I Learned More in 2 Hours Than 20 Years - How to Wheelie

At a glance

Fourteen minutes, and it is one of the cleanest pieces of motorcycle instruction on YouTube, mostly because the guy receiving it is not a beginner. Soup Moto has been on dirt bikes since he was four years old. Motocross tracks, a 65 to an 85 to a 125, jumps, rough terrain, clutch work, all of it second nature. He could also pop the front end up and not crash, which he is careful to call what it was: a crappy power wheelie done by a rider who did not even know you were supposed to cover the rear brake. Twenty plus years of riding, and a real wheelie was still not in the toolbox.

So he asked his friend LoMoto, an actual supermoto stunt rider, to teach him. Under two hours later he was riding at balance point and taking a hand off the bars.

The interesting part is what actually fixed it. Not the throttle. Not the clutch. Not even the rear brake, which does end up being the control that matters most. What fixed it was his left foot. LoMoto's core technique is the shift lock: jam your toe up underneath the shift lever and hold constant upward pressure, which both keeps the bike in second and physically bolts your body to the machine. Once your feet are carrying you, your hands can go light, and light hands are the whole game, because on a bike up on one wheel your bars are still a steering input and a death grip is a steering input you did not mean to make.

The rest of the lesson is a stack of small corrections that each fix a specific failure mode: get out of first gear because a spinning front wheel is what holds you steady side to side, take the free play out of the rear brake before you pop it so the pedal is live the instant you need it, stop doing a pull-up on the bars, slide to the back of the seat, and read your fork tubes against the horizon to know exactly where you are relative to balance point. This page rebuilds all of it in the order LoMoto taught it, keeps every cue verbatim where the wording matters, and draws out the two things the video only says out loud: the control map for all five inputs, and the fork tube gauge.

Chapters

Click any timestamp and the floating player jumps there and keeps playing. YouTube has no chapter markers on this upload, so these are drawn from the video's own structure and its real time codes.

• 0:00 Twenty years and still no wheelie
• 0:41 Slacker, and the case for setting your sag
• 1:34 Four years old, a 65, an 85, a 125
• 2:26 Two camps that do not talk to each other
• 3:58 The buddy with the sickest supermoto build
• 4:18 Baseline: show me what you have got
• 4:52 Fix one, get out of first gear
• 5:17 Fix two, take the play out of the rear brake
• 5:31 Fix three, stop doing a pull-up on the bars
• 5:54 Fix four, slide to the back of the seat
• 6:22 The thing that changed everything: the shift lock
• 6:59 The full setup, in order
• 7:21 "This is so weird to think about"
• 8:04 The moment it clicks
• 8:57 Every stunter locks in somehow
• 9:09 The rear brake foot controls the wheelie
• 9:37 Brake reflex drill: feather, never stomp
• 10:24 Why an air-cooled 250F barely needs the brake
• 10:52 Reading the fork tubes
• 12:24 Peer off to the side
• 12:57 An hour of reps, then the one-hander
• 13:36 Hooked

Twenty years and still no wheelie (0:00)

The opening is a confession, delivered over footage of him failing to do the thing:

I've been riding dirt bikes for over 20 years, and somehow I still can't wheelie.

Today he gets a lesson from LoMoto, an actual stunt rider. What he expected was a basic lesson on wheelies. What he got, in his words, completely blew his mind, because less than two hours later he was doing something on a dirt bike he genuinely never thought he would be able to do. And the weirdest part, he says, is that the thing that made it click was not what he expected at all.

He lays out the three jobs of the video up front: why he wanted to learn wheelies in the first place, the tips LoMoto taught him, and the exact moment everything finally clicked. All three get delivered.

Slacker, and the case for setting your sag (0:41)

The sponsor read is short and it is at least on topic, which is more than most. The product is the Slacker Digital Sag Scale.

His argument for it: regardless of whether you are coming from off-road riding on dirt bikes or stunting on supermotos, your suspension setup is probably the most important factor in how comfortable you feel on the bike. And suspension is also one of the more confusing parts of motorcycles, so essential tasks like setting your sag get skipped. The reason they get skipped is mechanical, not lazy: measuring sag the traditional way normally requires multiple people, because somebody has to balance the bike upright while somebody else reads a tape measure off the rear axle at the same time.

The Slacker replaces that with a digital scale you can read solo. His claim is that you can check your sag in less than five minutes all by yourself, which means more riding and less tinkering. Code SOUP gets 40% off at checkout.

For anyone who has never done it: sag is how far the suspension compresses under the weight of the bike and then under the weight of the bike plus rider. It is the single setting that determines whether the rest of your suspension is even operating in its usable range, and it is free to set. It also matters more than usual for this particular video, since a wheelie is entirely a conversation between the rear shock, the rear tire and your body weight.

Four years old, a 65, an 85, a 125 (1:34)

Then the backstory, which exists to make one point: this is not a beginner asking how to ride.

