I’ve been thinking about buying a trials bike to use for playing about on during the winter, hopefully it’ll help improve my woefully inadequate bike handling skills on the MTB.

Does anyone here ride trials?
What’s good for not a lot of money when it comes to trials bikes?
As a mid-30’s bloke who’s crap on a bike, am I likely to end up spending weeks in hospital or off work with various broken bones? 😆

Engines or pedals?

Pedals.

I’ve been thinking about buying a trials bike to use for playing about on during the winter, hopefully it’ll help improve my woefully inadequate bike handling skills on the MTB.

What’s your plan, natural/offorad or urban/street or a bit of both?

Have you ever ridden trials or street before? there’s massive learning curve and you need to put in hours (like hours and hours) to get any good, most of us that did or do ride trials learnt when we were in our teens, it is very hard to even keep up to scratch now with a job and ‘adult’ life let alone start from the beginning.

BTW, I’m not saying don’t do it or putting you off, it’s massively fun and rewarding, but just be prepared to be crap for ages and ages.

I’d say not worth spending on a proper trials bike until you’ve got into it, for one you might find its not for you and then jsut have wasted your money, but more than that the geometry of a proper trials bike is very different to a normal bike, and will feel very alien at first, perhaps even a hindrance, I would recomment just using a normal hardtail with the seat slammed and make sure you have a bash guard and beefier tyres (rims too maybe if you’ve got XC WW rims) to start off with as you’ll learn more about handling a ‘normal’ bike, and that seems to be your actual goal rather than to become a trials god? If you find you do get into it and enjoy it then start looking at real trial bikes, you’ll start to understand why they are the shape they are by this point and what suits you as there’s a lot of personal preference in there just like MTB.

Also, FWIW, trials in the rain is mostly miserable, and if you don’t have confidence and skills already doubly so. You won’t have faith in having grip when you need it for a lot of moves. Good way to learn the limits though 😉

As a mid-30’s bloke who’s crap on a bike, am I likely to end up spending weeks in hospital or off work with various broken bones?

quite likely, either that or embarrassing yourself massively cocking up a simple bunny hop.

have fun!

I used to ride a bit of trials; a mod bike might be a good one to practice/learn on since they’re light and simple. You really need to learn the pedal/hop technique to be able to do much though (hop up walls/across gaps etc) and this is something you can learn on your current bike. Until you can do this, they’re a bit of a waste of time.

BMX on the other hand involves less pedalling/hopping/braking and is all about rolling around. Might be more fun/more applicable for ya.

Edit: Presumed post was about motor trials so started replying before the above posts!

I rode a bit in my teens. My brother has a bike for enduro training so I still try to ride the odd trial every now and again. If time and funds allowed it, it’s definitely something I’d like to get back into.

In comparison to other forms of motorsport, it’s cheap to get into. You could pick up a reasonable bike for under a grand. A pair of boots and a lid and away you go.

Fitness wise it probably won’t offer much towards MTB (unlike MX or enduro) but balance and line choice will massively improve. It’s as hard as you make it, so no worries about breaking yourself. Don’t worry about the big steps you see in the videos, initially getting the hang of tight turns and balancing will take up most of your time.

Events are usually pretty friendly, I’ve never had any problems with asking more experienced riders for line choice etc. Winter trials often offer a newcomers class, and Sportsman routes will never feature any dangerous or scary features.

Also handy for winter evenings as things like balancing and moving the bike with a dead engine, tight turns or riding over a log/barrel can be done at home.

Go for it. You’re not going to be Chris Akrigg this time next year but I don’t suppose you expected to be. Just build yourself up a cheap hardtail with rigid forks, high rise bars, decent brakes a low gear range and bash guard and away you go. Keep one eye on the weight though, it’s tempting to go overkill on parts but a heavy bike is a pig to move around easily.

amedias is right about a proper trials bike feeling very strange compared to a “normal” bike, very light at the front and with the short back ends it does feel like the bike is going to loop out from underneath you, a lot. I started on an old Raleigh dual slalom frame with rigid forks, granny ring and good v-brakes. This is enough to learn the balance skills you’ll need. Even after riding like this for ages the move to a proper trials bike (a Brisa 26) felt really strange.

