Stop Going Over The Bars! | Beginner MTB Jumping Mistakes

There is no worse feeling than that moment of impending doom when you're going over the bars and there's nothing you can do about it. Check out some of these clips. If that's happened to you or you've nearly had that happen, stay tuned and watch this because we're going to try and fix it. Let's start with the where's and the why's. It happens to us, but to avoid an OTB or over the bars, well, first, we need to understand it. The place that I think it happens the most to all of us, myself included sometimes, much to my annoyance, is here at jumps. Firstly, when we hit a jump, the combination of our shifting body weight and our suspension doing its thing gives us a bit of a kick sometimes. If we're not used to it, we don't really know what to do, but we're going to get to that in a bit. The second most common place is drops and steep sections. Combine the two together. Essentially, that's happening because when you're going down something steep or you're going off a drop, your body weight is naturally thrown further forwards. A lot of people just don't really know what to do when this happens, but I'm going to tell you. Let's start off with body position. Now, there's a generic body position we can go in to begin with and we're going to focus more on the upper half of us. Your body position itself is going to be fairly central in the bike to begin with, and we're going to focus on keeping a nice, strong, tight core and a really good, strong upper body as well in the arms. We're not going to have too much of a bend. We're certainly not going to have them straight. We're going to have ever such slight bend in the elbow and then we're going to keep our arms nice and taut and tight, ready to absorb any impacts and to stop us flopping into the bike, throwing our weight further forwards, which is what we're going to get to a bit later on. Then if you find yourself in a situation where you think you might go over the bars, should we say like a steep section of this? Like I said, we're going to get onto jumps, don't worry. That tight core, that good, strong upper body here, well, look, that's what's going to hold you up nice and tight and hold you back on the bike. We showed that neutral body position. When it gets steeper, you're going to want to shift your weight further back. If you've got noodle arms, well, what's going to happen is when you hit a big compression, you come down these routes, them old little noodle chicken wings of yours, well, unfortunately, they're not going to be able to hold you up as strong as they need to be and you're going to hit a bump, all your body weight is going to shift over to the front and in turn, well, that's just going to shift it over the front wheel and potentially over the bars, something you don't want. Look, if you do find yourself maybe that that upper body, that core strength is maybe lacking a little more than you'd like it to be and it is actually a genuine problem when you do hit a big compression or jump or something like that, well, look, there's some simple exercises you can do. Press-ups, just a few press-ups a day can go a long way to getting that upper body working out, some core exercises, bench presses as well. You don't always necessarily need to go to a gym. There's loads of stuff that you can do at home. Actually, I've done videos on this in the past as well, so check out the links to those in the description down below. Wowzers, trousers, that is a big old scary takeoff. Look, before we get any further, you've made it this far in the video, so why not give us a little like and a subscribe, help support the channel, help me bring more great videos and myself and the other presenters as well. Now, we're going to talk technique, more specifically, jumping techniques. I think this is one of the most important areas and this is a prime jump for an OTV or hopefully not. It might seem weird to explain this without a bike, but actually, there's a really good way of explaining it. As we come in, imagine we're on our bike, we start to hit the transition of the jump. Now, what we all naturally do is start to our body weight will start to squat into the bike. What that then does is it shifts our weight down into the bike and back as well. You might be thinking, well, I'm going over the bars potentially, if my weight's back, how's that happening? Well, basically, the further you get and the further force that's applied to you as you go up the takeoff, you come in here and then what happens is as your wheels start to take off, so here when you're then taking off, you counteract that and your body weight is then being flung forwards by the takeoff. The problem you've got is unlike a steep section where you can break or use your arms to absorb the force, you're in the air, you can't do anything. Your body is just moving forwards without any resistance and you're about to go over the bars. Now, you can try and absorb this, you can push the bike out in front of you if needs be to try and get that front wheel and that weight shifted backwards. The front wheel pushed out in front, weight shifted backwards, but really that is why you're going. You're coming in, you're squatting into it because of then the takeoffs then pinging you forwards and that's moving all your body weight exactly where you don't want it. This is how you should do it, mind. The correct technique then, well, essentially, you're still going to do a similar thing. As you get to the bottom of the transition, you're going to compress into the bike to do the jump, but instead of that part here where you almost go too far backwards, that's when you're going to start that pop. That jumping technique where you'll then explode out of the bike, you'll pick the front end up. Now, this is the key part because it's that pick in the front end up which is going to stop you going over the bars. A lot of the times before, people wouldn't really know what to do, so that bunny hop technique, if you like. It's that that then shifts your weight still further back. You'll then push the bike forwards in the air to level it out and your body weight will then naturally shift slightly further forwards to nosedive in for the landing. Hopefully, it should look like this. To me, there are