The process of learning to unicycle can be split into several milestone moments, moments when you realize you’ve leveled up. These moments also give you an opportunity to evaluate your own progress, and help to plan the future course. During my own journey, I identified these steps

1. Wall/fence stage 1: you use a wall or fence for support as you try and fumble your way onto the unicycle, while it seems to try to throw you off. You can get to this point within a few minutes of unboxing your unicycle.

2. Wall/fence stage 2: you mount the unicycle, and try to go forward a few revolutions while continuing to use the wall or fence for support, before losing balance or having to dismount. Mounting and unmounting a unicycle is a lot of work, and though falling hard is rather rare, the number of times you hop off the unicycle is extremely high, and it can tire you out physically quite quickly. A beginner also tends to tense up quite a bit, locking the muscles, so it can be much harder work initially, so depending on your physical condition, the duration of each outing can vary between 10 minutes to 40 minutes before you are too tired to continue. This also means that the number of sessions before one levels up can vary quite a bit, from person to person.

3. Wall/fence stage 3: you get to proceed the length of the wall without dismounting involuntarily, and you can also take a revolution without making contact with the wall.

4. Wall/fence stage 4: you can start from the wall and push away, and continue to ride for a few revolutions, before you dismount. You try to count the number of revolutions before you dismount each time, so you get to see progress. This is a significant milestone, as this is where you actually start to realize that you can ride without the support of a wall or fence, even if it’s only a few revolutions. Progress is easiest to measure at this step, as you can count the number of revolutions you can make it to, before losing control. If your muscles were underdeveloped before you started to learn to unicycle, they have probably started getting firm by now. You’ll also probably find yourself dismounting before thirty revolutions simply because your calf muscles are screaming, and not because you lost control. Here’s a video of me, pushing away from a light pole, trying to stay on.

5. Wall/fence stage 5: you can set off from the wall, and ride more than thirty revolutions before dismounting by choice rather than by losing control. At this stage, you’d have devoloped a lot of self-confidence, allowing you to considerably loosen-up; the reduced tenseness in the muscles goes a long way towards increasing your effective range, and you’ll find yourself easily hitting 30 revolutions and going beyond it. If your muscles continue to scream, you might want to raise the height of the saddle more, to reduce the angle your legs make, when you straighten your leg on the downstroke. Having a lower saddle height is a great way to get confidence, but once you get more confidence, you really need to increase the saddle height to something more appropriate, to increase efficiency.

6. Wall/fence stage 6: riding in a straight line is good, but figuring out to turn is a huge bonus, as you could double back towards the wall, instead of having to stop and walk back. Turning requires using the hips to create a bit of a jerk (think of the effect from an aircraft rudder), but you can make it easier by leaning out and cutting back in (counter-steering).

7. Freemounting: Once you are past stage 5, you can start off from a wall/fence, and ride till your muscles start to hurt. However, each time you dismount, you’ll have to walk back to the wall/fence, before you can start again, and since one ends up dismounting a lot, this adds up to a lot of walking, particularly since by now you can ride a decent distance before you dismount. Freemounting gives you the ability to jump back on a unicycle, without having to do the long walk back to the wall/fence. This however is a hard skill to acquire, as there is not much scope for error, as you need to start to move forward pretty much as soon as you hop up onto the upper pedal.

   There are many things that can go wrong while freemounting, and while it’s not dangerous most of the time, it still leads to a lot of aborted take-offs. At this stage, you can count the number of unsuccessful take-offs before you make a clean get-away, and guage your progress by seeing this number reduce. The more frequently you are able to produce a clean freemount, the better you are. After I was convinced that my freemounts were not mere fluke events, I had an abort-to-success ratio of around 30:1, before I started to improve. When I got really good, it came to about 5:1, and later, to around 3:1, meaning even after getting reasonably good, every attempt isn’t guaranteed to result in a successful take off, but your probability for success increases quite a bit. This skill is perhaps one of the most desired skills to master, with unicycling, as it removes the dependence on a wall or fence, allowing you to practice just about anywhere, instead of in a special place, with access to a fence/wall of the right height etc. Here’s a video showing me free-mounting the 36-er, and making turns.

8. Riding with a pole: riding with a pole in one hand or both can be hard, given that one has to carry them all the time, instead of having empty hands, but having one or both poles can help extend saddle time significantly. The ability to ride with a pole means one can practice to use the pole to make a supported stop, instead of doing a full dismount. The ability to interrupt a ride and resume it can be very useful to allow you to get a short break to gather a breath, before resuming. It can also be a valuable tool to learn other skills such as idling. A pole can also guarantee a quick and easy mount, and a highly stabilized take-off, as you can adjust foot positions till you are fully satisfied, before setting off. Here’s a video of me, performing a pole-assisted mount onto my 36-er.

9. Idling: After freemounting, the next most useful skill to acquire would be the ability to idle; there are two main ways one could idle, i.e. by hopping up and down in the same place, or by rocking back and forth, without riding off, and both are hard skills to gain. Learning both styles would be really good, as both skills can be used in turn to learn other skills. The ability to rock back and forth is very closely related to riding backwards, while hopping is a very useful trick too, and can be used to execute other tricks, such as hopping down from a plank, table top etc. For idling, one might have to go back to a wall/fence as it can be a bit hard to overcome the fear of pedaling backwards. I found that I was not able to let go of the wall even if I didn’t need to maintain constant contact, so started to train with a walking-pole instead, and started noting steady progress. I’m currently still learning this skill, so I’ll update this post as I make further progress. Here’s a video of me, using a walking pole to get an assisted mount and trying to learn to ride backwards.

10. Riding backwards: closely related to idling (if the idling method is rocking back and forth), it can be a skill that can be learned as one practices idling, or independently. I decided to learn to prioritize learning to ride backwards, hoping to acquire the ability to idle along the way. Here’s a video of my initial attempts to learn to ride backwards.

11. Turning while riding backwards: once I’m able to ride sufficiently long distances backwards, I’d like to be able to negotiate turns, so I can increase my range.

12. I’d like to be able to look over my shoulder and nto my rearview mirror, without losing control; this skill would make it safer for me to ride on bicycle paths and on occasion open roads, without putting myself at risk.