He was four years old when he hopped on a dirt bike for the first time, and from then on he was completely hooked. His dad was a moto guy competing in local races, so he naturally gravitated toward the motocross track, and that is the main type of riding he did as he moved up through the bikes: from a 65, to an 85, to a 125.

Over the years he got genuinely comfortable. Shifting gears, using the clutch, hitting jumps, navigating rough terrain, all of it became second nature. He could even do what he calls crappy power wheelies, where he would pop the front up and somehow not crash the bike. The reason he calls them crappy is worth quoting, because it is the real thesis of the video:

because at that time I didn't even know you were supposed to cover the back brake.

And then the generalisation:

After so many years of riding, you try a lot of things on the bike and you end up being able to do a lot of stuff in a half-assed way, but it's not necessarily the right way.

That is the setup for everything that follows. Twenty years of riding produced a working approximation of a wheelie with no safety net underneath it. The lesson does not teach him a new trick. It replaces the approximation with a technique.

Two camps that do not talk to each other (2:26)

Around the time he started supermoto, a few years ago now, he began exploring other disciplines. He learned about cross-country racing and hard enduro, and he also started to develop a curiosity around stunt riding on supermotos and street bikes.

What he found interesting is the shape of the divide. Even though there is a huge deal of crossover between many of the techniques, it seemed to him that there was a huge divide between the two communities: the off-road guys, MX and enduro, in one camp, and the street guys doing wheelies and stunting in another. He thought both disciplines were super cool, and he makes the comparison that ties them together:

the same way riders like Graham Jarvis can do really slow, technical wheelies and pivot turns on challenging trails gave me the same sort of amazement as watching talented stunt riders almost dance on their bikes while in a wheelie.

Graham Jarvis is the right name to reach for. He is the most decorated hard enduro rider alive, and his signature is not power, it is balance: slow speed wheelies and pivot turns used as tools to get a bike over obstacles that look impassable. Which is exactly the same skill a stunter uses, pointed at a different problem.

If you have never seen true stunt riding, he says, look it up, because these people are doing seat standers and hand drags and crazy maneuvers where they fling themselves up on the gas tank of sport bikes and twist their legs around the handlebars. Just all types of wacky stuff.

Then the part he does not soften. He notes a lack of respect coming from a lot of riders in the off-road community toward stunters, and immediately draws the line honestly:

and let me be clear, not all riders in the off-road community lack respect for stunters, but for my experience, it's been a pretty large chunk.

Despite that, he looked at the discipline and thought: he has been riding for over two decades and there is still this whole type of riding he has never explored.

The buddy with the sickest supermoto build (3:58)

Luckily, he has a buddy who happens to have one of the sickest supermoto builds he has ever seen, and, more importantly, the dude knows how to stunt ride. So in an attempt to bring their two worlds of motorcycle riding together, he asked his buddy LoMoto if he could teach him how to finally wheelie his dirt bike.

LoMoto, rider number 821, runs a channel built around a heavily developed Honda CRF450L supermoto, a build he documented across a five part series, plus stunt riding, street riding and how-to content. He shot his own version of this same session, published the same day, from the instructor's side of the lesson. He also has two standalone tutorials worth having open if you are actually going to try this: How to Wheelie a Dirt Bike (Complete Beginner Guide) and How to Coaster Wheelie a Dirt Bike (Complete Beginner Guide).

The bike Soup is on is his air-cooled 250F four stroke trail bike, which LoMoto refers to by name later in the lesson and which turns out to matter a great deal for the rear brake work. The venue is a grass hilltop with a two track dirt path running along the ridge, rolling green hills behind. No cones, no closed course, no pavement. One rider, one instructor, one field.

And, as he puts it: boy did he learn some things he was not expecting.

Baseline: show me what you have got (4:18)

The first thing LoMoto had him do was just do a few wheelies without any instruction, purely to get a baseline on where he was at.

This is a small thing and it is the right thing. LoMoto does not open with theory. He watches, and then he diagnoses.

All right. Wheelie number one.

LoMoto: That was actually really good.

Soup: Okay.

LoMoto: That's a good starting point.

Right away, LoMoto was able to figure out the parts of the technique where Soup was having the most trouble, and he gave him tips to correct them. What follows is four corrections in about ninety seconds, delivered in the order LoMoto spotted them.

Fix one: get out of first gear (4:52)

The first question is a diagnostic one.

LoMoto: You're already popping your clutch, right?

Soup: Yeah, I'm in first.

LoMoto: Oh, you're in first?

Soup: Yeah.

LoMoto: Okay, so I'd recommend maybe doing second because you're falling side to side.

Note that the symptom came first. LoMoto had already seen the bike falling side to side. First gear is the cause he goes looking for once he hears it.

