How to Measure a Kids Bike Top Guideline

In this article, we’re going to go through a little bit of sizing kids’ bikes for you and just give you some tips on how to go about it.

Ideally, you want to go to the store with your child and ask the bike retailer to help them to figure out the perfect bike for them.

But if for whatever reason you can’t go into the store or maybe you’re trying to surprise your child or see at home, so you can check this article and get proper information on how you can do this for your child.

Bike Size Chart for Kids and Toddler

Some Basic Measuring Issues

Sizing for kids’ bikes first off starts with tire size. Generally, we’ve discussed here 12, 14, 16 sizes then we go to 20, 24 sizes bikes for kids and toddlers.

If you take your child’s bike and you look on the side of the wheel, you’ll usually find a wheel size on it something like a 16 by 1 or 24 by 2.

So, it’s that first number that you’re looking for the 24 stands for a 24-inch round wheel. This guideline also helpful for kids’ BMX bike measurement, not for an adult BMX bike.

Measure Inseam Height

The most important thing that you have to need to look at on a kid’s bike, isn’t so much either your child’s height or their age.

At first, you have to check your child’s stand-over height, which is basically your child’s inseam height and that’s the most important factor when you’re trying to determine a bike size for your child.

You could take two kids the same height, and one’s going to have longer legs and a higher inseam than the other one might have a longer reach.

These are important factors and obviously, you can take a bunch of ten-year-old children and they’re all going to be different heights and sizes.

Using ages is a bit of a guideline and you’ll notice that the chart that we have on our webpage includes height and age, but the most important factor is going to be inseam height.

Here we’re going to show you how you size up a bike so for sizing your kid’s bike.

Measure With Bike Top Bar

You’ll see on our chart for ten-year-old it recommends a 24” wheel and sometimes it’s 26” this is where the height comes into play through the length of the inseam.

What do you want to do is you want to get your child to swing their leg over the bike and stand over top of the bar.

So, they’re not standing over top of the, they’re not sitting on the bike seat and they’re not standing over top of the seat.

And what you have to need to look for is that their feet are flat on the ground on level ground and that they still have space at the crotch between the crossbar and their crutch so that they can basically be safe on the, put their feet safely on the ground.

Another great way to test this out is if you lift the bike up until the crossbar, just contacts, the crutch you should have about an inch, inch and a half, half of the space underneath that tire in an ideal world.

Now of course I know lots of people like to get as much life as they can out of their bikes.

Kids are growing lots, all that sort of thing. So, you can stretch that a bit, but you definitely do not want to be making contact with the crossbar, or definitely not like having your child on their tippy toes.

So, if their crutches touching the crossbar and their feet are up on their tippy-toes, that’s really not a good situation.

You’re better off that they’re going to enjoy their experience on the bike. Then you get a bike that’s too big and you know, they’re really going to struggle on it and not have as much fun.

We want them to have a positive experience. So, the way you can check this out without the bike and that’s what we’re kind of talking a little bit about today.

So, an inseam length is it’s just the time it is measured from the ground up to their crotch.

For example, if your child’s inseam length is 25 and now you take that information and you come into a store with it, or you call a bike seller or you can measure by yourself.

Now you have to need to measure that same distance (inseam length 25) from the ground to the crossbar, and that’ll let you know where they sit on.

There also you’ll notice on our chart on our webpage, if you go there, it’s got inseam length and that’s the really important determining factor at this age to try and figure out the bike.

So, if your wheel is 24 inches and it also recommended that possibly she might fit a 26. So here we grab a 26, and we’ll check that out for comparison.

Once we get into adult bikes, we’re generally dealing with frame sizes. So, at a 26-inch wheel bike, there’s going to be in many cases, a double, extra, small, extra small, small, medium, large, and extra-large.

Swing your child’s leg over the top of and if your child contacting that top bar feet are not flat on the ground. So, although that 24 inches was maybe pushing a tiny bit on the big side for ideal and your child definitely not in a safe riding position on this 26-inch bike.

Tell your child to straddle the bar and when he lifts up that front wheel until the contacts the crutch and if you see your child got well over a foot of space under the tire then that’s the first indication the bike is probably too big.

You have to need to check how tight your child’s knees come up into his/her body as well. You don’t need to get too small or to be too big size just you need a right in the middle.

Conclusion

So hopefully that gave you guys some help on how to size up a kid’s bike. If you can’t get your child into the store to check the size then you can follow our chart.

Measure a bike size for your kids not so hard task but you have to need proper knowledge of how you can do it perfectly so friend if you want to know more check OutdoorXsports for more ongoing biking tips and tricks.