Why Don’t We Forget How to Ride a Bike?

I can relate to the "getting easier when nearing the end" feeling.

I play cello and whenever I don't play for a week or more and I just sit down to play, my hands lack a lot of dexterity and are imprecise. Most people just play for half an hour to get it all back.

However, what I noticed is that if I play for a minute- or two, make an hour break and come back to play again, my hands are fully ready to play, as though I didn't have any longer (week) pause whatsoever. It's rally kind of magical.

Looking that the case of adult non-western immigrants learning to ride in places like the Netherlands or Denmark suggests it is not as easy as simply explaining the operation of a bike [0]. I'm not sure if they learn more quickly than children - that could be interesting to see.

Tangentially, and anecdotally, I can see that children in Denmark (or at least Copenhagen) seem to learn more quickly than American kids to ride adult bikes because they never use training wheels. They first start on strider-type bikes that teaches them the balance needed, so once they graduate to pedal bikes they don't need the training wheel and pick it up fairly quickly - at least relative to my experience as a kid in the US.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/28/utrecht-cycli...

“Most of us learn how to ride a bike during childhood. But as we grow older, many of us stop riding and put those once-beloved bikes in storage.”

As a Dutch person, this is so weird to read. How can you get by in day-to-day life without a bike ? Mine broke the other day, nothing big just a snapped cable, but I was without a bike for all of 2 days and it felt like being handicapped.

Skiing is something else where, for me at least, the 'don't forget' effect applies.

I used to ski in a one to two week block every year, for about 20 years (i.e. 2 weeks on then 50 weeks off). Once I reached a certain level (being able to do parallel turns) I never really forgot how to do them, although the first few runs of a new season would be a bit tentative. Something that continued to improve year on year was my ability to turn at speed on steep slopes. I think this was due to learned (and remembered) confidence as well as muscle memory, in particular knowing that because a turn would work, a sudden increase in speed didn't mean automatic disaster. I also learned to lean out of a turn (i.e. down the mountain, the opposite of a turn on a bike) and this was also a confidence thing that I didn't forget, and which turns safer still. Unfortunately, my increasing confidence was offset by decreasing fitness so I reached a plateau. That said, on my last couple of trips, I didn't fall once. I never took a multi-year break to test the concept properly.

> How can you get by in day-to-day life without a bike ?

By living in most cities in the USA? :D