7 Essential Gravel Riding Skills & Tips

Whether you've been riding road bikes and you want to mix things up and start riding gravel, get away from the roads, or you are brand new to cycling and you want to start off with some gravel riding, then it's always a good idea to brush up on your bike handling skills. It's going to make you a whole load more confident on the bike, as well as faster too. Plus, when you're riding your bike, you want to look like a pro, like you know what you're doing. In this video, I'm going to give you some gravel bike handling skills. Let's get into it. The first one I'm going to talk about is tire pressure. You're probably wondering why I'm talking about tire pressure when it's not even a skill. Well, good job for noticing that, but the tire pressure is really important. It's going to make the upcoming skills a lot harder if you get your tire pressure wrong. The tire pressure all depends on what kind of surface you're riding on. If you're riding on smooth gravel, then you can get away with having a little bit more pressure in your tires. If you're on the really rough, bumpy stuff, then you're going to want a little bit less pressure in your tires to give you a little bit more cushioning and make it a lot more comfortable for you. It's a basic one, but a good one to get right. Now, if you've been doing lots of road riding before, you'll know that you don't really move your body around that much on the bike. You almost just sit there and let the bike do its thing. On the gravel bike, sometimes you're going to need to move your body around a lot more. Say you're going down some really technical bumpy stuff, which you can do on a gravel bike, then you'll want to get out of the saddle, put your hands on the drops and your pedals in the three and the nine o'clock position. From there, you almost want to use your body as suspension. You can just let the bike move from underneath you. This is going to really help make things a lot more comfortable for you on the bike. I know it's quite hard to say relax when you're on your bike, but if you tense up and you grip your handlebars really hard and you're using all the muscles in your arms, then it's going to get very tiring very quickly and it's going to make for a bumpy ride as well. Try and loosen up. Give it a practice when you're next out. Get up and just let the bike move underneath you. Let's do something. Let the bike jam. Now, when you're on the road, the terrain is usually all the same. It never really changes that much. You're always on some sort of road. When you're on the gravel, it can vary a lot. You could be on compact gravel, you could be on loose gravel, you could be on sand, or you could be on really bumpy, rocky stuff. When you're on all those different types of terrain, you're going to want to corner differently for each one. When you're on the road, you can usually choose whatever line you want into the corner. You can come out wide, you can come cut in and then out. On the gravel, it's a little bit differently. You could come into the corner, it can be nice and smooth gravel, and then you can exit and it can be really loose. It really does pay dividends to having the knowledge to scan up ahead and understand what type of gravel it is and then adapt your cornering to that. One skill you can do that is going to help is going out on your gravel ride. Just find a nice bit of gravel road and just practice doing some skids. Practice, see how far around you can get your back wheel, do a few different tricks. It is really going to help when it comes to cornering and say if your bike does slide out, you can just correct it and then it'll look quite cool. Next up, how to ride your bike on the real bumpy stuff. In gravel, you can get extreme bumpy surfaces. Despite the bumpiness, you can actually ride quite fast on them. As soon as you hit that bumpy surface, the first thing you can notice, your hands and your arms shaking a lot and maybe your teeth going, but your automatic response to that would be to tense up a little bit and grip the handlebars a little bit harder. You almost want to avoid doing that and just relax. Have a little bit of a softer grip, not as soft that your hands are just going to fly off the handlebars because that's not going to be good. Again, like I said before, you want to almost use your body as suspension because we haven't got suspension on our bike apart from a little bit of suspension in our tires. If you have the right tire pressure, again, that's very important. On the topic of your hands, controversial one and quite a lot of people come at me for not wearing gloves when I'm on my gravel bike, but really, I just find it a lot more comfortable. My hands tend to swell a lot from the bumpy surfaces and they rub a little bit. I prefer not to wear gloves, but you might prefer it and find it more comfortable. It's totally up to you what you decide to do. Just try and relax your body and if it is just too bumpy for you, there's no shame in getting off and walking. I've done it plenty of times. Next up, riding over things on your gravel bike. Now, I'll be honest, before I was in the mindset of I'd see something quite scary looking, I'd get off and just put it back on my shoulder and jump over it and then get back on. In reality, you can ride over a lot of things on your gravel bike, but it is going to take a little bit of practice. A lot of things you can probably just roll over without even realizing you don't need to do polywheel up or your back wheel up, you can just roll over it. We are going to practice bouncing over things. For that, you're going to need to find yourself a piece of wood that has fallen off a tree and is now going to be used for your free bit of equipment for gravel bike handling skills. Find yourself a lovely looking log, looks a little bit like a gun, pow, pow, pow, but then you want to put it on the floor and we are going to practice bouncing over it. Let's do it. You can do this with or without a log. It might be a good idea first just to practice pulling your front wheel up and then pulling your back wheel up. It really is quite easy. You can literally just pull it up, you can just do a little wheelie over it and then I just pull my feet up and my back wheel comes up and then essentially you get this, and you get over it, lovely jubbly. Let's give that a go. I bet you I won't do it now. Once you get confident in clearing a small log like this one, you can move on to bigger logs or bigger bricks or whatever you have that you can jump over. The next thing you know, you'll be going out on your bike and you will not be getting off to jump over anything, you'll be riding over everything. Whoops. This next one is a tricky one, riding in sand. Obviously, here today there isn't much sand, but Olly Bridgewood is actually going to show us how to ride in sand. Over to you, Olly. Well, that didn't really go as planned. I guess Olly's not going to show us how to ride in sand. Do not try and ride in sand like Olly Bridgewood. We haven't got any sand here today, obviously, but here are some of my top tips. On the compact hard sand, you're not going to have a problem riding through that. It's just going to be like riding through a smooth bit of gravel, but it's the really loose sand that is going to be the trickiest. Now, you want to hit it with a good amount of speed and that'll give you the best chances of getting through to the other side to wherever you're going. If you hit that loose sand with quite low speed, your chances are going to be quite slim of getting through. Once you hit that sand, you're going to notice that your bike is going to have a mind of its own. It's going to want to go left, right, absolutely everywhere. My tip would be, try and relax on the bike. Let the bike do its thing and just try and keep pedaling through the sand and look where you want to go. Lastly, practice, practice, practice. I know it sounds cliche, but the more time you spend on the bike, the more comfortable you'll feel. Before you know it, nothing will faze you on your bike. Get out there, spend time on it, play around with it, have some fun. Just enjoy it. Those are some of my top skills that I think you need when you're out on your gravel bike. Do let me know down in the comment section below if you have any of your own little drills that you do out on your bike. I would love to hear them. As always, if you did enjoy this video, make sure to give it a big thumbs up, and I'll see you in the next one.