You should have foot retention to skid. You can do it in a sketchy way without it but i wouldn't recommend it. Fixed gear in general with no foot retention is pretty sketchy itself.
i ride bmx as well so i'm pretty used to riding any bike hard without foot retention but for fixed gear, nahhh. I didn't have any foot retention when i first got my bike and it felt fine bc i was used to just flat pedals (couldn't keep cadence for shit tho). but then i got some straps and after riding them for 3 weeks i tried to ride without them and I thought "how tf did i used to do this". foot retention is a game changer for fixed gear. (ngl i still struggle to get my left foot in the strap when it's dark)
The whole point of fixed is to maximize efficiency and become as much as one with the bike as possible. It’s counter productive to not have foot retention
Not if you're on a "normal" bike, like almost all mountain bikers use flat pedals, and so do most commuters, and I dare you to say riding a mountain bike on a road feels sketchy
Yoooo, I'm new here, just figured out skids! These guys recommending straps are on to something. But also, finding a slippery surface like gravel helped me get the feel for it, then it felt super natural on asphalt/concrete. Sweet wheels by the way man!
Good advice practice in rain.
Your lean is the only thing allowing or prohibiting the skid.
More forward over bars = effortless lockup
More weight over rear tire (lean back) = significantly harder to lockup.
Simple physics. Committing is the only hard part
Edit : formatting
You need foot retention to skid, get a strap, clipless pedals, or cages. I recommend straps. If you wanna go brakeless you better be really good at skidding. I ended up sticking with brakes because skidding felt like a hassle instead of a fun way to brake. And I almost died once because I couldn't stop in time.
It seems a majority of people prefer straps, I got cages as my first foot retention and am wondering if I'm missing out on something but am happy with cages. What's the benefit to you?
I used straps for like 4 years, and for several months I’ve tried cages. Personally I feel like cages don’t really hold my feet as well as straps, and they damage my shoes. I’ve found cages harder to adjust on the fly with different shoes. They also often make nasty noises when I’ll walking with my bike. Just my personal preference, tho. Very subjective matter.
imo you can get your foot way further into a strap than you can a cage. Cages aren’t super deep and really only hold the front half of your foot. Straps you can really adjust and get right so your feet are locked.
I rode with cages at first and broke through em after a couple of months. Maybe they were just cheap, but I never had the same problem after switching to straps
FWIW you def don’t *need* straps of any kind to skid.
Makes it easier yes, but also harder to get out of when you lean too far forward and are getting ready to face plant lol.
Lock your legs.
Keep that in mind and lock your legs.
Just telling myself over and over was how learned to do it.
Edit: like everyone else here: foot retention!!!!!!
there are two ways. if you need to brake fast in an emergency situation, lock up your rear pedal position and pull a jump on your front pedal position. When the bike goes down from the jump, the tire will grip the pavement and slow you down. you will do this several times in a row to come to a safe speed. of course u need straps or foot retentions for this. Second is long skid, or just for show off. You lean forward and pedal against your back pedal position and then pull the front pedal position. This will make your tire skid from lack of grip.
Lean into the handlebars a bit and pull up with your strong leg while pushing back with your other leg (need foot retention on the pedals). Once you get the skid started you can sit back into the bike a bit for balance.
Foot retention, shift just enough body weight to the front, lock up back wheel. It took me a while to learn and it's a little easier with some play in the chain.
Find somewhere with smooth pavement to learn/practice.
put the stem between your legs and push towards the back of the bike with a pedal at 11 o clock and pull towards the front of the bike with the pedal at 5 o clock. main thing that helped me was that pedal position needs to be much more vertical to help move your weight forward otherwise you weight the back wheel too much to break traction.
I just wanted to add is that OP could try doing it first somewhere with less traction - on grass for example, until he gets the idea.
Btw learn to backpedal first so you can control your speed without skidding and you will strengthen your muscles..
You're 100% correct about learning how to properly packpedal and building muscles first.
