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

Tom Scott plus · 3M views · 2021-11-27 · 19:33

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2021–2025

Topics

Education & learningDocumentaries & storytelling
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cyclingadult learningtom scottskill acquisition

What people said

nayuki · 2025-01 · Recommendation

There are a number of niche videos on the topic of learn-to-bike that emphasizes the pedal-less balance method: [LINK] , [VIDEO] , [LINK] , [LINK] , [LINK] , etc.

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aembleton · 2022-10 · Reference

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 [VIDEO]

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lqet · 2021-12 · Reference

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] [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Tom Scott plus, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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