How To Ride Your Mountain Bike Up And Over Obstacles On The Trail

You're out on the trail, you're having an epic ride, and then the inevitable happens. You come up on a large obstacle in your way. Could be a rock or a log or just anything where you think you need to dismount to continue your ride. Today I'm gonna share with you some of my trials background that will help you gain confidence and ride up and over way bigger things than you ever thought you could before. We're gonna go through some foundational stuff and some skills to get you up and over obstacles on your mountain bike. Before we really dive into this, so I just wanna classify the few different kinds of obstruction you can have on the trail. The first and most common is there's something across the trail that you have to just ride up and over. You're usually going perpendicular to it so you can just cross it once and be done with it. The next thing is a ledge that you have to climb up and onto. Say it's a rock ledge or some kind of next level on the trail that you need to climb up to to continue riding on. And the last and most advanced is not only climbing up a level, but as soon as you get up on top of it, there's an angle up. So you have to not only climb up, but keep your momentum going up. This is the hardest one because a lot of people just see that and get off because they think they have to push the next part. We're gonna make all three of those a fair bit easier today and I'm gonna take you through the steps. Each one kind of builds onto the next one. So dig through and really master each one as we go through and you'll be in a really great spot. Now the most crucial element of this entire thing is lifting your front wheel up. And there are a couple of different ways you can get your front wheel up, either by using a wheelie pedal method or just leaning back in almost a manual fashion to lift your front wheel off the ground. All of that needs to be timed with the ledge that you're riding onto. And the easiest way to practice that is to put a small stick on the ground and go ride in front of it and lift your front wheel up and over it. You'll get a sense for how early you need to start initiating the movements, whether it's pedaling to lift your front wheel over it or leaning back. Typically, the higher the feature is, the further back you're gonna start the process. And the higher the feature, the higher you're gonna have to lift up your front wheel, which means you're gonna have to be comfortable lifting it up and leaning back a bit further. We see manual machines everywhere, and manualing's a great skill to have, but the real core of that is being comfortable lifting your front wheel high up in the air and not feeling like you're gonna fall over backwards. So once we have our front wheel lift timing figured out, you're gonna start moving to bigger and bigger obstacles. It can be from a line on the ground to a small stick to a bigger stick. Maybe a curb is the next spot for you. But really, we just wanna get comfortable lifting our front wheel up and putting it over the edge. A lot of times on trail, you're just leaning up to make this first part happen because you have a bit of momentum, but it also helps to practice both ways, lifting your front wheel up and over and also pedaling your front wheel up and over. Once you've got that pedal timing down, you're in a really great place because that will give you a little extra push when we come to the rest of the movements. Now that you have your timing figured out for that front wheel lift, we're gonna move on to the rest of the technique. Truthfully, the front wheel lift is about 80% of what you need to do. The rest is really just kind of unweighting. We're gonna start with a medium-sized log. This is the most common feature you would find on the trail, a small downed tree that's in your way that you wanna ride over. It's just big enough to make things awkward. It might be a little bit too big for just your suspension to soak up on its own. And so we're gonna work through something this height to start. A couple things before we start. When I'm practicing a move like this, I actually lock out my suspension as much as I possibly can on the bike. I wanna learn the actual movement and do the most that I can with my body as opposed to letting my bike do all the work. But to start the movement, I wanna do it as rigid as possible so that I'm doing all the work. Next up, we're not gonna use our brakes. The whole point of learning this skill in the first place is so we keep our momentum so we don't have to stop on the trail. If we're using our brakes a lot, it's actually probably faster to get off the bike and carry it over. So to learn this without brakes, it's a good way to keep your momentum up, but also you're gonna see if you stop at any point 100%, it's gonna kill all your momentum and make this move a lot harder. Momentum is our friend when it comes to the up and over, especially for trail riding. The last thing, although we accentuate our