What to charge for 4 x 1 hour Bike Training for 4X

Personally I’d charge for the lesson and separate for the equipment hire.  As a dad £15-20 an hour for tuition would seem fair, based on what I pay for other kids activities

id write more but this effing site is killing my iPad againe

We want people to use standard equipment for the intro courses. If they have a 4X bike then we will offer improvement courses for them.

If you are happy at £15-£20 per hour then my thoughts of £10 per session for the first batch seem quite reasonable

£10 sounds like a bargain to me.

thing is, most people will want to ride their own bike, my two certainly would.  Little one would probably flat out refuse to do it, eldest might with some persuasion
its going to be a big expense for you to source multiple bikes of multiple sizes, and I’d be worried about them getting nicked if you try to store on site

£10 an hour seems reasonable to me, I have no idea what these things normally cost though

Oh I have just built a 4x bike but am basically completely rubbish….

The big question...will WCA be doing the training....

I have secured funding for 4 bikes and to pay for the professional coach. We also have training paid for 3 committee members to do future coaching courses.

I will discuss prices with the others. I just wanted to get some views from STW

Dt78 - we can do 1:1 training if you want to join

Based on what I would pay for a 6-1 group session at FoD for 3hrs I would say 15-  £20.00 for the coaching per hour. Not sure if the equipment hire would be a draw or an annoyance if it was compulsory as someone else said, if you have a suitable bike then you would probably want to ride it.

Only other thing to add is that the quality of the coach and the course content would determine if I returned, not the price(within reason) or the equipment. A hard ask for a coach to get mixed kid and adult content right, will you run them mixed or seperate? As I am only 30 mins away, and often hark back to my awesomeness on a BMX (all lies) I have a little bit of nostalgic interest in this 🙂

sure you know this wca but kids vary massively in size. your going to need more than 4 sizes to cater for a broad age range. unless you are just going after older kids / teens / adults?

when my soon to be 9 year old starts thrashing me at the bike park I may well try a bit of coaching. ive been firmly wheels on thr ground since a broken collar bone / double wrister landing

Insurance, maintenance/wear’n’tear on bikes & course - there will be other costs so don’t forget them.

PS - any first aid requirements/costs? Insurance may specify.
But the insurance is the must have. And it may be different for BC club just charging for track hire and folks charging a commercial rate.

The coach we are using is fully qualified to coach all ages and brings his insurance with him.

We will try to run the groups so they are similar ages abilities as I mentioned. The idea is to run 3 -4 back to back over a morning so there should be a session to suit.

4X bikes are basically all the same size from about 13/14 years old up. If they are younger than that then they are welcome to use their own kit. I have secured funding for 4 bikes and six helmets/gloves sets. The bikes will all be the same, the protection will be mixed sizes but aimed at teens / young adults rather than children.

We won't make it compulsory to ride our bikes but the coaches decision on the suitability of the bikes used will be final. Does that satisfy the 'my child can only ride their own bike' argument?

Will will be (hopefully) BC affiliated by the time we run the courses.

It sounds like £15-20 is a reasonable rate rather than just £10.

If any of you want to come and try the track, it is free to ride when not in club use. Search "Freespace 4X Track" in GoogleMaps or PM me.

The track is mostly cleared but there is a Dig Day this Sunday if you want to lend a shovel clearing the lips and landings. You get free Southern4X Membership for the whole of 2024 if you help out.

I was more thinking "My adult can only ride their own bike" 🙂

🙂

We basically want to avoid people turning up on a Halfords Shopper special and wondering why they struggle.

Your first introduction to the genre should be a positive experience

the local BMX track does similar and has a shipping container with bikes in. It's always getting broken into and the bikes stolen,

We have secure off-site storage for the bikes.

The council want to give us a shipping container for storage but we will only keep the shovels, some chairs and maybe a BBQ in there as they are vandal magnets

£10/hour sounds well cheap, I think an extra fiver would be fine and £20 perfectly reasonable if the coach and equipment are good.

I don't see bike sizing being a massive issue, you're not going to have a particularly negative experience on a smaller bike riding a 4X track. (too big would be a problem)

completely get you dont want people turning up on crap bikes, however, 4x is quite niche already so people who show an interest in getting some coaching are probably already into bikes and have half decent ones

i was at knightwood on sat, some sort of event / coaching going on. lots of kids having fun. it looks a good track too. have you had a chat to them about what they do? I have no links to them, but they look like they are doing the sort of thing you are talking about and only q couple of miles away. they also have 2 shipping containers which i thought looked like theyd be broken into all the time too

We do work closely with the guys at Knightwood and, yes, their shipping containers get broken into all the time.

The aim for these courses is an 'introduction' to 4X, so aimed at the people who ride Lordswood and Southampton Bike Park etc but are tempted by the idea of racing. A lot of these people have XC or general purpose mountain bikes rather than focussed 4X bikes which is one of the reasons we have the demo fleet.