two main problems with suspension setup that can cause bucking or going over the bars. You've got that the front's too soft or that the back is too fast. Both, however, are remediable. Remediable? They can be fixed. Remedied, that was the word I was after. Right, we'll start with the front, so the forks. If they're too soft, what's going to happen there is essentially they're going to compress or dive through their travel too far, moving that body weight again of yours over the front more than you would like it to be. This can be fixed in a couple of ways. We can, first of all, up our air pressure in our forks if it's obviously an air sprung fork. By doing that, most of the time, it'll be a cap on the top, a Schrader valve. You need a specific shock pump, of course, but we can add more air pressure in there. That's going to cause the fork to be a little bit firmer and not go through its travel as much. However, we don't really want to up the air pressure too much, but we want to stiffen the fork. We can actually firm up the later part of the spring rate if you like. What we can do is volume spacers. By adding more volume spacers to a fork, it reduces the air volume inside, so you'll have a ramp-up effect. What that means is that as the fork goes through its travel, or this can obviously be the same for the rear suspension too, but as the suspension goes through its travel, it then gets stiffer the further it gets in. The more tokens you add, the sooner this effect happens. If you were to have one token in there, it might go through a lot of its travel and then ramp up, get firmer. If you put five or I think you can almost put up to six tokens of these, but you might have to fact-check me on that one, then actually, you're going to have a very small area of softness and it's going to ramp up, get firmer much sooner. That's going to then, in turn, not cause the fork to dive through its travel as much, sit higher up in the travel as well, and keep your weight hopefully slightly further back. What about the back suspension? Back suspension, or if you're not my dad, rear suspension for most of us mere normal folk. Well, what's generally the problem here is the rebound. The rebound is too fast, which means it's returning back through its travel too quick, like a pogo stick, and bucking your body weight forwards. How do we fix that though? What you need to do here is add more rebound to the shock. Turning what on most units will be a red dial, which always generates a red dial for the rebound to the direction of the plus sign, so it should have a minus and a plus. Some actually make it even simpler. They have a tortoise or a little hare for faster or slower. You want to make it slower. You want to add rebound to it. Experiment click by click. There should be a good bit of range on this. What that's going to do is slow down. When your suspension compresses, slow down how quickly it comes back. The quicker it comes back, the more violent it's going to potentially throw your weight forwards. The slower, the more controlled, and the more time you've got to react as well. Have a little play, turn red dial, plus ways should sort you right out. This one is often an overlooked and underestimated one, and it's tires and tire pressures. How can adapting or changing those affect whether or not you're shot out the front door of the bike? Well, here's how. Much like we talked about in suspension and if the pressure's wrong there, your tires are the same. If they're too soft, they can deform or squish under load, much like on a takeoff of a jump where this is really likely to happen, and actually shift again your body weight where you don't want it, or actually fold all together. Now, we can come around this in a couple of different ways. We can look at it in terms of pressure. Adding more pressure to our tires, making them firmer, is going to make them hold their shape a lot better. You will obviously sacrifice grip in other areas, obviously, steeper, rockier, rootier, slipperier terrain. They're not going to do what they are supposed to then, deform and mold around all the different things that you're going over, but they aren't going to fold, if you like, essentially under pressure on the takeoff of a jump, especially if it's like a hip jump where you're turning at the same time, that sort of rolling of the carcass. Speaking of carcass, that is something you potentially can change. Now, there are different weight or different thickness carcasses out there, XC, think of it, Enduro, downhill. I've got a great example on this bike here. You can see I've got Vittoria Mazda's front and rear. I'm actually running a trail casing on the front and an Enduro casing on the rear. Now, I run fairly firm pressures, so I'm not too worried. This lighter or ever so slightly lighter casing on this tire isn't going to deform under load and I run my suspension fairly firm as well. I'm not too worried about it on the jumps. On the back, I don't want it to puncture, which is not really going to send you over the bars, but it avoids potentially damaging the bike or ending a run. I have a thicker casing on the back that isn't going to roll and squirm about. Actually, sometimes when you do brap into a berm, say, or a turn, have you ever seen it where the sealant flies out? Well, that's that tire rolling and it popping very momentarily off the bead of the rim and sealants coming out. Obviously, if that does happen, if you do it too hard, it can shoot you out the front door. Yes, that's why I run a slightly thicker casing on the rear. Bonus top tip for you then and something I see out on the trail all too scarily often. If you've got a dropper post or even a manual post that you can put down, drop it down all the way. What that's going to do when you're going over jumps or drops or even down something steep, it's going to really hinder you in being able to get your weight back. Obviously, it's going to put you higher up and further forward on the bike. Drop the dropper. There we are then. Hopefully, some tips to help you identify where or why you may have been going over the bars and to help fix it. Let me know how you get on in the comments down below. I always love to hear your feedback, so more the merrier. For me for now, from the Ford, I'll catch you later.