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

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

#81

Post by danmaz74 »

Fricken wrote: post #5

I was once an avid rock climber, but stopped for many years. One night on a surf trip in Indonesia I had someone hold my beer while I climbed a palm tree, which was only about 15 feet high, but that's still high enough that you don't want to fall. I got to the top of the trunk and reached up to grab one of the branches, and it was like, 'oh man, I'm so out of condition, I can barely grip this'. But then, accidentally…

> There is physical conditioning needed to utilize that strength without hurting yourself, but how strong you are is about neural pathways in your muscles, and how they fire, not the muscle itself. Your muscles are actually strong enough to rip the tendons from your bones.

Citation needed. Training for strength also increases your muscle mass, I'm not ready to believe that strength is only about neural pathways.

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

#82

Post by coldtea »

stinos wrote: post #67
coldtea wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Forgetting to ride a bike" is not about fluency. Of course you'll lose the fluency if you were advanced biker at some point. It's about forgetting HOW TO RIDE, the very basic trick of balancing the bike.

the very basic trick of balancing the bike Which is exactly the point the OP makes to that sentence as if we never stopped biking I think. At the least I'd say it's worded incorrectly. Sure your brain remembers the key part of how to do it, but the finer motor skills, balancing in hard situations etc don't just come back from one instance to the next and take extra practice.

I don't think anyone seriously says that e.g. a biker doing hard mountain bike rides or bicycle stunts etc will be as good after a 10 year hiatus in which he never touched a bike.

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

#83

Post by laurieg »

FatalLogic wrote: post #2

I'll suggest that we don't forget to how to ride a bike because a very important part of that skill is confidence and self-belief. It's similar to swimming. Does anybody ever forget how to swim? If you don't believe you can ride a bike then you'll tend to wobble around slowly and cautiously and overcorrect by manual steering. If you don't believe you can swim then you'll try to constantly hold your face too high abov…

I think this is a great point. More confidence -> more speed -> more stable bicycle.

Part of me wonders if learning to ride a bike actually isn't all that difficult in the grand scheme of things, but we all remember it as being tricky because we did it at such a young (and uncoordinated) age.

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

#84

Post by black-tea »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #25

“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.

Laziness and obesity.

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

#86

Post by jimmy1 »

danmaz74 wrote: post #81
Fricken wrote: post #5

I was once an avid rock climber, but stopped for many years. One night on a surf trip in Indonesia I had someone hold my beer while I climbed a palm tree, which was only about 15 feet high, but that's still high enough that you don't want to fall. I got to the top of the trunk and reached up to grab one of the branches, and it was like, 'oh man, I'm so out of condition, I can barely grip this'. But then, accidentally…

> There is physical conditioning needed to utilize that strength without hurting yourself, but how strong you are is about neural pathways in your muscles, and how they fire, not the muscle itself. Your muscles are actually strong enough to rip the tendons from your bones. Citation needed. Training for strength also increases your muscle mass, I'm not ready to believe that strength is only about neural pathways.

Think of olympic lifters. Pyyros Dimas, a guy who isn't "huge" (compared to say football players or body builders) won a Gold for the clean and jerk at 215 kgs (474 lbs) in the 85kg weight class (187 lbs). There is something else going on there besides muscle mass when a Here's a good article on the impact of your neural pathways on strength:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/07/170710091652.h...

from the article:

> Jenkins found evidence that the nervous system activates more of those motor neurons -- or excites them more frequently -- when subjected to high-load training. That increased excitation could account for the greater strength gains despite comparable growth in muscle mass.

Adrenaline does wonders for the excitation-induced stimulation of the skeletal muscle system

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

#87

Post by black-tea »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #22
hansthehorse wrote: post #14

Without evidence - I don't think it's that we don't forget how to ride but that an adult, any adult, can just get on a bike and ride it after operation is explained. Since everyone, or most everyone, rode one as a child we confuse this with "remembering" how to ride rather than having the adult reflexes and balance to naturally ride.

Adults who have never learned how to ride a bike can’t “just get on a bike and ride it” no matter how much explaining you do. It’s one of those things immigrants need to learn when they move to this country (the Netherlands) and it’s certainly not as easy as you suggest.

I taught an adult to ride a bike and he was pretty good after only an hour or so, to be honest. It's true that adults can't just do it, but it's also nowhere near as hard as it for children.

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

#88

Post by simonebrunozzi »

Jetroid wrote: post #47

Anecdotal, but perhaps interesting: I rode a bike every few weeks with my father as a child. When I was 11, I had a pretty serious health condition including paralysis from the waist down. I had to spend several years retraining my muscles to be able to walk and run again. I'm 22 now, and have just (literally in the past two weeks) started riding a bike again. I wasn't particularly confident but I was happily surpris…

Wow. It sounds like a tough way to grow up. Happy to read that you got back on your feet (perhaps even literally).

Thanks for sharing your experience.

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

#89

Post by Andrex »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #70
Jetroid wrote: post #47

Anecdotal, but perhaps interesting: I rode a bike every few weeks with my father as a child. When I was 11, I had a pretty serious health condition including paralysis from the waist down. I had to spend several years retraining my muscles to be able to walk and run again. I'm 22 now, and have just (literally in the past two weeks) started riding a bike again. I wasn't particularly confident but I was happily surpris…

To be fair, I think the article misses one of the points, though: for example, I had a time between 14 and about 22 when I didn't swim at all, having spent about 4 years doing swimming as a sport. When I started swimming again at the age of 22, I could swim obviously - but it took me weeks of re-remembering all of the correct positions of my hands, which muscles to contract and how should I breathe in order to sustai…

Swimming uses more muscles and requires more concentration. I had a large amount of form degradation when I took a years' break swimming, and it took a few weeks to get back in form. I was noticeably faster after I regained my form -- I'm not sure what the equivalent would be on a bike, since theoretically I would just need to pedal faster (requiring more raw strength, not form.)

I don't think there's much comparison to the bike example in the OP.

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