Psamathe wrote: ↑9 Mar 2024, 7:40pm
Or maybe try and solve the underlying problem?
eg if somebody asked me about better seat belts for their car because they kept hitting things then I'd respond that better seat belts won't solve the problem and easier and cheaper to sort out why they keep hitting things.
If you are falling off so often it wont be just your knees that will suffer but other body parts as well as bike damage. In my personal opinion the paths shown are not so challenging as to cause so many falls. Getting distracted? Bike handling sub-optimal?, etc.
ie you can protect your knees for £0 by not falling off.
I found my thoughts running along the same lines (wrists and collar bones probably most susceptible, and you can't brace your way out of a collar bone fracture). And while it wouldn't necessarily be £0, some training/coaching might be very good value.
Does the following seem familiar at all?
I coach (very) beginner mountain biking to kids from "just graduated from balance bikes" level and the most common cause of falls and stumbles is stopping and starting when they can't do what they've been used to and stop sat on the saddle with two feet down flat. If anything seems like it's going wrong default is hit the brakes, stay on the seat and put two feet out. That's great on a balance bike, it's a disaster on a mountain bike set up with the seat for pedalling: no feet on a pedal and there's no power and it's very hard to move weight around for balance, and because a MTB bottom bracket is high it's pretty much impossible to get two feet down at the same time if sat on the seat and one tends to need to lean quite a bit to get one foot down, resulting in much staggering and barely controlled dismounts (and where that's been set in motion by a worried reaction to difficult ground, the staggering may well be in a really awkward place).
We stop that happening by making a default stop a thing where the rider puts all weight on one pedal at 6 o'clock and steps down
ahead of the seat, putting the other foot down flat on the ground. To start, pull the pedal up from 6 o'clock to about 2 and stand on it, only getting back in the seat once you're going. And that eliminates the great majority of falls IME.
Get that dialled in as a default and all the silly low-speed tight-turn fiascos simply stop right away with one foot flat down rather than an ungainly dance with two feet flailing about too high above the ground before keeling over sideways.
Here's the one-foot-down. In this pic the rider has pulled their pedal up ready to start, on stopping the pedal with the foot on will be at 6 o'clock. Once stopped you have a triangle for optimum stable support (two wheels on the long side, a foot flat on the ground for the third) and no balancing on tippy-toe needed.
If you're already doing that...
The chair of our local advocacy group took a different method when encountering balance problems as she got older, which was an e-assist trike rather than bike. Once you've dialled in to the steering differences it's much harder to fall off a trike, particularly starting/stopping.
Pete.