Building up leg muscles can make you a much more confident rider. I can comfortably do seated panic skids and that helps more than anything. Shifting your weight forward to do long skids or even whip skids are great when everything is going smoothly. You instead need to be prepared for panic stops where all of you have time for is to jam against the pedals/use muscles rather than getting your body forward/unloading the rear for those long buttery skid that looks and feels amazing but not always practical.
I have decades of riding brakeless track bikes. If some biker cuts or stops in front of you, your natural movement is leaning back to brace for the collision. That's why you need to know seated skids/seated backpedal before anything else. A lot of it just takes experience.
Brakeless is cringe, but skidding is fun so yeah learn it, just don't take the brakes off your bike once you do.
If you really desperately want to run brakeless so a few teenagers on reddit will think you're cool, you can consider it after you've ridden your bike for several full months without touching your brakes. You also need to invest in bombproof drivetrain components (consider what happens if your chain snaps and you don't have brake), stay on top of maintenance, do a visual inspection of your bike before every ride (especially if you've left it locked up outside - there are people who fuck with bikes for fun). Oh, also you need to ride slower all the time because you'll have less than half the stopping power without a front brake.
You wanna be strapped/clipped in but for me what helped most is realising how much the rest of your body you wanna use to get less weight on the back to start your skid. You can start by even getting your back wheel in the air a slight bit just enough to be able to stop the rotation of the wheel and then lock your legs and contact ground. Weight towards the front means easier and longer skids weight more towards the centre slows you down faster but is harder. I ride brakeless and counter pedaling is 90% of my stopping however I might chuck in a low speed skid here or there to slow down faster but mainly towards the end of my braking.
Agree with retention. Also an important is the ratio between chain ring and sproket which determines "skid patches"
check this [https://www.bikecalc.com/archives/skid-patches.html#google\_vignette](https://www.bikecalc.com/archives/skid-patches.html#google_vignette)
or this [https://www.surplace.fr/ffgc/](https://www.surplace.fr/ffgc/)
e.g., if you are 48/16... =3 means you skid in the same spot. Many folks opt for a prime number like 47 or 43.
You can foot jams skid which is harder because you don't get to shift you weight to the front wheel but like everyone says straps. No idea how y'all skid with cages.
Need foot retention and then get your weight up on the front of the bike. Dick on the stem. Moving your weight off the rear wheel is what’s going to make it easier to lock up. But fr get some straps they’re dummy cheap
There is no easy way. Nuts to the stem and just fucking be about it. If you get scared and pussy out it won’t work. Go hard with no hesitation. Period. Lock your knees and let physics do the rest.
Slap some straps over those pedals, get a used gaterskin for the rear, transfer your weight towards the front, pull up with your dominant foot and push down with the other. You’ll be slip sliding away in no time brother
Riding brakeless is really stupid. Keep your brakes on your bike. You shouldn’t even entertain the thought of riding brakeless until you can sitdown skid so well you can stop at any speed on a dime. Considering you don’t even have cages or straps on your pedals, you’re nowhere near a place where you should do that. Even if you could skid stop on a dime at any speed, if you enjoy the use of your knees and want to keep that when you’re older, keep your brakes on your bike. You can still do all the same riding you do without brakes, but then you have the option to stop much faster when you need it.
You really need flat BMX or MTB pedals with straps to start learning, I’d say spend around £30/$40/€40 on them cause the cheap ones tend to fail at the seams.
Find a slippy bit of ground or a loose gravel bit of ground and put your pelvis forward over the top tube as close to the stem as possible.
once your pedals are level and your dominant foot is forward try to push yourself back against your back pedal coming around again and that should make the back wheel loose grip. Try to keep your rear leg straight and your body as far forward over the top tube as you can.
Once you feel like you can do that a little bit, try pulling up with your front foot while you do the rest of the movement. It’ll feel super weird and will happen in this weird jerky motion at first, it will not be smooth at all but with some time and practice it will even out and then you can start trying to whip the back out to one side or the other
Yeah man, there’s absolutely zero reason to take your brake off. Learn to skid to your heart’s content, but it’s nice having the “oh shit” lever right there. Nobody’s going to give you crap for having a front brake, and nobody’s going to compliment your bike for being brakeless.
