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Frame from I can't ride a bike. How fast can Mike Boyd teach me? Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

I can't ride a bike. How fast can Mike Boyd teach me?

Tom Scott plus
Other
YouTube
1 HN user recommended this video1 month2021–2025 score 1
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN uses it as the go-to example of an adult learning to ride a bike, mostly in threads about learning cycling later in life.

Tom Scott, who never learned to ride a bike, gets lessons from Mike Boyd, a YouTuber known for learning skills quickly. The video follows an adult's attempt to learn cycling in a short time.

1 recommendations · 2 citations · Other

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@nayuki Jan 2025 Recommends
on HN thread Take the pedals off the bike
There are a number of niche videos on the topic of learn-to-bike that emphasizes the pedal-less balance method: [link] , [this video] , [link] , [link] , [link] , etc.
Teaches bike riding via the pedal-less balance method.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@lqet Dec 2021 Cites it
on HN thread Learning how to ride a bike
Read more
But was the old way really that ineffective? I remember driving to a big empty parking space on a Sunday with my father, he removed the training wheels, and after around 30 minutes, I got it. Learning to ride a bike isn't complicated, what makes it look so hard is that it is a sort-of binary skill. You can either hold your balance, our you can't, and so it will look completely impossible until you suddenly can do it. Tom Scott learned to ride a bike in this 30ies, it didn't take long [0]. Interestingly, "training wheels" aren't called "training" wheels in Germany, but "supporting wheels" (Stützräder), and when I was a kid, nobody used them to "train" their children to ride a bike. They were used to transform the bike into another kind of vehicle the kid could use until it was old enough to learn to ride a bike. [0] [this video]
Adult learns to ride a bike quickly.
@aembleton Oct 2022 Cites it
on HN thread Paris Will Become ‘100% Cyclable’
I guess they never learnt. If you never learn then you won't know how to ride. Tom Scott made a video, as an adult learning to ride a bike [this video]
Tom Scott learns to ride a bike as an adult.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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