Avoid These Common But Wrong Mountain Biking Tips!

Mountain bikers are a helpful bunch, often willing to give you advice and opinions, even when you haven't asked for them. On that note, here are some of the worst mountain bike tips I've ever heard. Just keep your weight back. Now, often when it comes to scarier bits on the tracks like drop-offs or steep terrain, you'll hear people say, keep your weight back. There's some truth in it, but it's a bit more complicated than just sending your weight to the back of the bike. What you're actually trying to do is keep your weight balanced on the bike. When your front wheel drops down this steep section, if you don't do anything, your weight is going to drop towards that front wheel. That can cause you problems if too much weight goes on the front wheel, obviously, and your weight goes onto the bars, and you haven't got enough strength or it goes too fast too quick, then you can go over the bars. To counteract that, you need to start thinking about bringing your hips back on the bike. Dropping your heels, keeping your head up is all good advice, and you need to start getting low to the back wheel as well. Actually, if you look at this in slow motion, you can see if you draw a plumb line from your hips, which is what I tend to say is where your weight is on the bike, when you're moving back on these descents, it's just staying in the middle of the bike. Sometimes, if you're riding a rough section, then you do want to get further back on the bike to drive that front wheel through and keep it light. If you have too light a front wheel and you use too much brake, the front tire is going to lock up, and that's going to cause you problems. It's important to be moving dynamically on the bike all the time so that once I've rolled out the steep section, I'm then moving straight back to the middle of the bike so I do have weight back on that front tire. Always drop your outside foot in corners. Now, if you watched any of my cornering skills videos, you might think I'm guilty of this, but the word to look for is always because you don't always want to do it. Sometimes, you definitely do. Dropping your outside foot allows you to push the pressure down onto that foot and get your weight low and also angle the bike over. In flatter corners where you're looking for grip, it's a really good way of doing it, but there's some occasions where it really doesn't work. Here, we've got quite a quick bit of trail into some braking bumps into a nice smooth berm. If you drop your foot too early here, you're basically going to ride through these braking bumps stood on one foot. It's going to be really unstable, but also, you're not going to get effective braking where you do want to be up level pedals to do that. Then you've got a berm. Sometimes, if you compress really hard into a berm, if it's really grippy and really steep, then again, you want to be stood on two feet, so nice and central on the bike and nice and solid. This situation, I don't actually know. I'm going to try and ride this as fast as possible. I'll try and stay up on two feet here, and then I might dip my outside foot as I'm looking for grip because that berm isn't very steep. Sometimes, it's just a little bit of a dip. You don't always go all the way to the bottom. Or maybe if there's one turn, one way then the other, you're not going to go down and flat and then down. Sometimes, you do. Sometimes, you don't. There's no easy way of working out except for practicing it. E-bikes are cheating. I've heard it. People have said it to me as I've ridden past them on climbs, which I just disagree with. I guess, who are they cheating? What are they cheating? I love riding an e-bike as much as I love riding my mountain bike as well. There's full-power e-bikes. There's lightweight e-bikes, mid-power, whatever you want to call them. It's getting more people riding more often. For me, I'm in the more often category that I have a limited amount of spare time. I love to jump on my e-bike and go and do an hour of riding and get loads of downhill sections in in that hour. I probably wouldn't do it as much if I didn't have an e-bike. I love them. I also think that it can be a little bit snobby. I sometimes see hardcore riders saying, we've got e-bikers coming to our trails and there's trail erosion. I'm like, yes, I get it. Also, we should be encouraging more people to get into mountain biking and e-bikes are brilliant for that. We've seen that with the market problems with mountain biking bubble after COVID that bike manufacturers aren't selling bikes as much, but they are selling e-bikes and more people are riding e-bikes. I think that's great. Yes, we could probably encourage more people to get involved in dig days and things like that, but generally, I think more bums on bikes, it's more fun and e-bikes suit some people, don't suit others. If you're not crashing, you're not trying. There's lots to be said about that subject. I've fallen off my bike a lot in my downhill and enduro racing days and even GMBN days. You've probably seen a lot of those. There are people that maybe are totally risk-averse, that all they do is ride their bike for fitness. You're still going to fall off your bike. It's part of mountain biking, rightly or wrongly, unfortunately. I'm sure we all know people that are mad on their bikes. They just love pushing the envelope. It can be good for learning how to ride fast, but also, I think you can get