- Do you feel like your skill level has plateaued?
Often the learning curve is steeper to start,
and then you get comfortable and stop progressing.
So let's look at a few fun things today
that will help you push on and improve your riding.
(jazzy music)
The first thing to do is to change your mindset
and go back to being a 13 year old.
Now I know some of you watching this will be,
but I'm certainly not, but I think that's when you progress
the most, just through messing around on your bike.
First fun challenge is the manual,
and it's a really useful skill
for things like dropoffs, jumps, technical terrain.
Just get yourself out there, do the manual,
see how long you can hold it for.
Put a stick down where you drop
the front wheel, keep trying to beat it.
The longer the manual, the better.
You want to even challenge some of your mates.
So why is a manual gonna help you progress your riding?
Well it's the first part of learning front wheel control,
and you need to unweight your front wheel
over lots of things like wet routes, dropoffs,
it's gonna stop your front wheel from diving.
So when it comes to big, slow dropoffs
you're gonna need a manual.
Also you're gonna learn where the balance point is
on the bike before you start looping out and going too far.
You're gonna need good rear brake control
for stopping that from happening, but a good balance point,
knowing where that is, means you're
hopefully gonna do bigger bunny hops.
(jazzy music)
So you've done your manuals, keep practising those,
'cause you can always get better.
Now, moving on to the bunny hop.
Now this is a key skill for jumping, for getting over
gnarly terrain, it's just a mountain bike fundamental.
Again, you can always get better at this.
So I found myself an obstacle, a big log,
and I'm gonna try and go from the smaller end, up over that,
but then challenge myself to doing the bigger end over here.
So Martin has already given everyone over at GMBN
a bunny hop challenge, and Blake was the best,
so it's definitely time for me to practise this.
And it's great to have an obstacle
'cause you're gonna see directly if you are improving.
So your newfound bunny hop skills are gonna
help you make height on jumps, and hopefully make you
more confident to actually hit bigger jumps.
They're also gonna let you unweight over gnarly terrain,
so it's something that downhill racers do an awful lot.
Sometimes they'll literally just unweight
so the bike carries more speed over the bumps,
they don't sink in and hit them.
Often they actually use a proper
bunny hop to gap over stuff.
That does make the unridable ridable.
Learning how to drift is a really simple thing to do.
It's good to find yourself a big open spot like this,
that's nice and soft, should you fall off.
You don't have to actually make a corner at all,
just learn to move the bike around.
And it all starts with a skid.
I would recommend trying to do this on flat pedals, or at
least unclipping your inside foot if you are using clips.
'Cause a big dive could save you here from falling over.
So come into the corner nice and quick, and just
over-exaggerate the corner, so turn a little bit harder,
lean the bike over a little bit more,
and now just start dragging the back brake.
That's gonna start getting the rear wheel loose.
Eventually, once you get the feel for it,
it's good to not do it with brakes at all.
So just lean the bike over, turn hard,
and then you'll get a feel for it through the front
and the rear wheel movement at the same time.
Once you get the hang of this, it really is
gonna help your confidence in slippy corners.
To begin with, I'll bias my weight towards the handlebars
to make sure the front wheel has got some grip.
Eventually I'll start bringing my weight a bit further back
on the bike, to try and initiate a two wheel drift.
Learning to drift really teaches you the subtleties
about where to place your weight on the bike,
so that you're equally drifting the front and back tyre.
So I used to do a lot of this when it came to my race bike
for downhill and in duro, so that I knew the sweet spot.
So that when I was really pushing the limits,
and actually I was third, when I maybe wasn't expecting it,
hopefully I was in the right spot so I didn't
just end up crashing, so I slid the front tyre
or the back tyre right by itself.
So once you've got the skills,
it's now about pushing yourself.
So this is almost a bit of mental progression.
This could be riding a more technical trail,
so going from a blue to a red to a black,
but it could be hitting bigger and bigger jumps.
This really does need to be gradual progression,
'cause if you go too far, and send yourself
off a really hard jump, or really hard piece of terrain,
you end up crashing, you've gone back a lot of steps.
So you do small baby steps,
and build that progression all the time.
To see a video for some racing inspiration,
click up there for a video from Andes Pacifico last year,
down there for Blake pushing his limits at the Darkfest,
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