(explosions)
- Welcome to episode two of Crash Course,
where I take a look at the crashes you lot have been having,
try and spot why it went wrong
to stop you eating it like this.
(crashes)
(man yells)
But before we get into it, make sure you subscribe
and hit that little bell icon over there
so you get a notification every time we make an upload.
(whoosh)
First video has been sent in by Ruben
in sunny South Africa, check this out.
This is his friend Daniel, wow, it's a big one.
And anyone's who's had that horrible feeling
of getting bucked over the bars on a jump
just knows how horrible this is.
Well I'm not in sunny South Africa,
but I am in sunny-ish South Wales, in BikePark Wales,
and I've got a little jump over there,
and hopefully I can show you why this went wrong.
First let's look at the actual ramp, the take off the jump.
It looks to me like it's quite kicky.
By that I mean that it's quite a short take off,
it's quite steep, so that when you hit it, actually,
it's almost like hitting a wall,
it's going to try and slow you down,
and that can start throwing the weight forward.
So it's not always your technique,
sometimes actually the jump isn't built that well.
Got a good example here of quite a nice, mallow take off,
but when you hit it at speed,
it is going to send you up and into the air.
But let's go full slow-mo,
see what's going on with the body position.
(jazzy rock music)
Right now I think, to me it looks more obvious
than slow motion if you pause it on the take off,
see Daniel is actually stood up.
When the bike is actually just starting to get into the air,
front wheel's up into the air,
but Daniel's already stood up.
So what he's trying to do there
is actually lift the bike up into the air.
It's a really common one with jumping,
where people feel like they want to just launch straight away,
but actually what you need to do
is launch one wheel at a time.
So front wheel, and then what you need to do is pause
and stay in quite low to the back of the bike,
all the way until the rear wheel gets to the top of the jump
and then you stand up and forward.
So basically you're helping the front wheel
go into the air, and then the back one,
and you should then get a nice sort of launch
so the bike follows a nice curve in the air,
rather than the front wheel going up into the air,
and then the weight going up, stood up,
'cause that is then sending the back wheel up already.
So the back wheel's not used much at the jump,
but it can still send all the weight forward,
and that's the big problem here.
(jazzy music)
Next one comes from Wesley in Ballantine Park,
who's trying to ride his very first wall ride
from end to end and he says he doesn't have enough speed.
Well yeah, you've said it already,
you didn't have enough speed there.
So you need quite a lot of speed sometimes
to stick to a wall ride, so you need that force.
But also what you can do if you realize
you haven't quite got enough speed,
when you're half way around it,
you can try and pop off early,
so it's definitely down to a bit of experience,
this, doing lots of wall rides,
but in this case you could have done that,
you could have just carved, as you slow down,
carve a bit more of a corner,
and then do a little manual to
come off that wall ride early.
Don't forget that if it's wet it's going to make
that wood much slipperier as well.
(guitar music)
Talk about wood being slippery when it's wet,
well Dan finds out the hard way here.
If you're offline, if the trail is a bit off-camber,
or if you're trying to make a big corner on wet wood,
then just take it very easy.
Ideally you try and not ride it
when it's super slippery like this,
but sometimes you will, just be really careful,
'cause making a corner like this is almost always
going to end in a crash.
- [Man] Oh that's slick.
(beep)
(man yells)
- This one is sent in by David,
and this is in Maydena Bike Park in Tasmania,
but it's really muddy, and this is his friend Spud.
It's always the friend that falls off, isn't it?
And a good name for him, Spud,
'cause he tries to bury himself back in the ground here.
Some pretty good body surfing down the trail,
but as you can see,
Spud didn't quite have it nailed, as he'd hoped.
Really this drop is too big to try and roll
in that situation, so at that speed,
you're going to need to do something like a manual
to keep your front wheel up so you don't get
sent straight over the bars, or,
possibly go a bit faster, but you can't always do that,
because if it's super muddy like that,
you can end up being too fast and out of control.
So let's look at going nice and slow and doing a manual.
(jazzy music)
Well there's a couple of different ways thinking about this,
but you should end up in the same position
to the back of the bike with really
your weight off the front wheel.
So the first one is just getting to the edge
of the drop and doing a manual.
So you're down and back, nice to the back of the bike,
front wheel goes light, don't go over the bars, hopefully.
Or the other way is wait until you get to the edge
and then just simply slide the bike forward.
You'll end up to the back of the bike,
nice and safe position,
and your front wheel should stay light.
Anything to really be aware of
is not going too low and hitting that back tire,
'cause that's going to stall the bike completely,
and that can send you over the bars as well.
'Cause also if you're high,
and then your speed stops for any reason,
your momentum stops, all that weight is then
going forward towards the bars.
(jazzy piano music)
This one is sent in by Brayden from Bowling Green in K-Y,
which I presume is Kentucky.
This is his friend again tried this jump
and didn't keep his foot on his pedals
and hit the ground, and his bike pretty hard,
but he got up and walked away without any injuries,
which is good news.
What I would say, from my point of view though,
it wasn't the foot coming off that caused the crash,
that was definitely part of it,
but I think the crash was caused by not taking off straight.
It's really important on a jump like that
to try and look to where you're going
so that you ride off the take off either straight,
or sometimes turning, but you need to be aiming
for where you're going.
It looks to me like there's a bit of a pull,
and the bike goes sideways,
and then your friend tries to pull with his feet
to try and straighten the bike up
and that's when the foot comes off, and the crash happens.
But also if you look,
the front wheel doesn't land until the flat,
so really with something like this
you're aiming to sort of,
what I call butter it into the landing,
so you go front wheel then back wheel
into that landing, so that if your front wheel
is slightly sideways it lands as early as possible,
and it can straighten up.
If the front wheel doesn't land all the way
til the bottom, and it's sideways,
then you're probably always going to crash.
(upbeat acoustic music)
For this example I'm going to be coming into this
quite fast, it's quite a big jump,
and there is a corner, you can see it's a big berm there,
so what I try and do is do of my cornering there,
hit this take off as straight as possible,
but as you can see, it is a slight hip,
I do need to be turning a little bit in the air
to the right to get on that landing,
but it's just a real case of looking
to where you need to be, turning on the take off,
and carrying on that bit of a hip in the air.
By hip I just mean corner in the air with my body weight
and the bike, and landing, like I said before,
front wheel then back wheel, on all of that landing.
Keep sending us your crashes using the uploader,
there's a link in the description
down below this video to that.
Stick them in the fails and bails bit
and we use them in the dirt shed,
sometimes on Instagram and use them here,
and I'll try and help you out.
More of these videos coming soon.
If you want to see a video on how to nail your jumps,
over there, if you're dropped, over there,
thumbs up if you liked this video, cheers.