The explanation is the best physics in the video, and it is delivered without a single technical term:

So actually how it works is the faster you go, the steadier you're going to be side to side. And actually the faster your run-up is, the better you'll be side to side because the front wheel actually the more it's spinning, the more stable you are side to side. So when you're going slow in first gear and you pop it up, your front wheel stops spinning like right away and that's going to make the bike really, really unbalanced.

That is gyroscopic stability, described from the saddle. The front wheel is the only spinning mass on the bike that is free to resist a roll input, and the moment the front leaves the ground nothing is driving it any more. It coasts down. From a slow first gear run-up the front wheel is barely turning to begin with, so it stops almost immediately and the bike loses its stabilizer at exactly the moment the rider needs it. A faster second gear run-up gives the front wheel real angular momentum to spend while it is in the air, and that is what buys the steadiness.

So: second gear, and a genuine run-up rather than a lug-and-pop.

Fix two: take the play out of the rear brake (5:17)

The second correction takes ten seconds and is the one that separates a wheelie with a safety net from one without.

And another tip I have for you is before you pop it up, your rear brake here. You see how you have like this play in it? So that play you're actually not engaging your rear brake yet. What I would do is before you pop it up, just rest your foot on here, take that play out. That way whenever you need to use your rear brake, you'll instantly have brake pressure.

Every rear brake pedal has free play, the dead travel before the master cylinder pushrod actually starts moving fluid. On the ground it is invisible and irrelevant. On the back wheel with the bike rotating past balance point it is the difference between braking now and braking in a fifth of a second, and a fifth of a second is roughly the whole margin you have.

The fix is not to adjust the pedal. It is to pre-load it with your foot before you ever pop the clutch, so the pedal is sitting right at the bite point when the wheelie starts. Rest the foot, take the slack out, and the brake is live.

This is also the exact thing Soup admits he did not know for twenty years. He was doing power wheelies without covering the back brake at all.

Fix three: stop doing a pull-up on the bars (5:31)

The third correction is one LoMoto flags as a habit he himself has never fully broken:

So I would do that. A lot of people kind of mess this up. I still do it to this day. It's a hard habit to break, but when you do a wheelie, a lot of people pull their body weight forward on the bars like they're almost doing a pull-up. You might even do it without even noticing, but you actually just want to just lean back. Just let your body be be and easy.

Soup asks the obvious follow up, whether you lock the elbows or stay relaxed:

LoMoto: Yeah, you don't want to like lock them like straight like that, but just like just relax. You'll know if you're doing it wrong if your head's up by the bars. You want to be like looking at the bars from a distance.

That last line is the useful part, because it converts an invisible fault into a check you can run mid wheelie. You cannot feel whether you are pulling on the bars. You can absolutely tell where your head is. If your head is up near the bars, you are pulling yourself forward. If you are looking at the bars from a distance, your weight is where it should be.

Locked elbows are wrong too. The instruction is relaxed arms, body leaning back, and nothing rigid anywhere.

Fix four: slide to the back of the seat (5:54)

The fourth is the shortest exchange in the lesson and it exposes the real problem.

LoMoto: Also, before I do it, I always slide back on my seat. So, like where do you usually sit when you do a wheelie? Back there or in the middle?

Soup: honestly, I don't I don't think about it, so I'm not sure.

LoMoto: So, whenever you first do it, I would slide to the back of your seat, like somewhere back in here.

"I don't think about it, so I'm not sure" is the twenty years in one sentence. Everything he had been doing was reactive. None of it was a set-up.

Sliding back matters for the same reason everything else in the wheelie does: it moves the center of mass rearward, closer to the rear axle, which means less throttle is needed to lift the front and the balance point sits at a shallower, less frightening angle. It also puts your body where the next technique needs it to be.

The thing that changed everything: the shift lock (6:22)

This is the hinge of the video. Soup narrates it directly:

But, this is where everything changed because Lomoto told me about a technique that had completely been off my radar for the last 20 years. And this, in combination with the other tips he gave me, were about to take my wheelies to the next level. I just didn't realize it yet.

And here it is, verbatim, because the wording is the instruction:

And then if you feel like you're going to fall off your seat, which I do this every wheelie, is I shift lock. So, what that is is that actually helps lock you into a bike, so you're nice and sturdy. So, you've been doing them in first, but say you want to do a second gear, you're going to put your foot underneath the shifter, lift up in the second, and hold it like that. So, you're going to keep pressure on that. And that's going to shift the bike to second, but it won't shift it to third cuz you're holding up on the transmission.

Mechanically: you put your left toe under the shift lever, lift it into second, and then you never let go. You hold constant upward pressure against the lever for the entire wheelie. The transmission is already in second and a motorcycle gearbox will not index again until the lever returns and travels again, so the sustained pressure cannot upshift you into third. Your foot has become a hook.