movements a lot when we're learning techniques, the one thing we don't wanna do when we're going up and over is go over the bars. And so, especially when you're doing this up and over, we're gonna be doing a lot of pushing our bike out in front of us instead of pulling the bike with us as we go over the bars. That's a really key point to this whole thing, especially because your rear wheel might be up a little bit higher. It can be real sketchy if you push all your weight over the bars. So anytime we're working on the up and over, think a lot about bending your knees and pushing your bike out in front of you. That's gonna make a huge difference when it comes to learning all this stuff. A couple of things you may notice that I have on my bike setup. I have a bash ring. This is integrated into the spider on my bike. This is made by Wolf Tooth and as is the chain ring. It's kind of this combo and it fits on Shimano Race Face or SRAM crank sets. So super easy to plug in. It's not terribly expensive, but in terms of peace of mind, when it comes to climbing up stuff and not hitting your chain ring on things or breaking a chain, super clutch. The other thing I have set up, you might've noticed, I have a dropper post on this bike which I've dropped the seat all the way down. The reason why I do that is just to get it out of the way when I'm learning a trick. When I'm learning something new, I don't wanna have to worry about it. Most of our bikes have these anyway. You can always practice with it up, but I always like to learn everything with my suspension locked out, with my seat as low as it can go. I just wanna have my body do all the work and then I can add in all the other elements that may happen. If you're climbing or you're about to ride over something anyway, you probably have this dropped down. So it's not that much different than what you'd normally be doing. But for the purpose of practicing, bring your seat down as low as possible. You certainly don't need a bash ring like this, but if you're worried about smashing that thing, just being able to take that out of your mind and continue riding, it's a huge help. We have our rules in place to get this whole thing rolling. Now we're gonna dive right into it. We've learned how to lift up our front wheel and put it over something. Now to actually attack a log, I'm gonna ride slowly at this log and I'm gonna put my front wheel at the 11 o'clock position on the log facing me. The reason why I'm putting it in the face of the log instead of on top of the log is I actually wanna use it as some rebound. I'm gonna push my front wheel into the log and that's gonna push the whole bike up and then I'm going to shoot the bike out in front of me as hard as I can. And that's gonna bring my back wheel up, it's gonna flatten the bike out and then I'm gonna continue to ride the log with no brakes until the back wheel goes up and over it. Now at this stage, if you grab the back brake, your front wheel is just gonna slam down and you'll probably go over the bars or get really sketchy. So it's a really important point and why I said earlier not to use the brakes at all. You don't wanna have this momentum where it just shoots you off the front. We wanna roll this thing as smooth as we possibly can. So no brakes on the front wheel, no brakes on the back wheel. We roll up 11 o'clock on the face of the log, shoot our front wheel forward, let our back wheel kinda tag the rock and then roll off the back. I'll do a couple of these in slow motion from a few angles so you can see exactly what I mean. I'll pedal into them and I'll also do a front wheel lift into them. You can do this relatively slow and then the more comfortable you feel, the faster you can go. The most important part is getting that 11 o'clock and not 10 or nine. If you hit too low, it's not gonna end well. So you're just kinda gracing the top of the rock and you're kinda bouncing your suspension off of it. Just makes this nice little ricochet with the front wheel. Let's move on to riding up onto things. Now, normally there'll be some kind of ledge that you're riding onto. Maybe it's riding up onto a log the other way. Maybe it's a rock ledge that's the next phase of the trail. Maybe it's a concrete thing that you're trying to ride. Who knows? But the main point that I'm trying to make here is the process is very similar to what we just talked about with the log. You're just gonna have a little bit more movement over the front wheel. Now, when we were talking about up and over the log, where you push the bike out in front of you, that still kind of applies. You're just gonna add a little bit more to that front wheel where you're gonna put your weight over it a little bit more. And the purpose of that is to completely unweight the back tire. So the reason we're more comfortable getting over the front on this is that we're not riding over a feature. We're riding onto a feature where there's a bit more real estate to land and your back wheel is just making its way up to that even