10 Essential MTB Skills for Beginners

Mountain biking is a brilliant sport to get into, but it's hard. It's just riding a bike, right? Well, yes, but on unpredictable terrain. Don't worry, here's a list of 10 essential skills that you can practice anywhere that's going to get you riding a bike properly and safely. Bikes don't balance themselves, so I definitely think it's worth you trying to improve yours. This is a super simple tip, but if you're just getting into mountain biking, it can be tricky to get going on the trail. My advice here is to get your bike into a fairly low gear for going slow. Get your favorite foot just up above horizontal. Get your saddle to about mid-height, so you can still get your feet on the floor really nice and easily. Then as you push into the pedal, get ready straight away to try and pick up the other pedal with your other foot and get going. Once you've done that, you can pop your saddle up, you're in a good climbing position. Find yourself a flat piece of ground to practice getting that full range of motion when you're stood up on the bike. Get your seat nice and low. When you're standing up nice and tall, your feet should be planted on the pedals with the ball of your foot quite near the front of the pedal. Now, you go from the middle in the bike right down and back until your hips go right back over the rear axle. That's about as far as you ever want to go back. My bum is just about dragging the rear tire. Again, up to your neutral position, then up and forward. Your toes will dip slightly and your shoulders come in line with the bars. Dip your heels to bring your weight to the back of the bike, and then go up and flat for the central position and toes slightly down to bring your shoulders forward. Again, that's a really nice simple way of getting a feel for how far you need to move on your bike. It's definitely more advanced. We've got videos all about this, of course, so subscribe if you haven't already, about how you can use that range of motion to start things like manuals and bunny hops, but really you will need all that space and it takes a bit of getting used to using it. A great way to practice your balance and your moving around on the bike is to try and learn how to track stand, which is standing like this on your bike without riding along. You'll need to be putting a bit of power into the bike, ideally into a bit of a slope like you can see here. Now, I'm just moving the bike back and forward to try and not fall over. It is great practice for learning some slow speed balance. There's a skill to learning how to use your controls on your bike, and that is really being smooth and progressive with your brakes. Modern mountain bikes come with really powerful hydraulic brakes that are great for slowing down, but they can also grab your front tire, make it slide, and make you fall off, hands up if you did that first time you ever rode a mountain bike. To practice this, find yourself somewhere with lots of nice grip. You can just get used to pulling your brakes slowly and smoothly to begin with, and then try and pull them nice and powerfully. Now, when you're doing this, if you don't move your weight around, you'll find when you start pulling them really hard, your back wheel can start coming a bit light and actually picking up off the ground. That means you're using your front tire an awful lot to stop. It can be okay on flatter ground, but when you're using your brakes a lot more, when you're going downhill, you don't want to rely on that front tire to stop you. If you drop your heels, start using that range of motion that you've already practiced, and get down behind the bike, you're actually dropping behind the pedals. When you now hit the brakes, it's going to go into the pedals and push the bike to stop, rather than your weight coming up and forward and onto the bars. That's why the rear wheel comes light. If you get behind the bike, you can brake a lot more powerfully. Heels down and head up to keep your weight towards the back of the bike. Learning what your brakes do is something that you never stop doing. When you move on to being a more advanced rider, you can then start thinking about how each brake affects your bike. Sometimes you use a bit too much front brake and a bit of weight movement as well to pick up the back wheel for going around super tight corners, or even using a bit too much rear to brake the grip on the rear tire to get it sliding. When you've got a good feeling for the brakes on your bike and how effective they are, that's when you start thinking about how to use them slightly differently. When it comes to descending, especially when it gets technical like this, you have to think about what you're doing a bit more. Yes, your front brake can do a lot of the stopping, but when you come to a section like this, if you're relying on the front wheel and your front brake slows you down a lot, it could bring your weight up and forward, which would be really bad. Also, it's just easier for it to then start sliding. If you're asking it to grip two ways, too much of that on the front brake here could slip and then you're in a world of trouble down this rocky descent. This is where you need to think about dropping your heels to bring your weight back and balancing both of your brakes effectively. It's much easier if you use a bit too much rear brake. Obviously, that can slip out as well, but it's much easier to correct that, ease off your back brake and get it gripping again. If your front wheel slides too much, it can get you into a world of problems. Try to keep your head up and look far ahead down the trail so you can plan your