Then the second half, which is the actual payoff:

And what that's going to do is since you're holding yourself in your foot, you can loosen up on the bars. Cuz when you're doing a wheelie, you don't want to like death grip the bars because little movements in the bars can actually steer the bike. So, you want your hands to be extremely light on the bars. And you want all your weight to be in your feet. So, hold up on the shifter to hold your body on the bike, and be light on your bars.

This is the whole idea, and it is a chain of three links. You are afraid of falling off the back, so you grip the bars. You are gripping the bars, so you are steering the bike without meaning to. The bike is wandering, so you are afraid. The shift lock breaks the chain at the first link. Give the body a mechanical anchor that is not the handlebars, and the hands are free to do nothing, which is exactly what you want them doing.

The full setup, in order (6:59)

LoMoto then compresses everything into one procedure, and this is the part to memorize:

So, what I would do is I would roll up slowly in second. You can shift lock. It might feel weird at first, but it's actually going to help lock you in. So, kick up in the second, just hold your foot like that. Roll up, take that little extra pressure out of your rear brake, right? And then you're set up. Get a nice pace going, pop your clutch. I'd push down a little bit, pull up. And then you just try that. So, I would start out with shift lock, brake pressure, clutch it up in second, and just see where you're at from there.

Unpacked into the order the rider actually executes it:

1. Roll up in first, then shift into second and hold the lever up. That is the shift lock, set before anything else happens.
2. Rest the right foot on the rear brake pedal and take the free play out. The brake is now live.
3. Slide back on the seat, arms relaxed, head back away from the bars.
4. Build a nice pace. Not a crawl. The run-up is what keeps you steady side to side.
5. Push down a little bit on the bars to compress the front suspension, then pull up as it rebounds. You are timing the lift against the fork's own spring, not muscling the bike up.
6. Pop the clutch on the up stroke.
7. Hands go light. All the weight goes into the feet. The right foot stays on the brake.

Step 5 is easy to miss and it is doing real work. Pushing down loads the fork springs, and the rebound gives you free upward momentum at the front end, which means the clutch pop has less work to do and the lift comes up smoother and more predictably. The same trick is why a rider can loft the front over a log at almost no speed.

Note that LoMoto also splits the learning: if the shift lock alone is too much to think about, drill it on its own first.

What I would do is just put the bike in first. You know, you can kind of ride up there, just shift into second, then just hold your foot. Once you got that dialed, then you can try a wheelie, you know what I mean?

Learn the foot position while riding normally, on the ground, with no front wheel in the air. Only then add the wheelie.

"This is so weird to think about" (7:21)

Soup goes and tries it, and the first thing that comes out is honesty about how alien it feels.

So, I went and I gave it a try. And dang was it weird at first.

Yeah, I've never tried the shift lock where I'm in second now. This is so weird to think about. Oh god. Okay. So, I shift, and then I just hold my foot on the shifter as I'm riding?

LoMoto: You're doing your run up like that in second, like locked in?

Soup: Yep. so I pick whatever gear I want to do a wheelie in and I shift lock. That's so bizarre.

Which is exactly the right reaction to a technique that asks you to hold a control input permanently, something every rider is trained from day one not to do. Then he runs the sequence out loud, as a rider does when the motion has not gone automatic yet:

Okay, so I'm in first. Okay, now I'm in second, I'm locked in. I'm locked in.

LoMoto: Yes, that's what you want.

Soup: So then I just pop up from here.

LoMoto: Yep.

The moment it clicks (8:04)

He narrates it over the footage.

And that was when it finally clicked.

So we're in first. Now I'm locked in second.

That already felt like so much better. I'm going to try it again.

LoMoto: I could tell, dude, that was nice. Yeah, he's going to learn this quick. I knew it.

Soup: I have to think about it. I have to think about it.

LoMoto: Yep, you'll get it. Once you get used to it, you'll just do it all the time. And once you know the proper technique, it makes it so much easier to learn this.

Then the check in:

LoMoto: How's that feel?

Soup: It's so badass. Way more stable.

LoMoto: And how's the shift lock feel? You feel like locked into the bike?

Soup: Odd, but yeah.

LoMoto: Yeah, it's weird at first, but once you do like a bunch of wheelies doing that, you won't be able to wheelie without it.

Soup: It's just weird like putting constant pressure on it cuz I it just feels like foreign to me, but once you're actually up in the wheelie, you definitely feel way more locked in too with your feet.

Two things worth flagging in that exchange. First, "way more stable" is the specific symptom that got fixed: the falling side to side LoMoto diagnosed at 4:52. Second, LoMoto's prediction that "you won't be able to wheelie without it" is the tell of a technique that is load bearing rather than decorative. Once your body knows the anchor is there, riding without it feels like the thing that is wrong.

Every stunter locks in somehow (8:57)

LoMoto broadens it out, and this is the useful generalisation for anyone whose bike or boots do not suit a shifter hook:

People do it differently all the time. Like people do the shifter, the foot peg, some people wedge it under the frame, like all kinds of weird stuff. As long as you find a way to lock in, and I think shift locking's the most legit way of them all, so that's how I do it.