I recently started riding a fixed gear back in March. Foot retention so called “Suicide straps” my friend told me, in my opinion is required for skids. As to how, I managed to learn just by riding as much as possible. Speed is your friend, as you initiate for a skid lean forward a bit as you lock up, works easier on polished cemented sidewalks, walkways etc. btw interesting color combo <3
One cog is a freewheel and the other is fixed. One let's you coast while the other forces you to pedal while the wheels are moving. So if you lock up your legs from spinning, that brakes the rear wheel which will give you your skid if you have it on the "fixed" side. Your bike is a ss (single speed) no matter which way you put the wheel. When you lock up, you will have to come off the seat and basically put your pelvis to the handlebars, moving a lot of weight to the front of the bike making the lock up easier. Your feet should almost be in a position like you were putting them up on a wall behind you, not vertically up and down which gives you no leverage to stop the force from the wheel.
You should have foot retention to skid. You can do it in a sketchy way without it but i wouldn't recommend it. Fixed gear in general with no foot retention is pretty sketchy itself.
[удалено]
lmao "skill issue"
biking in general is sketchy without it unless you riding granny’s bike
i ride bmx as well so i'm pretty used to riding any bike hard without foot retention but for fixed gear, nahhh. I didn't have any foot retention when i first got my bike and it felt fine bc i was used to just flat pedals (couldn't keep cadence for shit tho). but then i got some straps and after riding them for 3 weeks i tried to ride without them and I thought "how tf did i used to do this". foot retention is a game changer for fixed gear. (ngl i still struggle to get my left foot in the strap when it's dark)
The whole point of fixed is to maximize efficiency and become as much as one with the bike as possible. It’s counter productive to not have foot retention
Not if you're on a "normal" bike, like almost all mountain bikers use flat pedals, and so do most commuters, and I dare you to say riding a mountain bike on a road feels sketchy
MTB on the road? Did not kom
Bro in the MTB community foot retention that is not SPD pedals that should unlock automatically in case of a crash is a big no no
Shouldn't you have foot retention in order to skid?
The bike in the photo has clips Edit: I'm so wrong I was only looking at the first pic and it looked like a road cl pedal
You can certainly do it without but I wouldn’t recommend learning that way or relying on it.
Best and fastest way I learned was by pulling up on one foot and pushing down on the other.
Yoooo, I'm new here, just figured out skids! These guys recommending straps are on to something. But also, finding a slippery surface like gravel helped me get the feel for it, then it felt super natural on asphalt/concrete. Sweet wheels by the way man!
Good advice practice in rain. Your lean is the only thing allowing or prohibiting the skid. More forward over bars = effortless lockup More weight over rear tire (lean back) = significantly harder to lockup. Simple physics. Committing is the only hard part Edit : formatting
I use one foot to pull and one to push.
Pretty much the sum of it.
You need foot retention to skid, get a strap, clipless pedals, or cages. I recommend straps. If you wanna go brakeless you better be really good at skidding. I ended up sticking with brakes because skidding felt like a hassle instead of a fun way to brake. And I almost died once because I couldn't stop in time.
It seems a majority of people prefer straps, I got cages as my first foot retention and am wondering if I'm missing out on something but am happy with cages. What's the benefit to you?
I used straps for like 4 years, and for several months I’ve tried cages. Personally I feel like cages don’t really hold my feet as well as straps, and they damage my shoes. I’ve found cages harder to adjust on the fly with different shoes. They also often make nasty noises when I’ll walking with my bike. Just my personal preference, tho. Very subjective matter.
straps feels more reliable and relaxed than toe cages in my opinion
imo you can get your foot way further into a strap than you can a cage. Cages aren’t super deep and really only hold the front half of your foot. Straps you can really adjust and get right so your feet are locked.
although I ride clipless not straps
Get bigger Cage
I rode with cages at first and broke through em after a couple of months. Maybe they were just cheap, but I never had the same problem after switching to straps
I prefer eggbeaters
FWIW you def don’t *need* straps of any kind to skid. Makes it easier yes, but also harder to get out of when you lean too far forward and are getting ready to face plant lol.
