A nosedive is when your board’s front edge comes in contact with the ground and causes you to suddenly stop, usually resulting in the rider being thrown off the board. This can be caused by several different circumstances and can lead to serious injuries. Nosedivse are a very common topic of discussion, as it is almost always the means that riders fall off of their Onewheel.
To understand what causes a nosedive, it’s important to understand pushback, so we recommend reading that Q& A nosedive can happen in many scenarios and isn’t always due to operator error. There are a few instances where they could be caused by a board malfunction, but the jury’s still out on that one. Jimmy Chang nicely summarized 5 main reasons (originally written by Jeff McCosker) why nosedives occur in his video below. They often come down to exceeding a safe speed limit, leaning too far forward, and accelerating hard up a hill or into a strong wind.
Nosedives can occur even when pushback was not engaged, as it’s not always caused by the board “giving up”. You could simply catch the nose of the board on some sort of obstacle that it couldn’t overcome, sending you sailing. To avoid nosedives, I recommend you stick to paved roads and sidewalks for the first few hundred miles, get a good understanding and feeling of pushback, and respect the unique risks present when riding a Onewheel.