Three named methods, one principle. Find a way to lock in. The shift lock is his pick because it uses a control that is already under your foot and does not require you to contort anything, but the requirement is structural, not specific: your body has to be held to the bike by something other than your hands.

Then the compliment and the pivot:

But dude, your wheelies already are looking like supreme.

The rear brake foot controls the wheelie (9:09)

And straight into the thing that actually keeps you alive.

Cuz I'm sure you already know, but the rear brake foot controls the wheelie. You know what I mean? That's what's going to bring you down, take you out of the danger zone and stuff.

Soup: Should I be like using it to bring it down every time or

LoMoto: You can if you like do you feel comfortable on your rear brake? Like if you've ever done a wheelie before and set it down with the rear brake?

Soup: Like yes, I have, but I don't know if it's like an instinct yet.

LoMoto: Yeah, so you definitely want it to be an instinct. Like you don't even want to think about it. Like if you get to the danger zone, you just want to drop the bike without even thinking about it.

"I don't know if it's like an instinct yet" is the honest answer, and LoMoto treats it as a gap to close rather than a fine-for-now. The distinction he is drawing is between a skill you can execute and a reflex that fires without a decision. Only the second one is any use when the bike goes past balance point, because at that point the interval between recognizing it and needing to have already acted is essentially zero.

Brake reflex drill: feather, never stomp (9:37)

So he builds a drill for it, and the drill is precise.

Let's check your your brake reflexes. So, do everything you did, shift lock, second gear, same speed, bring it up to the same height, but as soon as you're up there, instead of riding it out the way down there, feather your rear brake and bring it back down. Now, don't like stomp on it cuz if you stomp on it, that'll they'll slam you down quick, and you can also stall the bike out. Be gentle on it, but also be firm enough that it'll bring the bike down.

So, right now you're going to learn your rear brake and also kind of learn the pressure you need to bring the bike down without like hurting yourself.

The drill in full:

• Same shift lock, same second gear, same speed, same height. Nothing new is being introduced except the ending.
• Instead of riding the wheelie out for distance, bring it down immediately with the rear brake.
• Feather it. Do not stomp.
• Two named failure modes for stomping: it slams the front down hard, and it can stall the bike, which on a four stroke with a locked rear wheel is its own problem.
• The success criterion is not the wheelie at all. It is calibration: learning what pressure brings the bike down without hurting yourself.

This is a good piece of coaching design. Everything is held constant so the only variable being learned is the pedal, and the rep count goes up because each wheelie is now three seconds instead of thirty.

Soup narrates what came next:

We moved on to some drills designed to commit covering the rear brake to muscle memory, and I began to get closer and closer to balance point.

And afterwards:

LoMoto: That feel pretty good?

Soup: Yeah. It feels like I'm actually doing it correctly, yeah, and not just like doing whatever I feel randomly.

"Not just doing whatever I feel randomly" is the same confession as "I don't think about it, so I'm not sure," arriving from the other side.

Why an air-cooled 250F barely needs the brake (10:24)

Then a bike specific caveat that changes the whole calculus for anyone learning on a trail bike:

You got the rear brake, and I'm going to be honest, so you're on the 250 F, and you're on a four-stroke. All four-strokes have crazy engine brake, and I know this bike being air-cooled trail bike has even more engine brake. You know what I mean? So, you're going to have to use very little like rear brake on this bike until you're extremely far back.

Soup's bike is an air-cooled 250 four stroke trail bike, Honda's CRF250F, which he has run through a 34 mile enduro torture test elsewhere on the channel. The cooling fins are clearly visible in the shift lock close-up at 6:35. It sits in the CRF trail line rather than the motocross line: heavy flywheel, mild cam, tall gearing, built for tractability instead of top end.

Which produces enormous engine braking. Close the throttle on a big single four stroke and the engine turns into a pump working against a closed throttle plate, and all that drag arrives at the rear wheel. On a bike like this the throttle is already most of a brake. The consequence LoMoto draws is practical: on this bike you will need very little actual rear brake until you are extremely far back, which means a rider who learned on a two stroke or a modern liquid cooled motocross bike would find the balance window here noticeably wider and the recovery gentler.

He also pays a compliment that matters for what comes next:

And you're already being really, really smooth on the throttle, which is good. Cuz some guys are really choppy, and you don't want that.

Choppy throttle on a wheelie is the fastest way to oscillate the bike, because every on-off transition swings the front end. Smoothness is a prerequisite for chasing balance point at all.

Reading the fork tubes (10:52)

This is the second big technique of the lesson, and it is the one that turns "feel" into an instrument reading.