injured really easily. How many people do I know that have broken arms, legs? It's really, really common to actually hurt your shoulders, hurt your wrists with mountain biking. Obviously, that's not good. That can knock you back a long way. I've had knee injuries. I've torn my ACL. That changed the way I rode because it's a really big recovery from that. You then think, well, I'm going to be a bit more careful about dabbing because I don't want to do that again. There's nothing really good about getting injured on a mountain bike, of course. I would say there's a fine line. Try and stick on the right side of that fine line. Try to learn how to be smooth, be fast if you want, but you probably have to recognize that you're still going to fall off at some point. Of course, trying to be prepared for crashes is something that not everyone wants to do, but I do almost all the time. Obviously, I wear a helmet that's fitted well. It's not moving around. I wear knee pads 95% of the time I ride unless I'm really going on a mellow ride. I wear gloves, again, probably most of the time because you can rip your hands. I'm also wearing a fetching wrist brace because I broke my scaphoid about 20 years ago in a crash, and it still hurts me occasionally. Try and be prepared because you will fall off. Your front brake is your enemy. Well, tricky one again because it can be. My first ever mountain bike crash, jumped on my bike, went to the local woods, grabbed too much front brake, fell off, and absolutely skinned my knee. It was a really painful introduction to mountain biking. They still can be now. This front brake, I've got a 220mm rotor. It's insanely powerful. One finger can lock it up really easily, and obviously, that can cause big crashes. Yes, they can be your enemy, but you also need to learn how to use it properly. Basically, both of them. There's never a right or wrong. Sometimes I will think about dragging my back brake a little bit in the turns just so I can come off the front brake and make sure that front tire is gripping because, again, if you're not used to it, and me personally, again, if I've made mistakes with my front brake, and I can feel myself just pumping the brakes and not being really smooth, so you need to practice being gentle with both your brakes, particularly the front brake so you can use it for stopping because you will definitely need it in most situations, even in corners sometimes, but definitely on steep terrain, but learn how to not lock it up. Going inside on turns is faster. Well, it can be sometimes, but I guess people like Sam Hill, this unreal downhill riding skills, made it popular to hang your foot off and just take a crazy line on the inside of the turn. You do see it on trails. This is a pretty good example, actually. The main trail obviously goes quite wide, quite a fast open corner, and people have a really obvious inside line here, which works. Some of the problem with this is maybe it can really ruin trails if it's not necessarily a racetrack. It's just a trail out in the woods. If everyone starts going really, really inside all the time, then it almost becomes a different track. I've seen this loads of times in my local woods where they turn into basically straight lines. The old trail does this, but people cut inside. Maybe it's a problem with Strava where everyone's just trying to go as fast as they can all the time. If you are racing, it's worth exploring all the different lines. Sometimes it works, like I said. This corner, maybe it does, but if you're going to try and ride it fast, it's almost a little bit off camber. You're probably going to compromise your exit and be way further over to the left, whereas if you go really fast around the outside, you're going to line up for that next left-hander a bit better. Bear in mind that it's maybe only worth thinking about if you're trying to hump those extra, extra milliseconds, but don't go ruining a trail just to try out an inside line, I'd say. Speed is your friend is another really vague tip. How do you know when to apply that and when not to? Sometimes if you're blasting through a really straight section of maybe flat, but it's really rough and rocky, then yes, the faster you go, the more you can stay on top of those rocks and it's going to be smoother and better, but it can also be your worst enemy. If you're going too fast in a section, you're going to fall off. We're in a section like this where you've got a really fun, really grippy set of berms and a jump. If you go too fast here, there's a really good chance you're going to end up going inside and off the track and actually compromise your exit to another section. Sometimes you have to think about a whole section, particularly if you're thinking about carrying speed or racing or being smooth, but sometimes the exit speed is more important than your raw speed in the middle of the section. Obviously, if you're just going too fast for a corner, then you might have to brake mid-turn and that's going to ruin your flow or you might just fall off. Trying to judge when and where speed is your friend is a tricky thing to do. You need a lighter bike. Sometimes at the very highest end, you're looking at carbon fiber components. Obviously, they are getting lighter and lighter, so the more money you spend, the lighter the bike probably is. However, today I'm riding my Propain E-Carno 2 CF carbon fiber, but this is an e-bike, so this weighs in about 23 