I absolutely loved this Paolo Bettini Specialized commercial:
Slowly but surely, we are becoming a Specialized household as well. My race bike is a Specialized, and so is my son’s bike, the Specialized Hotwalk.
It was inevitable that my son would ride. He knows when I go riding, and he commutes to school on the back of my fixed-gear. Sometimes I feel badly, not because I’m pushing him to ride, but because he wants to emulate “Dada” and that means riding a bike. That said, he’s taken to it, and I think that is largely the result of the way we’ve introduced him to cycling or more accurately the type of bikes we’ve introduced, namely push bikes (a.k.a., balance bikes). For the uninitiated, a push bike has no pedals. Your child uses their feet to “push” the bike forward.
On his first birthday, we got my son the Radio Flyer Scoot-About, a four-wheel push bike, which he took to like a fish to water. For his second birthday, he graduated to the Kettler Sprint, a two-wheel push bike that was all wrong. It was too big, too heavy and poorly designed. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the saddle to stay straight. So I went and got him the Hotwalk, part of Specialized’s HotRocks line. It’s everything the Kettler was not.
Specialized Hotwalk
Specialized takes a different approach than most push bike bike manufacturers in that they make an actual bike with the same attention to detail as they do in their road bikes.
The Bike
The Hotwalk has an aluminum frame. It comes with an aluminum fork with a 1” threaded steel steerer. Although there’s nothing wrong with the headset, I am thinking of swapping it out with an old Chris King headset I have just because I think it would be cool. The 1” stem connects to an alloy bar which is nice and wide. The seat post connects with a standard seat clamp. The wheels have 12” alloy rims with 14 gauge steel spokes.
Wide Handlebars Make Steering Easier
The Ride
Not sure about comfort because I’ve never ridden it, but he hasn’t complained about his rear end hurting him. The low standover height let me get the saddle low enough for my son, who’s a bit above 50% in height for his age group. This wasn’t possible with the Kettler. The aluminum frame means the bike is lighter than most (it comes in under eight pounds where the Kettler was over 11 pounds) which makes it easier for him to get going and maintain his balance. The wide bars make for good control, and more importantly, easy corrections. He was zipping around on the thing the first day he got it, unlike with the Kettler, which he really couldn’t ride.
Set-up and Maintenance
There was no set-up other than adjusting the saddle height. Because Specialized uses actual bike components, I didn’t need anything but my allen keys. I can also use my pump (also a Specialized) for the tires because there’s enough clearance between the tube stem and the hub to fit the head of my pump (unlike the Kettler which required a hand pump). There really is no maintenance to the Hotwalk, but with allen keys and an adjustable wrench to remove the wheels, it won’t be a big deal.
Easy To Handle
The Bottom Line
If you really want to do a service to your kids and teach them to ride well, push bikes are the way to go. At my son’s age, pedaling a bike isn’t the hard part (that comes much later when he decides to race them). The hard part is keeping the bike upright and learning to balance. While they look nice, bikes with training wheels and pedals don’t help kids learn to balance themselves. Enter the push bike. For my son, he’ll move right to a bike without training wheels next year, and I don’t expect to have to do much running with him because he’s already figured out the balancing part.
There are many push bikes out there. The Specialized Hotwalk is the nicest of the push bikes I’ve seen. It’s light, easy to maneuver and easy to maintain. It’s somewhere near the middle of the range in terms of price point, but well worth it. Plus, your kid can say “I am specialized” to all her friends. Now, if she can get the accent just right is an entirely different question.
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Thanks for the very useful review. My son also loves to ride with me on my bike in his Bobike Mini seat. He’s about to turn 2 years old and will soon outgrow the Bobike seat. A friend gave us a small toddler bike with training wheels, which my son enjoys “riding” (meaning I push him), but he’s not tall enough to touch the ground.
I’ve been investigating the huge array of balance bikes out there and think that the three best options are the Strider, Specialized Hotwalk, or Skuut. I considered the Kettler Sprint, but it seems to have quality issues. Do you know anything about the Strider or Skuut compared to the Hotwalk?
I don’t have direct experience with either the Strider or the Skuut. That said, I have an opinion.
A friend of my son’s has the Strider which seems fine. The only thing that I don’t like, and this depends totally on the height of your child, if the saddle is pushed down low, the seat post will come through the bottom of the bike. It’s just one more thing that can cause injury in the event of a fall.
As for the Skuut, if your son is like mine and I imagine like most, these bikes get beat up. I wonder how well the wood holds up. That also leads to the maintenance question – how easy is it to maintain?