So, to bring the bike up to balance point, you're going to do exactly what you did now. And you're already being really, really smooth on the throttle, which is good. So, essentially what you're going to do is you're going to pop it up just like you were, and you're going to stare down your fork tubes. You're going to look at like the horizon out there. Just look out in front of you, but keep an eye on your fork tubes, okay?

Then the three states:

When the fork tubes are pointed at the ground, you need more throttle to bring the bike up. When the fork tubes are level with the ground, you're pretty much at balance point. And when the fork tubes are pointed at the sky, you're at true balance point.

And the definition of true balance point:

And what true balance point is, that's when you use no brake and no gas, and the bike will just coast at a wheelie.

Then the same three states mapped onto speed, which is what makes the gauge genuinely useful:

So, when the forks are pointed at the ground, you're gaining more speed. When they're level with the ground, you're staying the same speed. And when they're pointed up in the air, you're reducing speed. You're going slower.

That second reading is the clever part. The fork tube angle is not just an attitude indicator, it is also a rate of change indicator. Below balance point you are accelerating, at level you are holding, past it you are decelerating. So a rider who knows nothing about their speedometer can still know whether the situation is running away from them, purely by where the forks are pointing.

Then a warning, which is the most safety relevant sentence in the lesson:

And then, once obviously once they're up there at the sky, that's when you want to start to use your rear brake. But like I said, this bike has a ton a ton of engine brake. So, what you're going to do is you're going to do the exact same thing, keep an eye on your fork tubes, and try not to chase it out. Because the more speed you get, obviously the more dangerous you are. You want to get the balance point as quickly as you can.

Chasing it out is the classic beginner failure: the front is not coming up high enough, so you add throttle, and instead of rotating further the bike accelerates, so you add more throttle, and now you are doing a mediocre wheelie at a speed you did not choose. LoMoto's rule is to get to balance point as quickly as you can, precisely so you never spend time in the accelerating regime.

The rep he actually assigns:

So, essentially, what you want to do here is you want to clutch up, and you want to try to bring the forks level with the ground, so the bike stays the same speed. And then you're going to give the bike just a little tiny bit more throttle, so where the forks start to go up past balance point, and you're going to let off the gas. When you let off the gas, the engine brake, you'll hear the bike, and it'll set the bike down. And if it doesn't set the bike down, if you let off and it goes and starts falling backwards, that's when you're going to use your rear brake.

A two stage descent, with the throttle as the primary brake and the pedal as the backup:

1. Clutch up, bring the forks level. Speed is now steady.
2. A little tiny bit more throttle. Forks rotate up past balance point.
3. Let off the gas. Engine braking alone should set it down, and you will hear it happen.
4. Only if it keeps falling backwards after you close the throttle do you go to the rear brake.

That ordering is bike specific and LoMoto says so. On the air-cooled 250F, closing the throttle is most of a brake. On a bike with less engine braking, step 4 arrives a lot sooner.

The first attempts do not land immediately, and the coaching is terse and immediate:

LoMoto: A little bit higher, I think.

Soup: Yep, a little bit higher. Didn't get it up fast enough.

LoMoto: Perfect, right there.

Peer off to the side (12:24)

Then a problem the technique creates, and the fix for it.

Soup: To be honest, like, I'm having a hard time like seeing the fork tubes. I don't know if it's cuz these kind of cover them a little bit, or like the bars.

He is right. On a dirt bike with handguards fitted and a tall front fender, looking straight down the centerline gives you a view of plastic, not of fork tubes. LoMoto's answer identifies the underlying cause rather than the symptom:

Yep. So, you might be like leaning forward more. So, if you're leaning forward and you're pointing yourself in the bars, you're going to see a lot of like fender and handlebars. So, you want to like lean back, and then just kind of peer your head off to the side a little bit. So, every time I do a wheelie, I'm looking off to the side a little bit. That way you can see your front wheel and your fork tubes and everything. And then also look at like what's coming out in front of you.

Two fixes stacked. First, leaning forward is what puts the bars between your eyes and the forks, so the sightline problem is really the pull-up problem from 5:31 showing up again in a different form. Second, even with the body back, you deliberately peer off to one side rather than straight ahead. LoMoto does this on every wheelie. It buys a clear view of the front wheel and the fork tubes while still letting you watch what is coming.

And with that, the confirmation:

LoMoto: Yep, but that time right there, you did hit balance point. Your forks were like level, and I heard you let off the gas, and the bike kind of hung there for a second.

Soup: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I I kind of felt it become a little like you said, like a little more weightless.

Two independent instruments agreeing. LoMoto heard it from the ground, the throttle closing and the bike hanging rather than dropping. Soup felt it as weightlessness. That is balance point, arrived at from both sides.

An hour of reps, and then the one-hander (12:57)

For the next hour or so, I continued practicing what I had learned. But, at one point, Low Moto suggested something to me that I thought was absolutely bonkers.

