Turn quickly to the weak direction

It was a familiar experience to discover how asymmetrical my ability turn was. I found that I could turn to the left with relative confidence but turn quickly to the right side was very different and awkward.

What worked for me to make quick turns through 90 degrees to the left (confident side) was to:

i) keep relatively upright.
ii) turn shoulder and lock my eyes on what I wanted to turn towards
iii) then and only then twist my hips to point the cycle towards the direction my head and shoulders faced.
iv) I found it easiest to to be on the down stroke with the leg that is on the side I wanted to turn towards.
Other things that seemed to help were to use the rising knee (on the outside of the arc being turned through to push the nose of the seat around.

To turn the other direction quickly I ended up needing to be very deliberate about an additional step going into the turn. All steps were:

i) keep upright (same)
ii) just before i wanted to turn to the right I turn very slightly the other way by twisting shoulder only (not head) slightly to the left and then turning my head and shoulder quickly to the other direction and lock my eyes on what I wanted to turn towards.
iii)  Then flick the hips around.
iv) again favour the down stroke of the pedal in the direction you want turn
v) use the outside knee to help turn the unicycle.

keep pedaling through the turn.


Update:

Made some more progress here and am making tighter turns.The couple of things that emerged are:
i) Staying relatively vertical and avoiding leaning hard or bending forward - looks towards where you want to turn. Both of these action requiring the radius of you turn to be larger.

ii) Raise myself off the seat a bit as I turn. I am still in contact, I just reduce the pressure on the seat so that the seat can turn under me without it be driven by my thighs against the seat. The twisting motion is achieved naturally as your inside foot pushes back on the pedal and the outside one pushes forward. You can enhance this by visualising the pull backwards and pushforwards of the opposite legs ( think cross country skiing type motion). This lets the unicycle initiate the turn and ahead of your center of gravity shift which seems to increase agility.

iii) Continually twist to look at the new spot you want to turn to. This is tricky because when you turn your body and then the uni, the uni catches up and angle between where you are looking and where the uni is pointing gets small. The challenge is to keep turning you upper body to avoid the uni pointing in the same direction. Keeping this angle as big as possible ( continually correcting it) helps a lot.


Eureka!!!!!

After reading up on the UK Hockey League - How to Play I read that you should observe the opponents shoulders as an indicator of where there will turn. So today I tried dropping the shoulder on the side I want to turn to and Eureka I was turning like a person who turns well!!!!! yeah!!!