Sometimes, the best way to ride your MTB better is to go right the way back to basics. Here are five often-neglected, basic – yet essential – skills that every mountain biker should work on.
What if you go back – way back to the time when you first learnt to ride a bike? Now, you might think that you've covered off those really basic skills, but, for many of us (even some of the world's best), the big improvements in riding come from working on these. Skills like getting better at looking ahead instead of at your front tyre, improving your braking and refining your pedalling technique will all help you to ride much, much faster. So, why not go back to basics..?
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This is our top five basic skills that every mountain biker should know.
Number one, a good stance on the bike. Stand nice and tall. It should feel like most of your weight
is your feet and not through your arms onto the bars. Make sure your feet are in the right
position on the pedals so the ball of your foot is just in front of the axle of the pedal.
And once you drop into the trail, your arms and legs provide the best suspension possible.
If you're already crouched, you're going to lose half of that suspension.
Remember to keep your head up and chest open. Number two, learning the limits of how much you
can move around on the bike. It's what I call the arc of movement. In the ready position,
in the middle of the bike, your hips will be above the saddle and you can move them all the way down
to the back wheel and up and forward towards the bars. This is much easier with your saddle out
of the way, so if you've got to drop a post, get it down there. This is a really big one for
beginners. Often they feel like they're moving a lot around the bike, but actually their hips are
never really getting very close to that rear tire. So find yourself a nice open piece of trail or car
park. Get a feel for this so when you do it on the trail, it doesn't feel unnatural.
Using your brakes effectively. They can be your best friends, but also your worst enemies. They
often cause crashes. In steep sections, when you're on the brakes heavily, you get out of
control. Often it's actually best to get back off them, get back in control, and then brake again.
Take some time to practice modulating your brakes so you're not just using them 100%
all of the time. You're just feathering them slightly on some occasions, especially when
cornering, when you want to try and come off the brakes totally, especially the front brakes,
get that front tire gripping. The next thing to practice actually uses two of those skills I've
just talked about, the arc of movement and effective braking. So when it comes to emergency
stopping, really stopping as fast as possible, you're going to want to drop your weight to the
back of the bike just by dropping your heels and getting your hips back. Otherwise, when you hit
the brakes, all your weight's going to go onto the bars and potentially over. So get to the back of
the bike, on the brakes nice and strong, and you should stop really quickly. Oh, that was close.
Almost hit that feather. Number four, work on trying to find your natural pedaling speed,
otherwise known as cadence. Good riders will change gear really often. Try and stay in that cadence
for most efficient power. Try and monitor your power through the pedals when changing gear
as not to crunch through the gears and risk snapping your chain. Try and preempt the trail
as well. So you change gear early, but most efficient riding. Number five, training yourself
where to look on the trail. When you're driving your car down the motorway, you'd never look at
the bonnet. So same thing counts on the bike. You'd be looking way down the trail. Yes, when it gets
very technical, you might want to pick a line closer to your front wheel, but more often than
that, you need to be looking very far ahead. Here I can see a right-hand berm. In the corner of my
vision, I can see a left-hand one at the bottom. For me personally, I have to keep reminding myself
all the time to look a bit further. So now I'm actually going to use a point of view camera
to talk you through where I'm actually looking. So this section has actually got some ruts in it.
It's really important with ruts to keep your head up so you don't slide off the edge of one.
I'm just about to turn into a much more technical downhill section. So I'm looking at the way in.
Now I'm looking down to that berm. Now to the exit of the corner. That's really important with corners,
spot the exit early. Now rock section, I'm starting to look much closer to my front tire,
round the corner, back, further ahead. A faster section, now I'm looking really far down the
trail to that far right-hand berm, left-hand berm, straight right-hand berm. I can see a bag,
left. Now I'm looking about 50 meters ahead. Really fast section, up and over and up and over,
right-hand berm coming up, left, right, roller, left, right, rollers, jumps, second jump and berm.
Brake hard. So there you go. There's our top five basic mountain bike skills that everyone should
know. If you knew these already, then maybe you should click up there and check out our top five
essential trial skills every mountain biker should know and click down there for top 10
setup mistakes. Click on the GMBN logo to subscribe and give us a thumbs up if you enjoyed this video.