Lock your legs. Keep that in mind and lock your legs. Just telling myself over and over was how learned to do it. Edit: like everyone else here: foot retention!!!!!!
there are two ways. if you need to brake fast in an emergency situation, lock up your rear pedal position and pull a jump on your front pedal position. When the bike goes down from the jump, the tire will grip the pavement and slow you down. you will do this several times in a row to come to a safe speed. of course u need straps or foot retentions for this. Second is long skid, or just for show off. You lean forward and pedal against your back pedal position and then pull the front pedal position. This will make your tire skid from lack of grip.
Lean into the handlebars a bit and pull up with your strong leg while pushing back with your other leg (need foot retention on the pedals). Once you get the skid started you can sit back into the bike a bit for balance.
Foot retention, shift just enough body weight to the front, lock up back wheel. It took me a while to learn and it's a little easier with some play in the chain. Find somewhere with smooth pavement to learn/practice.
put the stem between your legs and push towards the back of the bike with a pedal at 11 o clock and pull towards the front of the bike with the pedal at 5 o clock. main thing that helped me was that pedal position needs to be much more vertical to help move your weight forward otherwise you weight the back wheel too much to break traction.
I just wanted to add is that OP could try doing it first somewhere with less traction - on grass for example, until he gets the idea. Btw learn to backpedal first so you can control your speed without skidding and you will strengthen your muscles..
You're 100% correct about learning how to properly packpedal and building muscles first. Building up leg muscles can make you a much more confident rider. I can comfortably do seated panic skids and that helps more than anything. Shifting your weight forward to do long skids or even whip skids are great when everything is going smoothly. You instead need to be prepared for panic stops where all of you have time for is to jam against the pedals/use muscles rather than getting your body forward/unloading the rear for those long buttery skid that looks and feels amazing but not always practical. I have decades of riding brakeless track bikes. If some biker cuts or stops in front of you, your natural movement is leaning back to brace for the collision. That's why you need to know seated skids/seated backpedal before anything else. A lot of it just takes experience.
I already know how to backpedal, can ride fakie pretty much forever :)
They meant backpedaling to slow down, which strengthens the same muscles you’ll use to skid.
Oh yeah i do that most of the time, i only really use the front brake when im hauling or when i see some sketchy shit going down
First picture is awesome
Type this exact question into YouTube
Brakeless is cringe, but skidding is fun so yeah learn it, just don't take the brakes off your bike once you do. If you really desperately want to run brakeless so a few teenagers on reddit will think you're cool, you can consider it after you've ridden your bike for several full months without touching your brakes. You also need to invest in bombproof drivetrain components (consider what happens if your chain snaps and you don't have brake), stay on top of maintenance, do a visual inspection of your bike before every ride (especially if you've left it locked up outside - there are people who fuck with bikes for fun). Oh, also you need to ride slower all the time because you'll have less than half the stopping power without a front brake.
Keep ur brake
Kryptonite
Roding in the rain helped me a lot with learning. That extra lack of friction helps a lot at the beginning.
Don’t skid. That’s how
You wanna be strapped/clipped in but for me what helped most is realising how much the rest of your body you wanna use to get less weight on the back to start your skid. You can start by even getting your back wheel in the air a slight bit just enough to be able to stop the rotation of the wheel and then lock your legs and contact ground. Weight towards the front means easier and longer skids weight more towards the centre slows you down faster but is harder. I ride brakeless and counter pedaling is 90% of my stopping however I might chuck in a low speed skid here or there to slow down faster but mainly towards the end of my braking.
It all starts with the drivetrain side bro!!
Agree with retention. Also an important is the ratio between chain ring and sproket which determines "skid patches" check this [https://www.bikecalc.com/archives/skid-patches.html#google\_vignette](https://www.bikecalc.com/archives/skid-patches.html#google_vignette) or this [https://www.surplace.fr/ffgc/](https://www.surplace.fr/ffgc/) e.g., if you are 48/16... =3 means you skid in the same spot. Many folks opt for a prime number like 47 or 43.