line and where you're going to brake. From that standing up position we talked about right at the start of the video, that's when you can use your arms and legs as a suspension, but you need to start off standing nice and tall because if you lower yourself down too much, which is something that some beginners do, then you've already used up half of your available space to soak up the trail. This is amazing trail. We're in Spain. It's brilliant. It's bedrock here and it's up and down, really fun to ride, but I need to be moving around quite a lot on the bike here. If you stay stood still, the trail is going to move you around. I'm going to look forward, predict how much I need to do, and I'll be letting the bike come up to me over these rises and then pushing them down the bottom to smooth out the trail effectively using all of that space. Good, clean gear shifting is going to help you keep momentum, especially on tricky climbs. Actually, pro mountain bikers are shifting an awful lot trying to stay in their preferred cadence, which means how fast they like to spin the gears. When it comes to changing to an easier gear, try to look ahead to predict where you're going to need to shift to keep your feet spinning in your preferred cadence, and then ease off the power slightly as you do that. It's going to give you a clean, fast shift without crunching the gears too much. Planning ahead should mean that you don't get caught out so much having to make a hard shift where the trail kicks up because that can ruin your momentum, but also snap a chain like that before. On the way down, when you're shifting to harder gears, you don't have to be quite so careful. Seated with your elbows bent slightly and slid forward to the front of your saddle gives you a really solid climbing position. If you stay too far in the middle, you might find that your front wheel starts wandering and going light as you're going up the climb. You need to counter that by coming forward, dropping your weight slightly towards the bars by bending your elbows. If you get the opposite, if your rear wheel starts sliding, then maybe you need to slide back a little bit on your saddle to get a bit more weight onto that and try and match your power. Keep your feet spinning a decent momentum, not spinning up too quick. Hopefully, that's going to keep some grip on that rear tire. When you've got a good feel for how your weight can be moved around the bike and how effective that is, you can then start to use that for lifting the wheels front and rear. That does move on to bunny hops and more advanced stuff, but actually, this can be really useful on the trail. Like this, we've got a bit of a rain rut. If you go from your ready position, nice and smoothly to the back of the bike, it's going to start unweighting the front. Obviously, the faster you move it and the more you move it, the more it's going to lift the front wheel. This is where you need to learn the small bits to begin with. Just do it nice and slowly. Don't move too far. That's going to lift the front wheel. You can use the opposite of that as well, up and forward like I showed you before. You don't often come further forward than shoulders in line with the bars. If you give it a bit of a scoop with the feet against the pedals, that can lift the rear wheel and that can be really useful for going up and over obstacles on the trail. You can help yourself out a little bit here using some trial skills by using your front brake to actually lift the rear wheel as well. Getting the front wheel up and over the rut and then pulling the front brake to keep that back wheel up in the air to clear over that gully. Good line choice is a skill that you never stop trying to improve, but when it comes to learning the basics, I think the most important thing is to try and look for where you're going to find grip. In turns, that is sometimes going to the apex, a bit like a racing car, but often, it's actually looking for where there's a decent amount of soil that isn't too loose and you're going to find the grip. On this section, I've got quite a steep downhill and this is more about the cambers. There's ruts that if I go into the bottom, it's full of these pine leaves and loose stuff. I'm trying to stick to a fairly straight line, but not get into that loose stuff. This one really comes from making sure that you are looking as far down the trail as is sensible. Obviously, you don't want to look too far ahead, but for me, it's something I always find that I don't. It's the opposite. I'm looking too close to my front wheel and that's where I make bad line choices. I'm always trying to remind myself, look up, plan where I want to be. Pumping the trail for extra speed is a key part of becoming a smoother and faster mountain biker. You need to use the curves and transitions of the trail to your advantage. The best place to pump is where the trail smoothly goes from pointing downhill to flat, like you might find on the back of a roller, but it can be used on a lot of different types of transitions. To get it right, you need to lower your weight into the bike as the rear wheel crosses the transition from down to flat, pushing the bike down into the trail with your weight. It should feel forceful but smooth. When you get the timing right, you'll feel the extra speed as you roll out. All right, there's 10 skills you can practice even when you're not on the trail. You just need a bit of space to do that. Let me know in the comments down below if there's anything else that you might be struggling with that holds you back when you're riding your mountain bike and I'll try and answer you or even make a video.