How To Bunny Hop a Mountain Bike Step By Step Tutorial 🔥

So I've made a few bunny hop tutorials, but I want to approach this video from a slightly different perspective. If you've been having trouble getting your wheels off the ground, or you've been struggling with how to bunny hop, this might be the video for you. So without further ado, let's jump into it. So when we talk about bunny hopping, bunny hopping is just jumping on your bike without the assistance of a ramp. With a ramp, you have the ramp assist you into the air. Bunny hopping, you have to do all the work yourself. So a good way to talk about bunny hopping is actually to start without our bike. Let's put our bike to the side and look at the mechanics of jumping on our feet. Okay, jumping, you are pushing yourself off the ground hard enough that when your legs are extended, you have generated enough force to push you into the air. So here, I'm pushing myself off the ground, but I'm not pushing myself quick enough to propel me into the air. This time, I'm gonna push off quickly, and that should be enough to get me into the air. We need to think about that when we're doing a bunny hop. A bunny hop is not a slow movement. It happens fast. You have to generate a lot of energy to get yourself and your bike off the ground. There's one other thing we need to take into account when we're talking about jumping. Jumping, it is a vertical motion. So that's something to consider when we're on our bike because when we're on our bike, we're a little bit more in a hunched over position. If I were to jump upwards from this position, my range of movement would be limited by the extension of my arms. I would not be able to get full range of movement out of my legs or hips. So before we extend our legs, we need to get our front wheel off the ground. That is something we need to take a look at in itself because it's one of the trickiest steps of the bunny hop. All right, I wanna put my bike aside really quickly to talk about one other thing. A lot of us have full suspension mountain bikes. If we were to just explode off the ground, we lose a lot of our energy that we're trying to use to propel ourselves upwards to compressing the suspension. So a good way to think about jumping on a mountain bike is we're actually jumping on a trampoline. On a trampoline, before you jump upwards, you have to squat down so the netting actually goes downwards before you can spring upwards. It's the same exact concept. So before you propel yourselves into the air, we need to pre-compress our suspension. That step is called preload. Now, if you're on a hardtail, this step is a little bit different because you don't need to pre-compress the suspension. The biggest difference is the timing. Bunny hopping on a full suspension bike is a slower process. Bunny hopping on a hardtail is a little bit quicker. There's one thing that a lot of people overlook when talking about preloading. Preloading has to happen quickly. For example, if I were to just slowly lower myself down, my suspension didn't compress any more than it did when I was sitting on it. Now, however, if I go back to that same position and I drop down, my suspension compressed when I hit the bottom. That is preloading. But instead of our butt smacking into the seat, we wanna use that drop and press through our legs because we're gonna then use that to propel ourselves into the air. So you remember how earlier I said when we jump upwards off the ground, it happens in a vertical motion. But when we're sitting on a bike, we are in this hunched over position. My range of movement would be limited by the extension of my arms. In order to get a full range of movement out of our hips and legs, we actually need to lift our front wheel into the air. To add more complication, in order to lift our front wheel into the air, we need to get our weight behind our rear axle. But it's more complicated than that. If I were to just shift my weight back, my front wheel is not coming off the ground. We need to use our body weight along with energy to lift our front wheel. If I were to push off my front wheel and quickly shift my weight to the back, then my front wheel will come off the ground. And this is happening at the same time as we preload. This is why bunny hops can be so frustrating to learn. There are a lot of little movements happening all at once. And if you skip one, you're not going to be able to achieve the full range of movement and get that good bunny hop that you're looking for. Now, I think we need to also discuss one misconception. We are not pulling the bike off the ground. This is me pulling the bike off the ground. I'm contracting my arm to pull the bike upwards off the ground. This is me carrying the bike. I'm just holding the bike there, not using any of my muscles to keep the bike off the ground. It's just hanging there. There's a big, big difference between pulling your bike off the ground and generating force with your legs to carry it up as you go into the air. So you'll notice when I'm doing a bunny hop, my arms are extended when the wheels are off the ground. And at no point did I contract my arm to pull the bike off the ground. All of the force was generated with my legs. Okay, so we're going to use this stick to help teach us these movements in the correct order. So first, I'm going to lift my front wheel over the stick using my body weight and energy. Now that we've got our front wheel over the stick, we're going to try to do the same thing with our rear wheel. In order to do this, we need to pre-compress our rear suspension and then spring upwards to get our back wheel off the ground and into the air. Some of you are probably going to find that your feet are coming off the pedals when you're trying to lift your back wheel over the stick. Now, as you can see, I have regular pedals. I'm not clipped in. So how do I keep my feet on the pedals? Well, you will notice that my foot is pointed when my legs are extended. I'm almost smearing my feet along the pedals to help drag them up into the air. Again, I'm not doing this by curling my legs. I'm just applying some pressure to the pedals so that when I push myself into the air, the bike comes with me. Okay, now that we've gotten our front wheel over the stick and back wheel over the stick, we need to do it both in one path. This will help teach us the basic timing of the bunny hop. So now that we've gotten a little bit of the timing down, before we let our front wheel drop, we are going to preload and spring upwards. Okay, now that we've started to get our bunny hops down, now we can work onto height. We can first start out with getting our front wheel onto this rock or curb, whatever you have near you, and then following that up by getting your back wheel onto it. Once you get used to the front and rear wheel lift onto a curb, we can use higher and higher objects to help us get better and better at bunny hops. Now that we've learned our timing by jumping onto objects, let's practice getting more height by jumping over objects. So remember, the primary way we get our bike off the ground is to carry the bike up with us as we push off the ground. When we move on to bigger objects, that is when we can absorb the bike upwards to gain additional height to jump over bigger objects. It may take a lot of practice and a few choice curse words to be able to get to the level that you want. If you found this video helpful, I'd love if you commented or even share this video with your friends. As always, my name is Phil Kmetz. Thanks for playing bikes with me today, and I'll see you guys next time. Peace.