It took me as many as 17 sessions of about an hour each, before I could learn to ride backwards, details of which are here. Riding backwards and idling are two different skills, and while neither of the two requires the learning of the other, I found that learning to ride backwards can make it easier to learn to idle.

Learning to idle was harder to grasp than riding backwards, as the latter is intrinsically the same as riding forwards, but with everything reversed. The hard part was leaning backwards, and overcome the tendency to lean forwards, as leaning backwards was quite scary, at least initially. Idling on the other hand is a completely different beast, requiring rapid reversal of directions. I started by trying to alternate riding forwards and backwards, but true idling is when you never really roll forward more than a crank revolution. The fact that I could ride out of an idle in either direction, forward or backward, made things a lot easier.

I didn’t remember to note how many sessions I needed to learn to idle, but I think it was only two sessions, after I’d learned to ride backwards. As my comfort with riding backwards increased, I started by trying to repeatedly change directions, and then tried to reduce the distance I rolled, before trying to change direction, and finally tried to learn to idle while being rooted to a single point. Here’s one of my attempts, trying to toggle directions repeatedly:

I was able to follow up with this, the very next day:

I now want to be able to get more comfortable with idling and then be able to do one-footed idling, which in turn would allow me to learn tricks such as wheel-walking.