kilograms, which is pretty chunky for a normal mountain bike. It's relatively lightweight for an e-mountain bike. Of course, I've got a battery and a motor, so it all adds up, but actually, it's where that weight is makes a really big difference. It's sprung mass on this bike. It's in the middle. It handles really well. It makes suspension work better, but even on the other end of the scale, when was the last time you heard someone promoting their brand new cross-country bike and talking about the weight? More often now, it's much more common to see them talking about how capable their bikes are because even at that really high end of the cross-country Race World Cups, the tracks are more technical. It's more important what that bike can actually do, not necessarily what the weight is. We can take inspiration from that. From the races, again, on downhill, they often add weights to their bikes so their bike has more momentum. If you're an average rider, unless you're looking at being really fast cross-country or climbing, weight really doesn't make much difference. It's better to be over-biked than under-biked. By being over-biked, it means that you're probably riding a bike that has quite a lot of suspension travel compared to the trails you ride. They might be fairly mellow trails, but you've got a 160, 70, 80-mil travel bike, and obviously vice versa for under-biked. This is totally down to personal preference. I think there's no right or wrong with this. I was always of the opinion that I preferred being under-biked. I like taking a short travel trail bike somewhere quite rowdy and having to almost tame the trail on a short travel bike, but sometimes you have to be a bit more careful because you probably have lightweight tires on it or you're riding something that's out of its depth. I actually did a video not so long ago. We went to Dovey Bike Park and talked about this. I decided that actually, it's quite nice to be over-biked. It gives you more confidence to have a bike that is completely capable of the trails you're going to ride. To me, it felt safer. Like I said, there's no right or wrong. Of course, most people just have the one bike that they're going to take everywhere. It's not often going to be the perfect bike for that place. You're going to be under-biked somewhere and over-biked somewhere else. Down to your own choice on that one. You need to run clips if you want to be fast. It's a debate that's raged on for years, flats versus clips. I think I've been on both sides of this. If you look at the world's fastest races, of course, everyone across the country runs clips. Enduro, almost everyone does, but there's some really notable exceptions. Sam Hill, for one, Alex Rudeau, Alex Storr, Dan Booker, Conor Fearon, Morgan Shaw, some podium-winning riders who've ridden on flat pedals. Actually, when I started to ride enduro, I taught myself to ride clips. I thought I had to have them for the power and for the fitness side of things. People always will prove it wrong. There'll be exceptions to those rules all the time. I would say, just stick with what you love to ride. I am back to almost always running flat pedals now because I find it really fun to be able to ride and drop a foot. I feel like I can corner faster and be more natural on the bike as well. You can always find someone to prove you right or wrong, but just stick with what you like. Listening to your friend's bike setup tips. This is something that I think I hear a lot of. If I go for rides with my mates, the whole conversation is about what bike parts are great, what you should run, what tire pressure, how you should run your suspension. I like to take those pieces of advice with a pinch of salt because I think first thing is to try and work out how you like your bike setup. For things like suspension, I will always look at the manufacturer's website. I still do it now when I get a new bike. I'll set the air pressure, if I've got an air shock, on my own settings. I'll basically look at getting 30% sag. Then when it comes to clickers, whatever pressure you put in that shock, it'll give you advice on where to start with those. I find that is the best place to start. You often hear about people maybe wanting to slow their rear shock down if they feel like they're getting kicked on a jump, like bucked forwards. Actually, that's a lot more about technique. I might slow it down a little bit to make it a bit more predictable if I'm just doing jumps, but often if people aren't preloading the face of a jump properly or they're mistiming it, that leads to many more bucks forward than it does coming from the rear shock. I would say learn your own preference on things like tires as well. Not everyone wants the same things. I hear a lot of people running way lower tire pressures than I would go. I still run 26, 28 in the rear, 23, 24 in the front, which is still hard for a lot of people, but I would rather compromise a little bit of grip to have a really stable tire that isn't going to roll off the rim or anything like that. Listen to your friends that you trust and try to ignore some of the others. All right, so there's some of the worst tips that I've ever heard. I'm sure there's more that I've forgotten about. Jump into the comments and leave some of yours that you've heard and you think, that's terrible advice, or even throw your friends under the bus. Tag them in the comments as well. Give us a thumbs up if you enjoy riding your bike.