The suggestion:

Yeah, and I mean, honestly, even if you want to try it, one of the scariest tricks that's like mental that people can't get over is doing a one-hander. And it's literally the same thing what you're doing right now, you just take your hand off. Because all your weight's on that foot, and you don't realize it, and you just pretty much keep doing the same wheelie, you just got your hand off.

This is the shift lock cashing out. If the anchor is genuinely the foot and the hands are genuinely light, then a hand on the bar is not load bearing, and removing it changes nothing structural. The barrier is entirely mental, which is exactly what LoMoto says. The technique already made the trick possible an hour before anyone tried it.

I didn't quite believe him at first, but sure as heck I built up enough courage and I took my freaking hand off the handlebars.

LoMoto: That's crazy.

Left hand off, right hand still on the throttle, the front wheel up, on grass. Under two hours after his first baseline wheelie of the day.

Hooked (13:36)

And I think that's what got me absolutely hooked because now I'm itching to get my next super secret bike. Stay tuned for that. And continue down the road of stunt riding.

Then the closing argument, which is the same one he opened the middle section with, now earned:

Remember, no matter if you like hitting jumps, tackling complex trails, or doing stunts on the street, we all really just love motorcycles. So, if you haven't yet, I'd urge you to give a new riding discipline a try. You just might find that you were actually missing out on a ton of fun on the bike.

He thanks LoMoto for sharing his wealth of knowledge, and points people at LoMoto's version of the same session for more insights from the class.

The ledger: twenty years versus two hours

Every input in the wheelie, before the lesson and after it. The left column is not a beginner's wheelie. It is a competent motocross rider's self taught approximation, which is what makes the comparison useful.

Run the lesson yourself

The session in the order LoMoto actually taught it, which is also the order to practice it in. Each stage adds exactly one new thing.

Best quotes

After so many years of riding, you try a lot of things on the bike and you end up being able to do a lot of stuff in a half-assed way, but it's not necessarily the right way.

Soup Moto, 2:14

the more it's spinning, the more stable you are side to side. So when you're going slow in first gear and you pop it up, your front wheel stops spinning like right away and that's going to make the bike really, really unbalanced.

LoMoto, 5:07

So that play you're actually not engaging your rear brake yet. What I would do is before you pop it up, just rest your foot on here, take that play out. That way whenever you need to use your rear brake, you'll instantly have brake pressure.

LoMoto, 5:21

You'll know if you're doing it wrong if your head's up by the bars. You want to be like looking at the bars from a distance.

LoMoto, 5:51

honestly, I don't I don't think about it, so I'm not sure.

Soup Moto, 5:59, on where he sits when he wheelies

since you're holding yourself in your foot, you can loosen up on the bars. Cuz when you're doing a wheelie, you don't want to like death grip the bars because little movements in the bars can actually steer the bike. So, you want your hands to be extremely light on the bars. And you want all your weight to be in your feet.

LoMoto, 6:42

Once you get used to it, you'll just do it all the time. And once you know the proper technique, it makes it so much easier to learn this.

LoMoto, 8:25

As long as you find a way to lock in, and I think shift locking's the most legit way of them all.

LoMoto, 9:04

the rear brake foot controls the wheelie. That's what's going to bring you down, take you out of the danger zone.

LoMoto, 9:13

Yeah, so you definitely want it to be an instinct. Like you don't even want to think about it. Like if you get to the danger zone, you just want to drop the bike without even thinking about it.

LoMoto, 9:31

Now, don't like stomp on it cuz if you stomp on it, that'll slam you down quick, and you can also stall the bike out. Be gentle on it, but also be firm enough that it'll bring the bike down.

LoMoto, 9:47

It feels like I'm actually doing it correctly, yeah, and not just like doing whatever I feel randomly.

Soup Moto, 10:19

When the fork tubes are pointed at the ground, you need more throttle to bring the bike up. When the fork tubes are level with the ground, you're pretty much at balance point. And when the fork tubes are pointed at the sky, you're at true balance point.

LoMoto, 11:00

try not to chase it out. Because the more speed you get, obviously the more dangerous you are. You want to get the balance point as quickly as you can.

LoMoto, 11:28

every time I do a wheelie, I'm looking off to the side a little bit. That way you can see your front wheel and your fork tubes and everything.

LoMoto, 12:42

one of the scariest tricks that's like mental that people can't get over is doing a one-hander. And it's literally the same thing what you're doing right now, you just take your hand off. Because all your weight's on that foot, and you don't realize it.

LoMoto, 13:13

if you haven't yet, I'd urge you to give a new riding discipline a try. You just might find that you were actually missing out on a ton of fun on the bike.

Soup Moto, 13:56

Safety, and where this stands

A labeled section at the end, because the video is a rebuild of a lesson and not a substitute for one.

