Five Essential Skills To Master On Your Mountain Bike

This is our guide to five skills every mountain biker should master. The best part about all of these skills is that you can actually do them anywhere, no matter your skill ability, you've got no excuse. The first one I'm going to kick off with is a track stand. It's just about balancing on your bike. You can cordon off a small area, you can practice it, you can really just move the bike around backwards and forwards, find that balance point. It does take a bit of practice to get good at it. Then you can actually start to do things like take a hand off. You can just chill a little bit like that on both wheels. Move the wheel and just follow it, just counteract where the weight's going and really get good balance points. If you get really good, you can battle with your friends and try and push them off when you're all track standing together. Top tips for holding your track stand a little bit longer are using your front wheel and just rotating it backwards and forwards, brakes on and off, and also pedaling backwards. Of course, no list could be incomplete without including the wheelie. The wheelie is all about lifting your front wheel up and coasting on the back wheel, just using pedals to keep your front wheel up. The longer that you can actually start to wheelie, the cooler you're going to look. You actually take that onto the trails, pedaling out of corners. Once you get really good, you can just manual. Top tips to keep your wheelie going for a little bit longer, just to really keep your weight over the back wheel, practice feathering that brake and get into gear that it's not too low but not too hard. Something that we get asked a lot about on the channel is bunny hopping. Bunny hopping is, of course, an essential technique to go out mountain biking. It's one of the hardest things to really master, get the height, and a lot of people really struggle with it. It's all about getting that weight back, using your hips to really shift forward. It's actually not any easier on a full suspension bike than a hardtail bike. For example, if you do take a trials rider, they're on a fully rigid bike and they're the keep practicing it, really drive those hips back, forward, and make sure you're lifting that front wheel with that rear wheel as well. This next one is all about just leaning your body weight over, shifting those hips, and getting comfortable with leaning the bike over. You can really take this technique and you apply it to the trails straight away. Once you start to get comfortable with these at a slower pace, you can really pick up the pace, really be aggressive with the bike, push it from one corner into the next, and just find the edge of the grip. The end is also one trick that is really impressive out on the trails or if you're just in a car park with your mates. You can use it on the trails if there's a really tight switchback and you just need to hop the back wheel around. You can pick it up, you can pick that back wheel up just by using a little bit of front brake. Careful though, you don't want to use too much front brake, otherwise you'll be straight over those bars. It's all about just shifting your weight forward with your hips again, but just not too much, otherwise you will be out the front door. There you go, there are five different skills that every mountain biker should master. What's the one that you're struggling with the most? Let us know in the comments down below. For more great videos on GMBN, why don't you click just about there and you'll get to a mission control playlist. If you click there, you're going to get to a how-to playlist. Don't forget to subscribe. Click on the globe, it's absolutely free, and you get a great video every day of the week.