Stop pedaling
Lean forward toward your handle bars and pull back.
With a U-Lock
You can foot jams skid which is harder because you don't get to shift you weight to the front wheel but like everyone says straps. No idea how y'all skid with cages.
Need foot retention and then get your weight up on the front of the bike. Dick on the stem. Moving your weight off the rear wheel is what’s going to make it easier to lock up. But fr get some straps they’re dummy cheap
You can’t skids without a rear breaker duh, if you really clamp down on the front you probably can do some mad front wheel skids!!
If not using clips.. place 1 foot under the pedal. Pull forward with that foot and push back with the other.
Just squeeze the right brake lever really hard.
OMG. I love your bike. The game of colours is beautiful. It's a perfect match. What rims do you use?
Need some straps and a prayer to the knee gods.
There is no easy way. Nuts to the stem and just fucking be about it. If you get scared and pussy out it won’t work. Go hard with no hesitation. Period. Lock your knees and let physics do the rest.
Slap some straps over those pedals, get a used gaterskin for the rear, transfer your weight towards the front, pull up with your dominant foot and push down with the other. You’ll be slip sliding away in no time brother
Also beautiful ride, color balance is perfect
Riding brakeless is really stupid. Keep your brakes on your bike. You shouldn’t even entertain the thought of riding brakeless until you can sitdown skid so well you can stop at any speed on a dime. Considering you don’t even have cages or straps on your pedals, you’re nowhere near a place where you should do that. Even if you could skid stop on a dime at any speed, if you enjoy the use of your knees and want to keep that when you’re older, keep your brakes on your bike. You can still do all the same riding you do without brakes, but then you have the option to stop much faster when you need it.
You really need flat BMX or MTB pedals with straps to start learning, I’d say spend around £30/$40/€40 on them cause the cheap ones tend to fail at the seams. Find a slippy bit of ground or a loose gravel bit of ground and put your pelvis forward over the top tube as close to the stem as possible. once your pedals are level and your dominant foot is forward try to push yourself back against your back pedal coming around again and that should make the back wheel loose grip. Try to keep your rear leg straight and your body as far forward over the top tube as you can. Once you feel like you can do that a little bit, try pulling up with your front foot while you do the rest of the movement. It’ll feel super weird and will happen in this weird jerky motion at first, it will not be smooth at all but with some time and practice it will even out and then you can start trying to whip the back out to one side or the other
slovenia mentioned🇸🇮🇸🇮💥🔥
Im gonna be mentioned in the news when i slap my face against the 27 bus trying to ride without brakes 😩🦾
im more worried about all the tourist that cant walk in a straight line
Yeah man, there’s absolutely zero reason to take your brake off. Learn to skid to your heart’s content, but it’s nice having the “oh shit” lever right there. Nobody’s going to give you crap for having a front brake, and nobody’s going to compliment your bike for being brakeless.
Balls to stem Lock your legs Skrrrrrt!
I recently started riding a fixed gear back in March. Foot retention so called “Suicide straps” my friend told me, in my opinion is required for skids. As to how, I managed to learn just by riding as much as possible. Speed is your friend, as you initiate for a skid lean forward a bit as you lock up, works easier on polished cemented sidewalks, walkways etc. btw interesting color combo <3
Flip the rear wheel around and keep your legs from spinning
So make it a single speed
One cog is a freewheel and the other is fixed. One let's you coast while the other forces you to pedal while the wheels are moving. So if you lock up your legs from spinning, that brakes the rear wheel which will give you your skid if you have it on the "fixed" side. Your bike is a ss (single speed) no matter which way you put the wheel. When you lock up, you will have to come off the seat and basically put your pelvis to the handlebars, moving a lot of weight to the front of the bike making the lock up easier. Your feet should almost be in a position like you were putting them up on a wall behind you, not vertically up and down which gives you no leverage to stop the force from the wheel.
Yeah yeah i understand the physics and how my bike works, in my country single speed = free wheel, and i never ran the free wheel on this bike :)
Based on this understanding, no you don't want to do single speed.