just going in a straight line I’ll only use my upper body and my hips. I’ll first lean my upper body to whatever side I want to go to. And if I need a bit more steering power for correction, I’ll get my hips to join in the action by pointing it in that same direction. Also if you lean your upper body back a bit, you can steer a bit slower and more controlled than if you’re sitting on your bike normally.
Actually cruising
So this is the first step to learning how to ride your bike without your hands on the bars. I would recommend trying this and every step that follows on a smooth, straight, wide and empty road/street. Empty ‘bicycle streets’ (fietsstraten) for instance, are excellent.
Once you find yourself on a nice piece of road, pick up the speed. Go as fast as you’re comfortable with, but the faster you go, the more your bike will stabilize itself. Meaning it will be easier for you to let go of the handlebars.
When you’re up to a nice speed, it’s time to make an attempt. Stop peddling and to start letting go. Starting small is key. Don’t just fully let go on your first attempt. Maybe even start by just letting go of only your thumbs, slowly. Eventually, or maybe instantly, you‘ll be able to keep going in a straight line like this, until you slow down to a point where you’re no longer going in a straight line.
First you should just try to be able to get to a lower speed while still going in a straight line. Once you can do that, at a slow enough speed (judge for yourself), you will remove another finger in your attempts. And then try to reduce your minimum straight line speed again. Repeat this until you can do it without your hands touching your handlebars at all. Initially, keep your hand right above the handlebars to be able to quickly grab them once you inevitably lose control. Slowly start moving your hands further and further away from the handle bars until they’re just chilling wherever you want them to be chilling.
When you are able to; comfortably speed up, let go of the handlebar, just chill (in a straight line) until you’re going slow enough to start losing control, grab your bar and speed up to do it again, it’s probably time to move on to pedaling. No sooner though.
Pedaling
To learn how to pedal without your hands on the bar you just need to pedal, with your hands on the bar and while you keep pedaling, you let go of the bar.
I’ll use the pedaling force/motion to push my upper body in the opposite direction to stay in balance. You also do this when cycling with your hands on the pedal, there you also compensate using your hand and the handle bar. If I also need to steer a little to remain stable and going in a straight line; I’ll shift my weight to the side I want to steer by moving my upper body more and at that point I also start pointing my hips to that side.
So for a straight line, just shift your upper body to compensate for the pedaling. Whenever you need to steer a little to keep going in a straight line; shift your weight even more using both your upper body and your hips to correct your steering.
There is a certain balance to the right speed to try this at. Going too fast will require a lot of force to keep going, making it much harder to shift your weight to compensate for the pedaling accordingly. Going too slow makes it harder to keep going in a straight line. I would recommend going as fast as you safely can. And once you get the hang of it a bit, slowly start trying to decrease your minimum stable speed.
If you have gears on your bike, using the right gear is also a matter of balance. Using a gear that’s too low is hell. It’ll barely take any force at all to pedal, meaning you barely have to compensate for the force. Which sounds great but you still move your foot down, meaning your balance shifts and you still have to move your weight to stay on your bike. Except now the pedaling force that you’d normally use to push your weight to the opposite side is practically zero. Additionally you’ll have to be pedaling much faster than in a higher gear, which also makes it much harder to learn. Plus you’ll probably be going so slow that it’s practically impossible to keep your bike stable.
Using a too high gear will increase the force needed to pedal, making pedaling much slower. If you pedal too slow it’s going to be impossible to keep your bike stable and you’ll end up having to cruise it out, or just grab your handle bars.
So you have to use the right speed as well as the right gear to try this out. You’ll get a feel for it. I find that to increase my balance when cycling without hands, it helps to use a higher gear than I would use if I was cycling with hands. So definitely opt for a higher gear than usual.
When you start doing this you will probably have to immediately put your hands back on the bars. That’s completely fine. Once you are able to not instantly lose control, you will probably still immediately lose speed. Normally you partially compensate for pedaling using your handle bar. So when you lose that compensation by letting go, you also lose pedaling force. You have to learn to compensate entirely by shifting your weight. Like I said earlier, you actually already compensate by shifting your weight when cycling, now you just gotta do it more.