level. The reason I didn't want us to go over the bar on the other one was that our back wheel was actually gonna be higher than our front wheel and putting your weight over the handlebars at that point would be catastrophic. But since you're just trying to bring your back wheel up onto the sledge, it's okay to put your weight over the handlebars just a little bit more to unweight that rear wheel. If you're having trouble with this particular movement, you can just go on flat ground, lifting your back wheel up. We do kind of a scoop in trials riding where you go down, back and up with the pedals and it just kind of brings the back wheel up. That's exactly what we're doing here. So same thing, front wheel lift where we pedal or manual kind of up into it. And then we shoot our weight over the handlebars to unweight that back wheel so it rolls up. Again, all of this is no brakes. And then you push the bike back out in front of you to get back in your riding position again. So let's say you can actually do this movement to a certain point, but you're trying to get it higher. The one thing I would recommend doing is practicing endos and manuals. And the reason for that is so that you get comfortable over your balance point on your front wheel and your back wheel. So when I'm doing an endo, I'm actually practicing how far over my front wheel I can get. And when I'm doing a manual, I'm trying to figure out how high I can lift my rear wheel up off the ground. If you do those two things, you'll have such a wider range of motion when it comes to lifting up your front wheel and getting over your back wheel. It's the game changer for getting up and over stuff. The only thing you then need to add in is your pedal timing of when you start the motion and how high you lift it up and then how far you can push the bike forward. The main thing people struggle with when it comes to climbing up onto stuff is that they grab their rear brake too early to try to lock in this wind. And ultimately, they end up sliding off the back of it. Most important thing you can do is keep the pedal pressure on and not hit the brakes so that your wheel does what it's exactly supposed to do, to push you up onto this thing. The beauty of the size of your mountain bike wheels is that there's such a large radius to it, it will actually ride over so much stuff. So even if you don't get the perfect height up onto something, there's a great chance the rest of the wheel will get you there. So don't grab your brakes. That's a big reason why I'm saying no brakes, no brakes with all this stuff, is that your wheels are gonna do so much extra work for you as you ride and you have to give them the opportunity to do that. If you grab your brakes, they stop working for you and become an anchor. The last thing we're gonna talk through is doing an up and over while you're climbing uphill. A lot of times you're going uphill on a climb, there's a ledge and then there's an uphill on top of it. And a lot of people will get off their bike, climb the ledge and then push the bike up to the top until there's a flat area to continue riding. So this should save you quite a bit of time while you're out there riding. The same fundamentals from the up and over we just went through should apply here. There's just one little tweak to it that should help you quite a bit. When you're getting to the point where you lift your front wheel onto the ledge and push the bike forward, you're obviously gonna be pushing the bike up with the terrain. And then what you do, you bring your body up into the bars as fast as you can and then kind of push again. It's almost like a double pump to push the bike out in front of you. Again, no brakes here. What you're trying to do is create some momentum so you have a bit of time to get another pedal stroke in after your rear wheel hits. Keeping your pedal pressure on and not touching the brakes is gonna continue here because when you land on that uphill ledge, you wanna have a little bit of speed, a little bit of momentum and you wanna be able to get a pedal in. If you land up top there and you're dead stopped, then you're definitely not going uphill. So that's really the key is kind of pushing the bike out in front of you and giving yourself time to get that extra pedal stroke in so you can continue riding up. Hopefully everything we've gone through today will help you get up and over everything that you encounter on the trail. If you're struggling with any other elements of this, you can go to my other up and over tutorial which really digs into the more basic elements of it and watching that one might give you a little bit more insight into what I'm really talking about here. So definitely check that out. If you wanna learn some additional mountain bike skills for your trail riding, there's a whole playlist that I invite you to check out. And if you think this is helpful and awesome, please consider subscribing to the channel. Thanks again for being here. Thanks for watching and we'll see you on the next video.