First thing I learnt to do was trackstand properly, before moving onto anything advanced. I also found that when learning to pedal kick, I hopped backwards at least 4/5 times for every kick forward 🙂

The Martin’s had a couple of videos, Dirty Tricks and Cunning Stunts and the second one I can’t remember the name of that I found quite useful, and good fun to watch. I can’t hear the phrase chocolate foot without hearing it in Hans Rey’s accent now though.

and the second one

ah, the art of Bi-King…

it had good riding in it, just as instructional but somehow I never liked it as much as a kid

Those videos (which I still have on VHS) were both utterly ridiculous and brilliant in equal measure 🙂

Not instructional per-se but very good for watching technique and getting ideas were Calculated Risk videos, Revolution, Evolve and Contact, very US based with a lot of Jeff Lenosky and Ryan Leech thrown in.

Also worth a watch is Manifesto, a Ryan Leech project which was interesting at the time as he was specifically trying to merge trials/street/bmx and a bit of MTB and the ‘manifesto’ was to never actually stop while riding trials lines, not at all dis-similar to how Akrigg and MacAskill ride these days but even more fluid if a little less showy. Certainly was interesting at the time as not many people were really riding trials like that, you were either very firmly in the hippety-hoppity observed camp, or the street/bmx crossover camp but never with the same amount of flow.

ah, the art of Bi-King…

That’s the one! I still have them on DVD somewhere, I might have to dig them out for a bit of nostalgic viewing.

Another little tip if you go for it, once you’ve learnt your new skills on a hardtail and decide to test them on the trails, remember if you ride a full suss that they bend in the middle. That might be experience talking 😳

I’ve started mixing up my riding and doing some XC rides and some skills rides – mainly jumps, drops etc, but also including some basic trail riding skills like track stands, hopping over logs etc. I’m a long way off Chirs Akrigg (understatement of the year), but do notice an improvement in skills and confidence. Though I agree unless you put the hours in you’ll never be any good at pure trials, nevertheless, by just investing 30 mins a week you’ll easily pick up some basic skills that will help you.

I can’t hear the phrase chocolate foot without hearing it in Hans Rey’s accent now though.

😆

I hopped backwards at least 4/5 times for every kick forward

that “I can’t stop…!” bit was always going through my head when I first learnt 🙂

and for some reason now got Steve Pete with “look at the hole you made!” popping into my mind from Chainspotting, damn you brain for remembering such useless stuff!

OP ignore all of us, trials rots the brain

that “I can’t stop…!” bit was always going through my head when I first learnt

and for some reason now got Steve Pete with “look at the hole you made!” popping into my mind from Chainspotting, damn you brain for remembering such useless stuff!

OP ignore all of us, trials rots the brain

😆

I often use that “I can’t stop” quote, usually for anything not bike related. Makes me chuckle; no one else knows what I’m going on about.

I think, probably two of my favorite cycling films; Ahston and Hawsey chucking dummies on bikes off a cliff; wonderful. From a time when it wasn’t taken too seriously.

now got Steve Pete with “look at the hole you made!”

Thanks for that. And to go with it all I can visualize is Ashtons head smacking into his stem.

OP – found myself in a similar state 2 years ago. Bored with normal crappy winter riding so picked up a second hand mod bike for <£100.

I found I didn’t use it a huge amount when I lived in the city – but have used it a bit more after I moved out – what it did give me was a few more skills when riding my mountain bike that have translated very well.

I’d always had poor slow speed skills – these have improved drastically.
I’d never felt comfortable lifting the back wheel around – less so now and this has helped a lot.
I’d never felt like I could pedal kick off things – no longer an issue.

I’ve neglected the trials bike for the past year, and my riding has shown it a bit. But I happened to put the bike in the stand last week to get it back in order – planning to ride it more over the next month – just need to order a new rear brake as I totalled the old one 🙂

Happy hopping – from a still crap mid 30’s trials attempter.

so slippery; like riding on custard

got an evening to myself tonight, might crack out bi-king.

When i was a kid we used to buy tiny XC bikes and convert them: mostly by taking chainrings off, then replacing bits as they broke.

The issue with this is you end up with a bike that is too small. ideally you want a wheelbase of your size but a seat tube off a XS bike at most.

tartybikes is a good place to shop/browse bikes.