Once you can comfortably pedal in a straight line at a relatively low speed, speed up and slow down without needing to put your hands on the steering wheel (except for changing gears of course), you should start trying to brake if you have coaster breaks. Otherwise just move on to turning.
Braking
So if you have handbrakes like me, it’s physically impossible to use the brakes without putting your hands on the handle bar.
If, on the other hand, you have coaster breaks; you’re in luck, maybe. Honestly there isn’t much to say on how to try and learn this. Just do the same thing you’ve been doing and try to slowly slow down by braking. Gradually increase braking intensity and the lowest speed you can reach without losing control. Good luck!
You could also just skip this to be honest, in most situations it’s better to just grab the handlebars and brake at a normal speed. Since braking using coaster brakes without hands and without losing control is honestly just painfully slow. It is, however, very much possible.
Turning
For those of you who didn’t know, turning is quite essential on a bike.
You might know that when you normally take a turn to the left on a bike, you first have to turn to the right a little and then you take the turn to the left. Like a very subtle question mark turn? Well you also have to do this when you don’t have your hands on the bar except you have to make a much bigger “preturn” and the turn itself also has to be much bigger. It turns into somewhat of an s turn.
To actually make such a turn, I again use both my hips and my upper body to shift my weight to one side. But that’s not all, I use the outside thigh to pull the saddle with me, which in turn pulls the whole bike with me. This puts the bike at a roll angle which will make you turn much faster than only shifting your weight. Additionally it helps me not fall off the bike, you’re essentially hanging from the bike saddle by your thigh.
It’s important to note that when taking corners like this, to increase my control; I do not pedal. I make sure that my pedals are horizontal, so my feet and pedals are at the same height. This allows you to push off of the pedals to help you balance and move your weight around much more easily. You can pedal in turns, but to maximize the steering angle, you have to stop pedaling.
Now it’s possible to make an even sharper turn by pointing your knees in the direction of the turn. I’ll start by only pointing the knee on the inside of the turn into the turn. Since this knee can point the most in the direction of the turn, this knee has the most effect. If I really want to make the turn as sharp as possible I’ll also point the outer knee into the turn, but since there’s a bike frame in the way for me, I can only turn that knee so much, meaning it only helps so much. It does still make a difference though.
So basically, you start by shifting your weight using only the top of your body for just going straight forward. The more I’m trying to steer, the more parts of my body I start moving to that side, going down from the top.
To practice and become better at this, you need to swerve. Again, make sure no one is around and that you have a decently smooth road to try this only. Start by picking up speed then stop pedaling and start swerving from side to side, slowly making big swerves. Once you kinda get the hang of it you can try to do it whilst pedaling. This is where it gets interesting. Again, start at high speed. Use a relatively high gear and synchronize your swerving to your pedaling. Pedal your right foot while going to the right and while moving your weight to the left in anticipation to your swerve to the left. When your pedal is roughly all the way down you are at the middle point of your swerve to the left and currently pointing straight ahead. Then you start pedaling your left foot and start moving your body right in anticipation of the next swerve, rinse and repeat.
It sounds kinda weird and dangerous. But it’s also very good practice for cycling without hands. You’re constantly taking turns and switching your weight, not only making you better at the turns. But also better at cycling without hands in general. Once you learn to do this at lower speeds. You can actually use this to stabilize your bike when going at low speeds that you previously could only cycle at while using your hands. It’s kinda crazy. Plus swerving in general is very fun imo.
look mom no hands!
Now you are ready to show off your skills to mom, great job!
Honestly I was planning on spending more time on this, but I didn’t. Mainly because time kinda ran out for this week’s article. A few other things you can do to become a more complete lunatic is learning to look over your shoulder, without unintentionally swerving too much, for safety purposes of course. As well as ‘hopping’ over (speed) bumps or fucked up potholes to avoid being evicted from your bike, which is especially useful in Delft.
If you have questions and/or you would like to personally judge/insult me, feel free to contact me.