Mastering The Art Of Carrying Speed | MTB Skills

Welcome back, you beautiful people. We got an exciting topic for you beauties out there. How to carry speed on the trail. The art of carrying speed, in fact. It's quite an advanced topic, I reckon, but hopefully some tips in there's going to help you whatever level of ride you are. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button. Blake, let's find a trail. Let's go that way, Neil. All right, one of the key elements to maintaining your speed out there on the trail is body position. You want to be quite central on your bike. You want to have your elbows bent. You want to have a slight bend in your knees, slight fixed position on your knees. You want to keep a nice low stance, aggressive stance on the bike, which I like to call the attack position. You're ready for anything that comes at you. This allows you to absorb all those bumps and undulating ground on the terrain, and also helps keep your wheels in contact with the ground to give you maximum traction. So I'm ready to hit this trail. Good line choice is a really important part of trying to carry your speed. Again, people like Sam Hill, downhill racers, spend all their time pre-race looking for the fastest line down the track. So try and ride like a pro downhill racer and actually just study the track as you're going. You don't have to necessarily find the fastest line for carrying speed, but maybe it's the smoothest. Maybe it's the one that suits your skill level, but often I'm looking for wider lines into turns. Sometimes that means sort of jumping up and out of corners to find a bank. Sometimes it means actually the line choice is kind of the best one, but actually it's a bit rougher, so I may be even bunny hopping or slightly unweighting over the rough stuff to keep it smooth but stay on the fastest line. But again, it's a difficult one. Try and think of it as you're riding all the time and you'll learn to ride a bit better and pick better lines. Here in Spain, we're riding this track, it's amazing fun, but it's super dry, it's rock hard, there's gravelly stuff on top. So actually I'm thinking quite a lot about kind of exit speed of corners. Rather than throwing those speed at the turn, it'd be really easy to slide out. I'm trying to come out of the corners with as much speed as possible, and that gives me good flow, and that line choice will make me carry good speed. Now let's talk about the pumping technique. Now this is where you use undulating ground, rollers out there on the trail. You find yourself going down, you compress your body weight into the bike when your bike disappears into a terrain, and then when it comes up, this is where you extend your body. Now this comes with practice out there on the trail. You can convert this potential energy into forward momentum. Now the pumping technique comes with practice, and practice is always good fun. What you're doing with your brakes is obviously a really important part of carrying speed. So ideally it's kind of trying to be smooth, again a bit like everything else. There are some times when if you've got loads of grip, you can brake late and hard, but that is quite an advancing. For general carrying speed, I'm trying to be as smooth as possible, modulate my brakes. I like to have really powerful brakes, and then learn how to be careful with them. So it's always one finger, and just trying to learn to modulate them. I also like my brakes to sort of bite quite far in, so quite near the bar. I'm actually riding my Canyon Spectral. So it's a trail bike, it's 140 mil travel, it's no big enduro bike, but it does have big brakes. I've got the SRAM Code RSC with 200 mil rotors, front and rear, that are super powerful, but kind of like the Corning Line Choice today, it's more about modulating them for the amount of grip I've got, where I've got these loose bits on top of the hard pack. Got to be careful. Same thing with accelerating, big part of carrying speed is pedaling hard. I'm not going to be spinning up the rear tire, down here, I'm not that powerful. But this trail does kind of go mellow in part, so I'm trying to judge where to put my effort in. So if it is flatter, I'll put a bit of effort in to carry that speed along the flat section. But it's probably almost as much as on this trail, there's lots of pumping to be had. The ultimate level of speed control is when you're going really fast and smooth, what I've said already, and it's safe, but you're hardly using any energy to do that, or the minimum amount possible. If you're thinking about pro riders, there's one I can think of, Sam Hill, who always goes really fast, never looks too fast, hardly ever crashes, but also, he looks like he's hardly using any energy to do that, and that's probably why he can do it from top to bottom down track, is because it isn't that strenuous for him to do it. So that is God-level speed control, and let's get into how we can improve that to get somewhere near Sam Hill. Many mountain bike obstacles, such as rock gardens, drops, and jumps, proper speed control is essential to riding these obstacles smoothly. When it comes to riding them too fast, you find yourself over-jumping certain obstacles, or going too slow, you can stall and lose all of your momentum, which is not safe. Confidence building, the more you become confident with the speed control out there on the trail, you can actually start to ride and tackle a lot more demanding trails out there. Personally, for me, I take it slow. I don't go straight in the deep end and go full gas everywhere, because my confidence goes straight out the window. You want to start off small, build your speed up on a trail, become more adept to controlling your speed on the trail, then you'll find yourselves being more adaptive to other different terrains and trails out there. Carrying speed, I think, feels like an art when you nail this one thing, and it's called flow. So it feels like you get into a rhythm on the track, you're not going really fast and then slowing down. To me, it feels a bit more like my average speed is good, I'm just carrying speed all the way, and that is not over-riding the track, so not losing control, and also, really importantly, it's not crashing as well. So it should feel like I'm in control, I'm flowing, I've got a good rhythm, and it's safe. Descending can be very intimidating, but confidence is super key. It's all about bringing your body weight over the back, keeping it low, dropping your heels, and believing in your bike. Yeah, particularly steep downhills like this one, it's quite a loose spot. I'm trying to use that rear tire as an anchor, use that rear brake, and I think, obviously, going a bit steady to begin with, get a feel for how much grip there is. Good thing about steep downhills, you can ease off the brakes so you're better off going in a bit slow and then letting off going through, but it's all about time on the bike, building your confidence in the level of grip you've got, and also your skills as well, so don't go too fast too soon. The art of carrying speed, Neil, is definitely something that you need to practice. Are you an artist? Picasso, yes, my middle name is Picasso. I actually think this is one of those things. If I ride too hard, I lose it all, so I try and ride at like 90%. It feels like my average speed is better, and I'm better at the art of carrying speed. I feel like if I throw myself on the deep end, it goes very wrong very quickly. Follow you, I'll follow you down here. It's quite exciting. Anyway, thank you very much for watching. Hopefully this video's helped you out. Master the art of carrying speed, and practice is always good fun. Neil? Yeah? Ready? I smell tea, Spanish tea. See ya. What's that smell like? Tea.