The rear brake is the whole safety system, and it fails silently. Everything else in this lesson is about making the wheelie better. The rear brake is the only thing that makes it survivable. Past balance point, gravity is now working with you rather than against you, and the bike rotates away faster the further it goes. That is why LoMoto is emphatic that it has to be a reflex and not a decision, and why he drills it separately before he lets Soup chase balance point. If you take one thing from the page, take the free play instruction: an uncovered pedal with slack in it is not a brake.

The shift lock cuts both ways. It is a genuinely good technique and it also removes your ability to shift or to get your foot off quickly. Riders who lock in with a boot wedged under the frame are giving up even more. Nothing in the video addresses what happens to a locked in foot in a crash, and that is worth thinking about before you adopt any of the three methods, particularly on a bike where the shifter sits close to the case.

The engine braking advice is bike specific and LoMoto says so. The instruction to close the throttle and let the motor set the bike down is calibrated to a heavy flywheel air-cooled 250 trail bike. On a modern motocross four stroke, a two stroke, or an electric bike with regen mapped differently, the throttle does far less braking and the rear pedal has to come in much earlier. Do not carry the timing across bikes without recalibrating it on stage 6.

Venue. All of this is filmed on a private grass field on a dirt bike, at low speed, with an experienced instructor watching from a few yards away and calling corrections between every attempt. Every part of that matters. Wheelie practice on a public road is a different activity with different consequences, legal and otherwise, and neither rider suggests otherwise.

On the title. "I learned more in 2 hours than 20 years" is a headline, and the video is honest about what is underneath it: he already had twenty years of bike control, which is exactly why two hours of structured instruction converted so fast. LoMoto's first assessment of the baseline wheelie was "that was actually really good, that's a good starting point." A rider without that base is not going to get to a one-hander in an afternoon, and nothing here claims they would.

What is generalisable. The strongest idea in the video is not the shift lock, it is the diagnostic pattern. Watch the rider first, name the symptom, find the cause, then change exactly one variable per drill and hold everything else constant. That is why an hour of reps beat two decades of trying things. It is also the argument for spending money on an afternoon of coaching rather than on parts.

Resources

The people

• SOUP MOTO, the channel. Dirt bike advice, bike comparisons and long form riding content.
• LoMoto, rider 821, the instructor in this video. Supermoto, stunt riding and street riding, plus how-to content. Instagram and all links.
• Graham Jarvis, the hard enduro rider Soup names at 3:04 for slow technical wheelies and pivot turns.

LoMoto's side of the same session, and his tutorials

• Can I Teach Him to Wheelie in One Day?, LoMoto's own cut of this lesson, published the same day.
• How to Wheelie a Dirt Bike (Complete Beginner Guide).
• How to Coaster Wheelie a Dirt Bike (Complete Beginner Guide).
• I Built the Ultimate CRF450L Supermoto, Episode 5, the build Soup calls one of the sickest he has seen.

The bike

• Honda CRF250F, the air-cooled 250 four stroke trail bike Soup is riding, and the reason engine braking does so much of the work here. Part of the Honda CRF family.
• Brutal 34-Mile Enduro TORTURE TEST on a Stock Honda CRF250F Trail Bike, Soup putting the same bike through a very different day.

The sponsor and the gear

• Slacker Digital Sag Scale, the one person sag measuring tool from the read at 0:41. Code SOUP for 40% off.
• FXR Racing, the riding gear. Code SOUPMOTOFXR for 25% off.
• Dango Design Gripper Chin Mount, the helmet chin mount that shoots the POV footage. Code soupmoto10 for 10% off.
• DJI Osmo Action 5 Pro, the camera.
• HOVERAir, the self following drone behind the aerial shots.
• Cardo Systems, the helmet comms. Code SOUP for 10% off.
• MotoSport, parts, tools and gear.
• Soup Moto's full gear list and his simple toolbox list.
• Soup Moto merch, where the logo shirt lives.

Concepts worth reading up on

• Wheelie, the maneuver and its balance point.
• Gyroscope, why a spinning front wheel resists being rolled over.
• Engine braking, the drag that sets a four stroke wheelie down without touching the pedal.
• Air-cooled engine and the four stroke cycle.
• Motorcycle fork, the component doing double duty here as suspension and as the balance point gauge.
• Center of mass, which is what sliding back on the seat is actually moving.
• Supermoto, motocross, enduro and stunt riding, the four disciplines Soup is trying to talk about in one breath.

Other Soup Moto videos referenced in the description

• Stark Varg First Impressions
• Why Dirt Biking Might Not Survive...
• 50 Things That Belong in EVERY Dirt Bike Rider's Kit!
• 60 Brutal Lessons Every Dirt Bike Rider Should Know!
• This IMMEDIATELY tells me you have NO CLUE what you're talking about...
• The TRUTH About Dirt Bike Engines
• Dirt Bikes are Meant to be Crashed
• The TRUTH About 2-Strokes
• You DON'T Need a 450
• Are 2-Strokes Dead?!